Who is related to robert e lee
In his dashing if sometimes depressive antebellum prime, he may have been the most beautiful person in America, a sort of precursorcross between Cary Grant and Randolph Scott. He was in his element gossiping with belles about their beaux at balls. In theaters of grinding, hellish human carnage he kept a pet hen for company. He had tiny feet that he loved his children to tickle None of these things seems to fit, for if ever there was a grave American icon, it is Robert Edward Lee—hero of the Confederacy in the Civil War and a symbol of nobility to some, of slavery to others.
We may think we know Lee because we have a mental image: gray. That is all that makes life valuable. As battlefield generals go, he could be extremely fiery, and could go out of his way to be kind. But in even the most sympathetic versions of his life story he comes across as a bit of a stick—certainly compared with his scruffy nemesis, Ulysses S. For these men, the Civil War was just the ticket. Lee, however, has come down in history as too fine for the bloodbath of To efface the squalor and horror of the war, we have the image of Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves, and we have the image of Robert E.
Henry, the scion who was to become known in the Revolutionary War as Light-Horse Harry, was born in Washington became his patron and close friend. With the war nearly over, however, Harry decided he was underappreciated, so he impulsively resigned from the army.
In , he was elected to the Continental Congress, and in he was elected governor of Virginia. In Washington put him in command of the troops that bloodlessly put down the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. In he was elected to the U. He and his second wife, Ann Hill Carter Lee, and their children departed the Lee ancestral home, where Robert was born, for a smaller rented house in Alexandria.
Under the conditions of bankruptcy that obtained in those days, Harry was still liable for his debts. He jumped a personal appearance bail—to the dismay of his brother, Edmund, who had posted a sizable bond—and wangled passage, with pitying help from President James Monroe, to the West Indies.
In , after five years away, Harry headed home to die, but got only as far as Cumberland Island, Georgia, where he was buried. Robert was Robert appears to have been too fine for his childhood, for his education, for his profession, for his marriage, and for the Confederacy. Not according to him. According to him, he was not fine enough. When he was superintendent of the U. Military Academy, Lee acquiesced to Mrs.
By what can we know of him? The works of a general are battles, campaigns and usually memoirs. And he wrote no memoir. He wrote personal letters—a discordant mix of flirtation, joshing, lyrical touches, and stern religious adjuration—and he wrote official dispatches that are so impersonal and generally unselfserving as to seem above the fray.
During the postbellum century, when Americans North and South decided to embrace R. Lee as a national as well as a Southern hero, he was generally described as antislavery. This assumption rests not on any public position he took but on a passage in an letter to his wife. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. He was not one to hide his looks under a bushel. His heart, on the other hand.
Perhaps it broke many years before the war. He only wanted a Virginia farm—no end of cream and fresh butter—and fried chicken. Not one fried chicken or two—but unlimited fried chicken. One thing that clearly drove him was devotion to his home state. In late June of , he began another invasion of the North, meeting the Union host at the crossroads town of Gettysburg , Pennsylvania. For three days Lee assailed the Federal army under George G. Meade in what would become the most famous battle of the entire war.
Accustomed to seeing the Yankees run in the face of his aggressive troops, Lee attacked strong Union positions on high ground. This time, however, the Federals wouldn't budge. The Confederate war effort reached its high water mark on July 3, when Lee ordered a massive frontal assault against Meade's center, spear-headed by Virginians under Maj. George E. The attack known as Pickett's charge was a failure and Lee, recognizing that the battle was lost, ordered his army to retreat.
Taking full responsibility for the defeat, he wrote Jefferson Davis offering his resignation, which Davis refused to accept. Grant assumed command of the Federal armies. Rather than making Richmond the aim of his campaign, Grant chose to focus the myriad resources at his disposal on destroying Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. In a relentless and bloody campaign, the Federal juggernaut bludgeoned the under-supplied Rebel band. In spite of his ability to make Grant pay in blood for his aggressive tactics, Lee had been forced to yield the initiative to his adversary, and he recognized that the end of the Confederacy was only a matter of time.
By the summer of , the Confederates had been forced into waging trench warfare outside of Petersburg. Though President Davis named the Virginian General-in-Chief of all Confederate forces in February , only two months later, on April 9, , Lee was forced to surrender his weary and depleted army to Grant at Appomattox Court House , effectively ending the Civil War.
Famous Kin of Robert E. Lee Robert E. Who was Robert E. Some of the most recently added connections of famous kin for General Robert E. John Quincy Adams 6th U. President 21st cousin via Miliscent of Rethel. Nicholas Gilman Signer of the U. Constitution 21st cousin via Miliscent of Rethel.
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