American Experience (1988–…): Season 23, Episode 1 - Robert E. Lee - full transcript

From PBS and American Experience - Robert E. Lee is celebrated by handsome equestrian statues in countless cities and towns across the American South and by no less than five postage stamps issued by the government he fought against during the four bloodiest years in American history.

Tonight...

MAN:
Lee is the bloodiest general
in United States history.

He was a killer,

a very dangerous man
with an army.

MAN:
Lee was not a general
about probabilities;

Lee was a general
about possibilities.

WOMAN:
He came to encompass
the Lost Cause,

the romanticized parts
of the old South.

The reality is,
it's a little more complex.

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ROBERT E. LEE (dramatized):
I, Robert Edward Lee,

do solemnly swear
that I will support

the Constitution
of the United States.

I do solemnly swear to bear
true allegiance

to the United States of America



and to serve them honestly
and faithfully...

NARRATOR:
From the moment he arrived

at the nation's military academy
in West Point,

Robert Edward Lee eagerly
absorbed the strict

and selfless ethic
of the United States Army.

LEE (dramatized):
...and the orders of the
officers appointed over me,

according to the rules
and articles of war.

NARRATOR:
The beauty of it was

the high-minded ideals
provided him a proper channel

for his ardent desire
for recognition.

LESLEY GORDON:
West Point was founded
to take these young men--

16, 17, 18 years old--

and reshape them and give them
a new sense of values,

of honor and duty
and loyalty to country.

It really was a pretty
austere experience.

Apparently the food was awful
and pretty sparse.

Most of the men
that went there just...

they were happy to literally
survive it.

But Robert E. Lee seemed
to thrive there.

There were opportunities
to really show yourself

in front of men and be tested.

MICHAEL FELLMAN:
He was always aware of
the impression he was making.

And he was a deeply
perfectionist person

who had an image
of who he ought to be.

He tried extremely hard
to be a paragon.

And he wanted to shine.

NARRATOR:
Cadet Lee was mindful
of his personal talents

and of his place in the world.

He was born into
the Virginia aristocracy.

His extended clan included
a president,

a chief justice
of the United States,

signers of the Declaration
of Independence.

And Lee's own father

had been one of the nation's
most celebrated

Revolutionary War heroes.

As a daring young cavalry
commander,

Light Horse Harry Lee had won
the esteem

of General George Washington
and a medal of honor

from the Continental Congress.

Even at 18, Robert E. Lee
carried himself

as if the command of men
was his destiny

as well as his duty.

I'm personally struck

by how many of his peers were
just impressed

by his physical presence alone.

When he walked into a room,

I think that there was a sense
of dignity and seriousness

that immediately got the
attention of those around him.

ELIZABETH BROWN PRYOR:
People remember that when
he would give them

a little nod of approval
or somehow show

that he thought that they were
doing a good job,

that they felt as if Jove had
come down from Olympus

and given him a sign
of his greatness.

NARRATOR:
Lee went through the academy

with sober and single-minded
purpose.

When his fellow cadets
went out carousing

or got liquored up
in their rooms, Lee worked:

French, applied mathematics,
mechanical drawing,

topographical engineering,
artillery.

He let nothing slip.

Every day for four years,

Lee bent himself to attaining
the top spot in his class

at West Point.

"Number one,"
he would later write,

"it is a fine number.

Easily found and remembered."

PRYOR:
He was a naturally
self-disciplined person

but of course it was part
of his ethos also--

duty, self-discipline, denial
and achievement.

JOSEPH GLATTHAAR:
Lee was one of six cadets
in his graduating class

who received no demerits.

He scored perfectly in artillery
and in infantry and in cavalry.

His math scores were superb.

GARY GALLAGHER:
I think Lee's peers
at West Point

had mixed feelings about him.

I think that many of them
admired him--

it would be hard not to admire
someone who did so well--

did so well in his class work;

did so well in terms of behaving

according to the
Academy's rules.

But I think others saw him
as perhaps a little bit

over-the-top in that regard.

They called him the "Marble
Model," some of them did.

And I don't think that's an
entirely flattering epithet.

LEE (dramatized):
Do you ever think of me,
my own sweet Mary?

And how much do you
want to see me?

Not half as much as I want
to see you...

I declare I cannot wait
any longer.

NARRATOR:
At 22, Second Lieutenant
Robert E. Lee set his sights

on a bride to match his idea
of himself and his future.

GORDON:
Mary Custis really came

from what I would call
Virginia royalty.

Now, Lee himself did come from
very good sort of bloodlines.

But hers are much cleaner

and to have any kind of claim to
George Washington in Virginia,

that's...
that's just instant gold.

NARRATOR:
Mary Custis was
the great-granddaughter

of George and Martha Washington;

her inheritance included
thousands of acres

of prime Virginia land,
nearly 200 slaves,

and a main estate high on a hill
near Washington city: Arlington.

From that perch
across the Potomac,

her family peered down
on the White House

and the Capitol building.

For 30 years, presidents had
made pilgrimage to Arlington

to dine with the Custises
on George Washington's china.

PRYOR:
Mary was really not easy to woo.

She called herself
an "impregnable fortress."

Robert was so nervous around her

that he got his younger sister
to pass messages to her

rather than give them himself.

And one of his brothers had to
send him a little buck-up poem

that started out saying

if you want to win
the fair maiden,

you must be brave because only
the brave deserve the fair.

GORDON:
When Robert began to court Mary,

it seems apparent
that Mary's father,

George Parke Custis,
was not very keen on this match.

He was afraid that this
young lieutenant

was going to marry his daughter
primarily for her money.

NARRATOR:
The second lieutenant knew
what he was up against.

Lee's father may have been
a war hero,

but that wasn't the whole story.

Sordid tales of Light-Horse
Harry Lee

had been at large among the
elite of the Virginia Tidewater

for a generation.

THOMAS:
He managed to lose an
extraordinary amount of money

in land deals,
and many of these deals

were working
with other people's money.

He had the distinction
of having written

George Washington a bad check.

He wrote his own father
a bad check.

He had lost the family fortune;

he'd lost the ancestral home
at Stratford;

he ended up in debtor's prison.

