The General in His Study

Mary Custis Lee, Courtesy of Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial Mary Custis Lee

By ELIZABETH BROWN PRYOR
NYT

The writing is blurred and the paper nearly translucent, but the scene it portrays is vivid. In a recently discovered letter, Mary Custis Lee, the eldest daughter of Robert E. Lee, describes how her father wrestled with the decision to resign his commission in the United States Army and side with the South. The letter, found in a folder of fragments at the Virginia Historical Society, was written in 1871 to Charles Marshall, Lee’s former aide-to–camp, as he prepared to write a biography of the great general.

It provides the most reliable information currently available to historians, overshadowing the questionable second-hand accounts that scholars once had to rely on. Not only was Mary Custis Lee an eyewitness to the scene, but her letter was written just a few years after the war, whereas the traditional depictions did not appear until decades later.

And her words fundamentally alter the story of Lee’s fateful choice. Lee biographers have long claimed that his decision to leave the Army was an inevitable one, driven by the pull of relatives, state and tradition. However, as his daughter shows us, in the end the decision was highly personal, made in spite of family differences and the military conventions he revered.

Lee’s decision to give up his 35-year Army career came after a week of cataclysmic events: the southern capture of Fort Sumter, Lincoln’s call for 75,000 troops to protect federal property and, on April 17, the secession of Virginia.

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