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Robert E. Lee served as
General-in-Chief of the Confederate Army during the U.S. Civil War.
Lee surrendered his Confederate Army to General Ulysses S.
Grant at Appomattox Court House, in Virginia, on April 9,
1865.
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Robert Edward Lee (January 19, 1807 – October 12, 1870) was a
career United States Army officer, an engineer, and the most
celebrated general of the Confederate forces during the American
Civil War.
Lee was the son of Major General Henry Lee III "Light Horse Harry"
(1756–1818), Governor of Virginia, and his second wife, Anne Hill
Carter (1773–1829). He was a descendant of Sir Thomas More and of
King Robert II of Scotland through the Earls of Crawford.[1] A top
graduate of West Point, Lee distinguished himself as an exceptional
soldier in the U.S. Army for thirty-two years, during which time he
fought in the Mexican-American War.
On early 1861, General Winfield Scott invited Lee to take command of
the entire union army. Lee denied because his state - Virginia - was
seceding from the union despites Lee's wishes. When Virginia seceded
from the Union in April 1861, Lee chose to follow his home state.
Lee's eventual role in the newly established Confederacy was to
serve as a senior military adviser to President Jefferson Davis.
Lee's first field command for the Confederate States came in June
1862 when he took command of the Confederate forces in the East
(which Lee himself renamed the "Army of Northern Virginia").
Lee's greatest victories were the Seven Days Battles, the Second
Battle of Bull Run, the Battle of Fredericksburg and the Battle of
Chancellorsville, but both of his campaigns to invade the North
ended in failure. Barely escaping defeat at the Battle of Antietam
in 1862, Lee was forced to return to the South. In early July 1863,
Lee was decisively defeated at the Battle of Gettysburg in
Pennsylvania. However, due to ineffectual pursuit by the commander
of Union forces, Major General George Meade, Lee escaped again to
Virginia.
In the spring of 1864, the new Union commander, Lieutenant General
Ulysses S. Grant, began a series of campaigns to wear down Lee's
army. In the Overland Campaign of 1864 and the Siege of Petersburg
in 1864–1865, Lee inflicted heavy casualties on Grant's larger army,
but was unable to replace his own losses. In early April 1865, Lee's
depleted forces were turned from their entrenchments near the
Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, and he began a strategic
retreat. Lee's subsequent surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on
April 9, 1865 represented the loss of only one of the remaining
Confederate field armies, but it was a psychological blow from which
the South could not recover. By June 1865, all of the remaining
Confederate armies had capitulated.
Lee's victories against superior forces won him enduring fame as a
crafty and daring battlefield tactician, but some of his strategic
decisions, such as invading the North in 1862 and 1863, have been
criticized by many military historians.
In the final months of the Civil War, as manpower reserves drained
away, Lee adopted a plan to arm willing slaves to fight on behalf of
the Confederacy, but this came too late to change the outcome of the
war. After Appomattox, Lee discouraged Southern dissenters from
starting a guerrilla campaign to continue the war, and encouraged
reconciliation between the North and South.
After the war, as a college president, Lee supported President
Andrew Johnson's program of Reconstruction and inter-sectional
friendship, while opposing the Radical Republican proposals to give
freed slaves the vote and take the vote away from ex-Confederates.
He urged them to rethink their position between the North and South,
and the reintegration of former Confederates into the nation's
political life. Lee became the great Southern hero of the war, and
his popularity grew in the North as well after his death in 1870. He
remains an iconic figure of American military leadership. |