NARRATOR:
"Should I be able
to escape the sins

into which my father has
fallen," Lee wrote to Mary,

"I hope the blame which
is justly his due

will not be laid to me."

LEE (dramatized):
And am I so black and handsome

and my nose so red and fingers
so white and tapering,

oh you will admire to see them.

But I wonder if you
are as anxious as I am.

Certainly he had
the right breeding

and that was a good thing.

And he was stunningly handsome,
which Mary probably noticed.

He had beautiful hair
and sparkling eyes.

And as a young man he had
an ebullient manner, actually.

LEE (dramatized):
Is there no way for me
to get there again?

To read to you, walk with you,
ride with you.

And now, my sweet Mary,

you know what I would say to you
if I was there,

but I cannot write it.

MARY CUSTIS (dramatized):
I wish you were here today
to amuse me

while I am sitting
for my portrait.

Indeed I wish for you
very often,

though I am still content.

NARRATOR:
The courtship never did
get easy.

Mary refused at least one of
Robert's marriage proposals.

But when she finally succumbed,
her father fell in line.

Unlike Mr. Custis, Mary's mother
saw the capable young soldier

as a perfect addition
to the family,

and she hoped her new son-in-law
might take control

of the farming operation
from her own flighty husband.

Lee declined the offer.

Fame and glory did not often
attach themselves to farmers,

no matter how wealthy.

Lee explained his
decision otherwise.

His sworn duty, he would often
remind his new wife,

was that of professional
soldier.

Robert E. Lee's precise
professionalism

and orderly intellect

made him what the military most
needed in the 1830s and 1840s:

a gifted civil engineer.

He redirected a major river,
fortified harbors,

defied tides and storms
to build new forts.

Duty kept him on the move:
Savannah, Hampton Roads,

Baltimore, St. Louis, New York.

Mary tried to follow at first,

but a brief taste of camp life
made her reluctant

to leave her father's
comfortable Virginia plantation.

The Lees were together enough
between 1832 and 1845

to conceive three sons--
Custis, Rooney and Rob--

and four daughters--
Mary, Annie, Agnes and Mildred.

The Lee children grew up at
their grandfather's plantation,

tended by the family's
numerous slaves.

Mary Lee wrote to friends
of the fragrant gardens,

with the woodbine and the roses
in bloom,

the dense forest
that backed the house,

"the sweet green shades
of Arlington."

(birds chirping)

MARY LEE (dramatized):
My dear Caroline--

we are all very much
as you left us

with the addition of Mr. Lee
to our circle,

but this happiness we are always
expecting to be deprived of,

as he will probably be obliged
to go north on engineer duty.

LEE (dramatized):
My dear daughter--

when I come home we must have
such little concerts

composed of my sons
and daughters.

You must be the prima donna,
Custis the tenor

and Roon the bass.

But who shall be
the nightingale?

Rob or Mildred?

I expect it will be Rob.

For if he can sing
as sweet as he looks,

all music would be
a creaking cartwheel to him.

GORDON:
Lee seemed to want to be
a present father

through his letters,

although he couldn't always
physically be there.

And they are very detailed.

It seems what he's writing
are the things that he wished

that he could be telling them
in person.

And they do show an extremely
loving and affectionate father.

But you also get a sense
from those letters

of a real pain that Lee felt
from those separations.

NARRATOR:
Mary Lee never fully understood
her husband's willingness

to sacrifice time
with his family,

but she did learn
it was unwise to press him.

Near the end
of a tough pregnancy,

when she asked him to take
a leave and return home,

he lashed out.

"Why do you endeavor
to get me excused

"from the performance of a duty

imposed on me by my profession,"
he wrote,

"for the pure gratification
of private feelings?"

For his part, Lee was never
entirely at home at Arlington.

And his wife's indifference
to domestic engineering rankled.

"I don't know,"
Lee wrote to a friend,

"that I shall ever overcome
my propensity for order."

Mary is a free spirit

and she has this confidence
that comes from

this sort of unassailable
social background.

She was less punctual
than Robert;

he complained about that
all the time.

And she was more given
to creative dress, shall we say.

There are some wonderful
descriptions of her

in some pretty
outlandish outfits.

THOMAS:
The children and family life
he enjoyed,

he reveled in it,
but it was also confusing.

And it sometimes provoked him.

He felt, I think,
some relief at being away

and simply doing whatever
the army demanded of him,

obeying orders as it happened.

(explosions)

NARRATOR:
In March 1847,

on a remote beachhead nearly
3,000 miles from home,

calculating the arc and
trajectory of artillery shells--

"so beautiful in their flight

and so destructive in their
fall," he would say--

Robert E. Lee
finally went to war.

Lee wished he was
"better satisfied

as to the justice of our cause,"

but politics was a secondary
concern to him.

He'd been preparing for battle
for more than 20 years

and the Mexican War
was a chance, he wrote,

to "gain distinction and honor

and therefore not to be
regretted."

And his sterling reputation
within the army

had landed Lee a spot
on the personal staff

of Commanding General
Winfield Scott.

There are few campaigns in the
United States' military history

that are more audacious than
Winfield Scott's campaign

from Veracruz to Mexico City.

It involved a much smaller
invading army

moving into the heartland
of a very large nation,

facing tremendous
logistical problems,

and capturing one of the great
cities of the Western Hemisphere

with a relative handful
of soldiers.

GLATTHAAR:
Winfield Scott had to land,
he had to seize Veracruz,

and then he had to advance
to the highlands

before the malaria season hit.

So there was a lot of pressure
on him to execute effectively.

And one of his right-hand people
was Robert E. Lee.

NARRATOR:
General Scott drove his army
relentlessly across Mexico,

racing dangerously ahead
of his own supply lines,

and he piled up victories--

Veracruz, Cerro Gordo,
Churubusco, Chapultepec.

GALLAGHER:
Anyone who served under Scott,

or anyone who observed what
Scott was doing from a distance,

could learn that
in some instances

audacity can carry the day
in military affairs.

THOMAS:
From Scott, Lee learned
the lesson of the attack.

And he never forgot it.

NARRATOR:
Robert E. Lee was at the center
of Scott's success.

He was the commanding general's
eyes, always out front

and often alone, hunting
the perfect artillery placement

or an unexpected way to outflank
the larger Mexican Army.

What Scott emphasized
during the Mexican War

was something called headwork.

And Lee excelled at headwork.

Headwork was going out,
scouting the field,

knowing the topography,

and coming up with imaginative,
imaginative responses

to what your adversary
was doing.

PRYOR:
He volunteers to go across
this large lava field

called the Pedregal,

which had sharp,
glass-like points at every turn,

to see if he could find a way
to actually get across it.

Even some
of the generals say,

well, this was maybe, you know,
a little more risky

than anybody should have
undertaken.

NARRATOR:
Lee made his way through
the perilous lava fields

three separate times--

once alone, in the dark,
in a driving rain,

within range of enemy fire--

and he found a path for Scott's
army to run a surprise attack

that drove the Mexicans from
the high ground at Contreras.

CARMICHAEL:
He now had proof--
conclusive proof--

that he was an extraordinarily
gifted soldier.

I think that he also discovered
to some degree

that the challenge, the danger,
the excitement of combat,

that it appealed to him.

NARRATOR:
On September 14, 1847,
after a seven-month campaign,

Lee marched into the Grand Plaza
of Mexico City

with a place of honor
in the victory parade.

His name would be conspicuous

in Winfield Scott's
after-battle reports.

America's commanding
general called

Lee's crossing of the Pedregal

"the greatest feat of physical
and moral courage

performed by any individual
to my knowledge."

THOMAS:
Winfield Scott called him

the best soldier
in the American army

and said that in the event
of a war,

the thing that the United States
government should do

is take out an immediate
life insurance policy

on Robert E. Lee.

GLATTHAAR:
What's clear is Lee emerged
from the Mexican War

as the rising star
in the United States Army.

NARRATOR:
Robert E. Lee had never felt
more alive

or in greater control
of his own destiny

than when he was in battle
in Mexico.

And on his return home,

he had trouble readjusting
himself to the peace

and to the work-a-day
engineering

and administrative jobs
assigned him.

Just a few years after
his triumph in Mexico,

Lee tried to talk his eldest son
out of military service.

"I wish I was out of the army
myself," he confided.

PRYOR:
He wants to leave the army

and he just can't find
a way to do it.

His wife is getting sick,
probably from mercury poisoning.

She starts being unable to walk

and move comfortably
around that time.

And not only does his
mother-in-law die,

but his favorite sister dies.

It's a period where it appears

that his life is almost
out of control,

or he believes his life
is out of control.

And he does turn to religion
at that time.

GALLAGHER:
Lee came to religion
rather late in life.

He is not a fervent Christian
early in his life--

not at West Point,
not in Mexico,

not as a young man
on the move

and even an early middle-aged
man on the move.

But when he arrived,

he was absolutely on board

and it became central to how
he dealt with almost everything.

LEE (dramatized):
My dearest Mary--

I only wish to obey
His Commandments,

to neglect nothing on our part
for the accomplishment of that

which is plainly our duty and to
leave the results in His hands.

NARRATOR:
In 1857, ten years after
Lee's triumph in Mexico,

and the year Lee turned 50,

his father-in-law died

and Mary begged Lee to take
a leave from the army

and come home to look after
the family estate.

ERVIN JORDAN, JR:
Lee returned to Arlington after
the death of his father-in-law

because of his sense of duty.

He was the man, at that point,
of the family.

And he felt he was obligated
to take up the task

of straightening out
his father-in-law's finances,

which were never
in the best of condition.

NARRATOR:
The estate was in worse shape
than he suspected.

The plantations willed to
his sons were barely functioning

and heavily mortgaged;

there was no cash
to pay his daughters

their promised inheritances;

and most of the 195 slaves were
unwilling to bend their backs

to restoring the farms and
working off the family debt.

They had been promised their
freedom in Custis's will

and many wanted it immediately.

THOMAS:
The problem with Lee
owning slaves

was his orders didn't always
get followed right away,

as they might in the army.

He was having a terrible time
with insubordination.

JORDAN:
Lee very much felt that
the slaves who ran away

had violated what he probably
felt was a contract,

a contract of duty and honor
to him as their slave owner.

So as a consequence he was
entitled to punish them

because they had violated
their duty to him.

NARRATOR:
Lee paid to have runaways
captured and whipped.

An eyewitness recalled him
urging a county constable

who was lashing a female slave
to "lay it on well."

One slave at Arlington
called Lee

"the worst man I ever see."

At the end of his two years
at Arlington,

Lee had accomplished little.

The plantations remained
unprofitable,

his daughters' inheritances
unpaid

and the slaves still in chains
and aggrieved.

When Lee finally returned to
the United States Army in 1859,

he found himself stuck

at a desolate cavalry outpost
in Texas,

with little to do but oversee
court martials

of derelict soldiers and
chase stray Comanche Indians.

CARMICHAEL:
He certainly had to wonder,
what was ahead?

Had his best days,

had they passed
during the Mexican War?

Was there an opportunity for him
to fulfill that ambition

that had animated him when he
was a young cadet at West Point?

Here you have R.E. Lee,
this ambition driving him,

looking to a military career
that would give him

the ultimate source of fame
and maybe thinking

that that's really not
in the works anymore.

MARY LEE (dramatized):
The Ides of March
are almost here.

We of the South
have had great provocation,

yet for my part I would rather
endure the ills we know

than rush madly
into greater evils,

and what could be greater

than the division
of our glorious republic?

JORDAN:
Lee very much anticipated
what secession meant.

He knew it was going to be war.

In one of his letters
to his sons,

he wrote that the war would
probably last ten years

and that it would be
very, very bloody.

LEE (dramatized):
Tell Charles he must not
allow Maryland

to be tacked on
to South Carolina

before just demands of the South
have been fairly presented

to the North and rejected.

Then if the rights guaranteed by
the Constitution are denied us,

we can with a clear
conscience separate.

As an American citizen,

I prize my government
and country highly,

and there is no sacrifice
I am not willing to make

for their preservation,
save that of honor.

South Carolina had seceded

because it thought that Lincoln
and the Republican Party

would interfere with
the institution of slavery,

plain and simple.

GLATTHAAR:
South Carolina has
a 2,500-word explanation,

which is more an accusation
of Northern interference

with their institution
of slavery.

Mississippi states it baldly.

"Our position is thoroughly
identified

"with the institution
of slavery,

the greatest material interest
of the world."

(gavel pounds)

NARRATOR:
Through the first few months
of the secession crisis,

the leaders of the South's
most powerful state

refused to be swept
into the Confederacy.

The preservation of slavery, the
Virginia aristocracy understood,

was a shaky foundation
on which to build a revolution.

Many Southerners were incensed

that Virginia was trying to play
the peace broker.

JORDAN:
Virginia was America's
leading slave state.

There were more slaves in
Virginia than anywhere else

in the Western Hemisphere,
with the exception of Cuba.

People like Jefferson Davis,
Howell Cobb, Alexander Stephens

all knew that the Confederacy
would not be able to survive

without Virginia
being a part of it.

There was a tremendous amount of
pressure on Virginia to secede.

And Lee was very carefully
keeping an eye

on what Virginia
was going to do.

NARRATOR:
Lee had spent much of his
adult life away from his home,

but he was absolutely attached
to the idea of Virginia.

It was, to his mind,
a divinely ordered society.

In Virginia,
as in all the South,

well-born, well-bred
white Christian gentry

had the freedom to rule
as they saw fit.

Poor and unpropertied whites
lived in peonage,

with little ability to sway
their "betters";

slaves toiled under
benevolent masters.

When God had a better plan, Lee
believed, He would reveal it.

His feelings were generally
along the lines

of a group of people who were
called the slavery apologists.

Now, these people recognized
that there were moral problems

with this institution

and they believed that
eventually it would fade away.

But they absolutely upheld
the right to own human property.

And they also had
elaborate justifications

about how the slaves
were better off under slavery

in the United States than they
would have been back in Africa.

And Lee's writings are
absolutely along those lines.

He certainly never questioned
the values of his class.

He would talk about "my people."

And by that he meant the white
people of his social class,

born to rule.

And his honor is involved
in the defense of his people.

(cannon fire)

NARRATOR:
On April 12, 1861,

the secession crisis
became a shooting war.

When Confederate forces attacked
Fort Sumter in South Carolina,

President Abraham Lincoln called
for every state in the Union

to provide troops to assist
in putting down the rebellion.

That presidential decree

gave the secessionist bloc
in Virginia

a powerful public argument
for breaking from the Union.

This was about much more
than slavery, they argued.

This was about
defending Virginia

against a federal attack
on state sovereignty.

This was about defending the
honor of the state of Virginia.

"The requisition made upon me
will not be complied with,"

wrote Virginia governor John
Letcher in answer to Lincoln.

"You have chosen
to inaugurate civil war,

and, having done so,
we will meet it."

Lincoln's move--
and Virginia's response--

put Robert E. Lee in a bind.

Like all military officers,

he'd sworn to serve
the United States of America

and to obey its president.

And the president
wanted Lee's help.

CARMICHAEL:
Francis Blair, who was a close
associate of Abraham Lincoln,

called R.E. Lee to his office.

And in this meeting Blair
expressed to him

Lincoln's desire to offer R.E.
Lee command of the Union Army.

This, of course,
was really everything

that R.E. Lee had been striving
and working for

his entire career, put out there
for him in this amazing offer,

opportunity.

PRYOR:
He declined the offer
on the spot, right then.

He didn't take time
to think about it.

And he marches straight over
to the War Department,

which was a couple of blocks
away at that point,

and apparently goes immediately
into Scott's office.

This is the man that he most
reveres in the army,

Winfield Scott.

And he tells Scott
that he cannot lead an army

that would invade the South.

Lee then tries to convince Scott
that what he'd like to do

is sit out the war.

And Scott cuts him off and says,
"No, you can't do that.

"I have no room in my army

"for people who have
divided loyalties.

"And if you're going to resign,
you better do it

before you're ordered to take
a job that you don't want."

NARRATOR:
Lee went home to Arlington
to decide his future.

The ideals that had ordered
his life--

honor, duty, country--
did not light a clear path.

For two days, Lee anguished
over his decision.

Slaves noted him pacing back and
forth on the front porch by day,

praying in his room
late into the night.

Whichever side he chose,
Lee knew,

the biggest challenge
of his military life awaited.

LEE (dramatized):
General Winfield Scott--

since my interview with you
on the 18th,

I have felt that I ought no
longer to retain my commission

in the army.

I, therefore,
tender my resignation,

which I request you will
recommend for acceptance.

It was a very fateful decision

and it was not one
that he took lightly.

Winfield Scott did tell Lee,

"I think you've made the
greatest mistake of your life."

NARRATOR:
Two days after he resigned
from the United States Army,

Robert E. Lee answered a summons
to Richmond, Virginia,

soon to be the capital
of the new Confederacy.

He listened as leaders
of the secession convention

sang new praises of his
long-disfavored father,

Light-Horse Harry Lee;

compared Robert E. Lee himself
to George Washington,

hero general of the other
American Revolution;

and offered Lee command of
the forces defending Virginia

from the federal tyrant.

After 30 years
of dutiful service

in the United States Army,

a path toward
a monumental destiny

had finally opened itself
to Robert E. Lee.

He would be the military leader

of a country fighting
for independence,

a general leading an army
in righteous cause

against overwhelming odds.

If Lee triumphed, he knew,

his name would live
through the ages.

From the moment he signed on,

Robert E. Lee was acknowledged
as the military savior

of the South.

That he had no actual experience

commanding large bodies
of soldiers

seemed beside the point.

"No man is more worthy to head
our forces and lead our army,"

wrote one Richmond newspaper.

"His reputation,
his acknowledged ability,

"his honor, his Christian life
and conduct

make his very name
a tower of strength."

The first year of the war
brought Lee little but misery.

One of his sisters declared
for Union

and never spoke to him again.

All three of Lee's sons
left home

to join the Confederate Army.

And two weeks after
Lee's resignation,

Union soldiers occupied
Arlington

and chased Lee's wife and
daughters from their estate.

Mary Lee was bereft.

"I have lost a place dearer
to me than my life," she wrote,

"the home of every memory
of that life

"whether of joy or sorrow,

birthplace of my children,
where I was wedded."

Two months later,
in his first field command,

Lee was undone by an untrained
officer corps,

green soldiers and bad weather.

Lee's army got stuck in the mud
of western Virginia,

then retreated without landing
a single blow

on the invading Union Army.

PRYOR:
At the beginning of the war,
1861, he has black hair.

And six months later he looks
like an entirely changed person

with the white beard,
white hair.

His family can't believe it.

They look at pictures of him
they see published

and they don't think
it's the same person.

NARRATOR:
Southern legislators
wondered aloud

if their celebrated general
was too soft to attack,

too content to dig in
and play defense.

And word got back to him
that men in his own army

had taken to calling him
"Granny Lee."

In the spring of 1862,

the South's "tower of strength"
was stewing in Richmond;

President Jefferson Davis
had relieved Lee

of his field command

and made him his personal
military advisor.

As a general without an army,
Lee had to stand by and watch

as the Confederacy lost
Nashville and New Orleans,

Fort Henry, Fort Donelson
and Shiloh.

And he had to watch as
the Union general-in-chief--

the dashing 34-year-old
George McClellan--

led his Army of the Potomac,

the largest single fighting
force in American history,

up the Virginia peninsula

toward the jewel
of the Confederate nation,

its capital city: Richmond.

JORDAN:
McClellan moved
a hundred thousand men

to the outskirts of Richmond.

Some of McClellan's forces
got so close to Richmond

they could hear the church bells
pealing.

They could see the chimneys
of Richmond.

There were plans made
to evacuate.

Jefferson Davis sent his family
off to safety.

The Confederate archives
and papers and things

were packed up to be
shipped away.

They thought that this was going
to be the end.

GALLAGHER:
The loss of Richmond

would have been the death-blow
of the Confederacy

because so much had gone wrong
in so many other places.

There would have been nothing

for the Confederate people
to cling to in a positive sense

if Richmond had fallen to
McClellan's advancing army.

(bells ringing)

NARRATOR:
Richmond awoke to more bad news
on June 2, 1862.

The commander of the army
defending the city,

General Joseph Johnston,
had been shot off his horse.

He was done for a while.

With nowhere else to turn,

President Davis handed the reins
of the army of Northern Virginia

to Robert E. Lee.

The soldiers did not rejoice.

Memories of Lee's timidity
in his previous field command

were still fresh.

CARMICHAEL:
Those reservations and concerns
in the eyes of many

were confirmed
by his first order

to have the troops dig in
around Richmond.

The Richmond papers were
particularly savage.

They claimed that this was
the West Point way of doing war,

that you exchange muskets
for shovels.

PRYOR:
One of the Georgians who was
under the command

called him "The Failure"
in capital letters.

"They have given us The Failure

"and how do they expect us
to perform

with The Failure"-- in capital
letters-- "in charge of us?"

NARRATOR:
Lee himself was unfazed
by the carping in the ranks.

He had never lacked
for confidence.

And from the moment he took
command outside Richmond,

Lee was thinking attack.

He knew his army could not win
a long war of attrition.

His best hope of winning victory
for the Confederacy

was a speedy knockout
of McClellan's army.

JORDAN:
Lee had this idea that one
or two battles

would solve everything.

So while Lee wasn't happy about
McClellan approaching Richmond,

he looked upon it
as an opportunity

to destroy
the Army of the Potomac.

CARMICHAEL:
What Lee saw on the map

was that the Chickahominy River
divided McClellan's army

into two parts.

That the right flank
of the Union Army

was hanging in the air,

cut off from the bulk
of the Union forces.

And so Lee decided to pounce
on that isolated right wing

of the Union Army above
the Chickahominy River.

He envisioned
a grand turning maneuver

that would not only drive the
Union Army away from Richmond

but that it would also destroy
the Union Army.

NARRATOR:
Lee was willing to risk disaster

to pull off
his flanking maneuver.

His attack would leave
a minuscule force

to defend the city of Richmond;

if McClellan counter-attacked
and drove toward the capital

while Lee's attack was underway,
Richmond would surely fall.

The entire Confederacy would
likely go down with it.

Newspaper correspondents,
photographers and field artists

had flocked to the outskirts
of Richmond

to record the fall of the South,

and Robert E. Lee
gave them a show.

(gunfire, shouting)

When Lee attacked,
McClellan panicked

and began pulling his army
toward the cover of his gunboats

on the James River, more than
20 miles from Richmond.

Lee drove his soldiers
to the chase,

possessed by a vision
of McClellan's army destroyed.

For six days,
he narrowly missed chances

to bag the retreating
enemy troops.

And Lee knew his opportunities
were running out

on the seventh day

when the two armies re-engaged
at a place near the James

called Malvern Hill.

GLATTHAAR:
Lee was really desperate to get
at the Union this last day.

Malvern Hill had three slopes
wide open

with fields under cultivation.

And so the Union troops
were on the top

with artillery positioned there.

Lee's artillery was stuck
to the rear;

it didn't get forward in time.

The Union was able to
concentrate on the guns

that did arrive.

And then one of Lee's
subordinates nonetheless ordered

a frontal attack.

WINSTON GROOM:
Lee made an ill-advised attack

on a very powerful
Union position,

which was his bête noire
all through the war.

These, these attacks
on fortified positions

never worked out very well
for him.

GLATTHAAR:
It was just a wave
of Confederate troops

assaulting up through fields
and just getting slaughtered.

GALLAGHER:
Lee is the bloodiest general
in United States history

if you're gauging that

by what percentage
of his soldiers get shot.

And the Seven Days showed that
for the first time.

His army suffered 20,000
casualties in the Seven Days;

the United States Army 16,000
in the same campaign.

GLATTHAAR:
The soldiers saw
the massive destruction,

saw the huge loss of life.

But they also saw the results.

And Lee had knocked the Union
Army back 20 miles.

This is the kind of generalship
they wanted.

Here is somebody who would
really go after the Federals.

That's what they had wanted,
that's what they got.

NARRATOR:
"General Lee is rapidly
regaining the confidence

of the army,"
wrote a fellow officer.

"You cannot imagine how
gratifying is the feeling

to soldiers to know
that their chief is competent."

In the weeks after Seven Days,

Lee made the Army
of Northern Virginia his army,

instilling discipline and order.

He replaced dozens of officers
who had not measured up

to his exacting standard,

and consolidated power
in the few commanders

he'd come to trust.

And above all,
he trusted himself.

Robert E. Lee was one of
a handful of Civil War generals

who had the imagination
to conceive

a grand military strategy,

the focus to plan a large
campaign to the smallest detail

and the energy to drive it.

And he was already bringing
to bear all those talents,

planning his next move--

a move designed to force
President Lincoln

to consider the wisdom
of a negotiated peace.

GALLAGHER:
Lee knew that the key
to which side would win the war

lay with the civilian
populations.

Whichever civilian
population decided

it wasn't worth it first,
that's the end of the war.

And he believed there was
no better way

to depress United States morale
than to take his army

on the offensive and defeat
major United States forces.

GLATTHAAR:
What he wanted to do was give
the Northern public

a taste of war.

He wanted them to experience it,
to know what it was like

to have an invading army pass
through their neighborhoods.

He wanted them to suffer the
humiliation of being occupied

temporarily by an enemy army.

NARRATOR:
In mid-summer 1862,
with his army in order,

Lee struck north.

Weeks of skirmishing
came to a crescendo

at the Battle
of Second Manassas,

where Lee's army sent Union
troops reeling back

toward the fortifications
of Washington.

A week later,

the Army of Northern Virginia
crossed the Potomac River

into Union territory
for the first time.

LEE (dramatized):
Soldiers, press onward

and our sister states will soon
be released from tyranny,

and our independence
be established

on a sure and abiding basis.

CARMICHAEL:
The Army of Northern Virginia

is an army that has really sort
of a split personality.

One personality is this
extraordinary confidence

in their leader,
extraordinary high morale,

a belief that they can't
be conquered.

But at the same time it is an
army that was being worn down.

Lee was pushing
these men beyond,

beyond the logistical capacity
of that army.

NARRATOR:
By the middle of September,

after weeks of long, hot marches
on short rations,

Lee's army was divided
and badly damaged.

A third of his men were gone--
killed, wounded, captured

or simply scared off.

"When I say
that they were hungry,"

a Maryland citizen wrote
of Lee's soldiers,

"I convey no impression
of the gaunt starvation

"that looked from
their cavernous eyes.

That they would march or fight
at all seemed incredible."

And yet, when he got reports of
McClellan's much larger force

readying an attack at
Sharpsburg, Maryland,

near Antietam Creek,
Lee refused to retreat.

And he stood with
his ragged, undermanned force,

personification of what one
observer later called

"antique heroism."

(gunfire, soldiers shouting)

GROOM:
At Antietam, Sharpsburg,

when McClellan made
his big assault,

it's hard to imagine

the amount of dangerous material

that's flying around
at any given time.

And these guns could put up

50,000 or 100,000 bullets in
the air at any given moment.

People were getting hit
and killed all the time

and artillery is exploding,

and people screaming
and hollering.

GALLAGHER:
Lee literally moved back
and forth along the lines.

He came under fire
more than once.

He clearly understood

that his army was
in a desperate position.

But outwardly he was
absolutely calm

in very difficult circumstances.

And I think that was part
of his self-control;

that was part of his belief

that you needed to demonstrate
the kind of behavior

that you wanted your soldiers

and your subordinates
to exhibit.

He parries very well.

It's almost like a fencing match
that he's able to, um,

ward off every blow
that the Union gives them,

which are some pretty
substantial blows,

by somehow patching together
the right number of people,

getting them
into the right place.

NARRATOR:
Across a four-mile front,

through the "savage continual
thunder" of artillery,

through wave after wave
of attack,

while ammunition ran short
and men scattered

and Lee scrambled reinforcements
into the line,

the Army of Northern Virginia
stood its ground for 14 hours.

When nightfall finally brought
to a halt

the bloodiest single day of
combat in American history,

Lee's army was on the brink
of destruction.

Almost 14,000 of his men
had been captured,

wounded or killed.

And McClellan had fresh troops
to throw at the battle

the next day.

But as a new dawn rose
over those killing fields,

the Army of Northern Virginia
remained.

And General Lee kept his men
there throughout that day,

daring McClellan
to try them again,

shoving the carnage
under McClellan's nose.

THOMAS:
Lee himself, I think, had
his fighting blood up

and believed that he could
withstand more attacks.

I also think he wanted to make
his army know

that they were tougher
than their enemies.

NARRATOR:
McClellan shied again,
and the following day,

Lee grudgingly began to pull
his army back home to Virginia.

But the Confederate commander
had brought the war home

to the North.

A Union soldier
from Connecticut,

surveying the bloated
and blackening corpses

near Sharpsburg,
wrote to his family:

"Think now of the horrors
of such a scene

"as lies all around us.

"There were hundreds of horses,
too, all mangled and putrefying,

"scattered everywhere...

"the farmhouses and barns
knocked to pieces

"and burned down,

"the crops trampled and wasted,

the whole country forlorn
and desolate."

Lee's campaign had struck a blow
at Northern morale,

but he hadn't anticipated
the grit of the Union leader.

In the days after the battle,

Abraham Lincoln chastised,
then fired George McClellan,

declared Antietam a victory
for Union,

and then issued
the Emancipation Proclamation,

which freed the slaves
in every state in rebellion.

GROOM:
That was, in effect,
throwing down

yet another gauntlet
to the South,

because after that,

a negotiated settlement would be
a practical impossibility.

GALLAGHER:
The Emancipation Proclamation
changed the terms

of the whole war in Lee's view.

It was a war where everything
was at stake now

in the Confederacy--
the entire social fabric,

not just whether
or not you'd have

a new slave-holding republic,

but whether
or not you would have

the slave-based social system
that had been present

for more than 200 years.

NARRATOR:
"What we have hitherto seen,"
wrote the Richmond Examiner,

"is but the prelude of the war
which will now begin."

Lee's prophecy of a long and
bloody fight had come to pass.

After two full years and scores
of thousands of lives lost,

the war was a stalemate.

Neither side had gained
much ground.

In March 1863, the opposing
armies were settled in

on either side
of the Rappahannock River,

near Fredericksburg, Virginia,
awaiting the spring thaw.

For nearly four months,
General Lee had been living

in a canvas tent,
in an island of mud.

"The general was never
so comfortable,"

wrote a staff aide,
"as when he was uncomfortable."

But the quiet wore on Lee
and shortened his temper.

His staff officers had learned
to read the signs.

When they saw the general's neck
and head twitch--

"snapping at his ear,"
one aide called it--

they knew he was about to kick.

GLATTHAAR:
Lee was notorious for
a very difficult temper.

He exploded on staff officers.

He could be nasty.

And he yelled at A.P. Hill
on several occasions,

actually humiliated him
in front of others.

PRYOR:
He's not particularly easy
to work with.

He sometimes blames his staff

for things that he has done
wrong, mistakes he has made,

and then he can't apologize;
he has trouble apologizing.

At one point he wrote
to his daughter Agnes

and said that, you know,

"The young soldiers don't really
enjoy the company

of the old general."

And he said, you know,
"Actually I'm so cross

that I'm not worth
being around anymore anyway."

NARRATOR:
Lee would not permit himself

the luxury of friendship
and society that winter.

No one heard him complain
about the loss of Arlington

or the unexpected deaths of
his only two grandchildren,

a two-year-old boy and an infant
girl he'd never seen.

And when Lee received news

that his daughter Annie
had died of scarlet fever,

he mourned her alone.

LEE (dramatized):
My dearest Mary...

Old age and sorrow
is wearing me away.

I feel oppressed
by what I have to undergo

for the first time in my life.

In the quiet hours of the night,

when there is nothing
to lighten my grief,

I feel as if I should be
overwhelmed.

GLATTHAAR:
The amount of paperwork that was
flowing into his headquarters

was absolutely staggering.

He was blitzed with paperwork

and he was trying to plan
for the spring campaign.

All the while,
he was feeling terribly.

The evidence seems to indicate

that Lee suffered
a massive heart attack.

THOMAS:
He did begin this physical
decline, really,

in the spring of 1863.

And most people don't realize it
because Lee denied it himself,

to himself, and tried
to rise above it

and not act the invalid,

which at that time
he certainly was.

NARRATOR:
In the last days of April,

as Lee struggled to regain
his physical strength,

the Union Army,

under a new commander,
General Joseph Hooker,

made the sort of bold
and precise flanking move

Lee had dreamed of
for his own army.

CARMICHAEL:
Hooker, in dividing his army,

put Lee in a vice essentially.

There were Union forces
that were at Fredericksburg

and then the bulk of the Union
army was advancing

from the west
toward Lee's forces.

One would expect that Lee would
have retreated to the south,

closer to Richmond.

And that would seem to have been
really the only option.

NARRATOR:
Even ailing and outmaneuvered,

Robert E. Lee was not
about to turn and run.

Instead, he countered

with his most daring
and dangerous move to date.

He sent half his army,

led by his most aggressive
commander, Stonewall Jackson,

on a 14-mile stealth march
to attack Hooker's right flank.

If the attack failed,

the Army of Northern Virginia
would likely be destroyed.

(artillery fire, bugle call)

Jackson's attack caused a panic
in the Union line,

and for the next two days, Lee's
divided army fought its way

through Hooker's men.

GALLAGHER:
The climactic fighting at
Chancellorsville came on May 3.

It was a hugely costly day,

more than 8,000
Confederate casualties.

But at the end
of the morning's fighting,

the two wings of Lee's army
came together

in one of the few clearings

in this heavily wooded
part of Virginia.

And as the army's wings
came together,

Lee rode into an amazing scene.

CARMICHAEL:
They were of course driving the
Union army away from the field.

And there was Robert E. Lee
amongst his victorious troops,

the Chancellor House in flames,

and those men
cheering on their general.

THOMAS:
One of his staff officers says
it was from a scene like this

that in the olden days men rose
to the dignity of gods.

And this was probably
Lee's finest hour.

And he knew it.

GALLAGHER:
It's the moment

at which the bond
between Lee and his soldiers

was absolutely sealed.

His men came to believe

that they could achieve anything
as long as he was in command.

And I think he believed

that with his soldiers
he could do almost anything.

LEE (dramatized):
There never were such men
in any army before,

and there never can be better
in any army again.

If properly led,
they will go anywhere

and never falter
at the work before them.

NARRATOR:
Lee knew Northern morale
was badly shaken

by the stunning Confederate
victory at Chancellorsville.

Now was the time, he reckoned,

to drive a stake through
the heart of the Union cause.

This army of his, these men,
could do it.

Lee got his chance in the first
days of July 1863,

when the opposing armies
stumbled onto each other

near the Pennsylvania town
of Gettysburg.

For two full days of long light,
Lee pushed his men

to break the lines
of the Army of the Potomac,

and they came
tantalizingly close

to taking the well-entrenched
Union positions.

On the third day,
Lee decided to go for broke.

(artillery fire)

He ordered a barrage
of artillery

to soften up Union positions
on Cemetery Ridge,

where General Pickett's
infantry division

would spearhead a full-force,

every-man-on-the-line,
frontal assault.

When subordinate commanders
warned

that their enemy's defenses
were too strong

and their own men too fatigued,
Lee waved them off.

GROOM:
I believe that he had
every confidence

that those men
that he sent up there

with General Pickett
on that final day

were going to split
that Union Army in two

and get them off that hill

and send them flying
back to Washington.

He was wrong.

GORDON:
Lee was stunned.

He was shocked to see
the results.

The reinforcements that were
supposed to come in

didn't happen.

Men got lost, men panicked.

He's devastated by this--
devastated by it--

watching this moment unfold
before his eyes.

NARRATOR:
Lee saw more than half
his infantry fall that day.

Pickett alone lost two-thirds
of his division.

Lee did manage to avert
fatal destruction.

But the army he'd created

and loved so well
and trusted so deeply

was wrecked.

That night, when battle
finally ceased,

an aide caught a glimpse
of Lee in the moonlight,

revealing
an "expression of sadness

I had never before seen
upon his face."

LEE (dramatized):
Soldiers!

We have sinned
against Almighty God.

We have cultivated a revengeful,
haughty and boastful spirit.

We have not remembered that
the defenders of a just cause

should be pure in His eyes.

Let us humble ourselves
before Him.

Let us confess our many sins

and beseech Him to give us
a higher courage,

a purer patriotism,
and more determined will.

GALLAGHER:
He really did believe that
God was ordering things.

And if difficult things happen,

that meant you had
to just try harder.

You had to deal with them
and move on.

You couldn't wallow
in self-pity.

FELLMAN:
Even though there
are fewer of us,

and even though things
are desperate,

if we are internally
true servants of God

and have cleansed ourselves
of our pride,

God will shine his light on us

and we will win
despite the odds.

And so he did believe that
they could stand at the pass,

and if they're brave enough and
strong enough they can yet win.

NARRATOR:
The forces against Lee's cause
had grown stronger,

the cost of the war more dear.

One of Lee's sons
was a prisoner of war;

his daughter-in-law
was on her deathbed;

and his wife and daughters
were camped out

at a rented house in Richmond.

And Robert E. Lee was
more committed than ever

to the dream of winning
independence

for a slave-holding
Confederate nation.

But that meant he would have
to rally his people

to meet his standards.

There was no room for doubt,
for fear, for anything less

than absolute devotion
to the Confederate cause.

FELLMAN:
There are some incredible
letters to his daughters

during the war, saying,
"Stop having so much fun,

"stop going to parties,

"behave yourself, sew more socks
for the soldiers,

"discipline yourself.

"This is a trial for us all

"and we're set here
to fight this trial

with every ounce of our being."

GALLAGHER:
Lee was not sympathetic

to soldiers who didn't do their
duty from his perspective--

deserters, shirkers.

Lee's response to desertion

was often, "We need
to hang some people."

So what we have
in September of 1863

is not just a spike
in desertion,

but a spike in execution.

There's nearly 40 men who
are killed in Lee's army

while in Virginia
in September of 1863.

He recognized that the
cohesiveness of his army,

its military efficiency,

depended upon him making those
kinds of tough decisions.

And he was willing to live with
the moral consequences of it.

GALLAGHER:
Executions were elaborately
choreographed

for maximum effect.

Large numbers of men
would be drawn up

in a three-sided formation,
the accused put at the open end.

The coffin would be there.

The grave would be there.

The man would be executed,

and then sometimes
several thousand soldiers

would be marched past the corpse
before the whole event was over.

These were meant
to send a message.

NARRATOR:
First reports of troop movements

started coming
into Lee's headquarters

just after midnight,
May 4, 1864.

The Army of the Potomac,

now nearly twice the size
of Lee's own,

was thundering across
two pontoon bridges

to the south shore
of the Rapidan River

near Fredericksburg, Virginia,

disappearing into the dark
tangle of woods

where Lee's men had dug in.

The president of the United
States had drawn a bull's-eye

on Robert E. Lee and his army

and pointed it out
to his new general-in-chief,

the hero of the war in the West.

GALLAGHER:
Ulysses S. Grant's taking
the field in Virginia

in the spring of 1864

absolutely underscores
how important

Lee and the Army of Northern
Virginia were.

Grant could have run
the war from anywhere.

His friend Sherman said,

"For God's sake,
don't go to the East.

"Congress is in the East.

"Newspapers are in the East.

Run the war from the West
with the telegraph."

But Grant knew he had to go east

because the people
of the United States demanded

that their great soldier, Grant,
go head-to-head with Lee.

Lee and the Army of Northern
Virginia were not intimidated

by the arrival of U.S. Grant.

Their attitude was, "Grant's
done great things in the West.

"He hasn't faced us
or R.E. Lee in the West.

"And now he's going to find out
what it's like

to be up against
the first string."

GROOM:
The Southerners believed that
they were going to win somehow.

They believed God
was on their side.

So did the North.

And I don't know,
I don't think God could be

on both, everybody's side,
but that's what they thought.

They all thought that.

(gunfire, men shouting)

NARRATOR:
Grant commenced his attack
at first light, the 5th of May.

And for three days in that
mottled jack-oak forest,

with wildfires devouring
the wounded

and soldiers engaged in
desperate hand-to-hand combat,

Lee's men held off
Grant's larger force,

then shoved it back.

It appeared that Grant, like
McClellan and Hooker before him,

was going to be forcibly ejected
from Virginia by Lee's army.

JORDAN:
The Union troops,
the Army of the Potomac,

was a bit dispirited, because
you take on Lee, you lose.

And they actually said
to themselves,

you know, "Licked again."

And Grant had ordered a retreat
for the moment.

And as they were retreating,

they came to this fork
in the road,

and Grant and his staff were
on horseback sitting there.

Now, if they were told to go
to the left,

the soldiers knew they were
retreating

and heading back to the safety
of Washington, D.C.

But if they went to the right,
they were going to be circling,

continuing on to probably
take on Lee again.

So as the soldiers approached,
Grant's sitting on horseback,

his cigar's in his mouth,

and he very silently
just points to the right.

Grant was not retreating.

GROOM:
Grant hung on like a pit bull.

And everywhere Lee went,
he followed him.

He chased him all over Virginia.

The Overland Campaign between
May and mid-June 1864

was a complete break
with what had come before

during the Civil War.

Before, there had been a battle

and then a long period
before another one.

But when Lee and Grant hooked
up, there are gigantic battles

one after another,
with virtually no respite.

NARRATOR:
Lincoln had finally found
a commander

who was willing to apply the
terrifying mathematical reality:

the North simply had more men
to throw on the pile.

And as Grant pressed
his advantage,

the Army of Northern
Virginia bled.

Three of Lee's corps commanders
were knocked out of the battle.

His trusted cavalry commander,
Jeb Stuart, was killed.

CARMICHAEL:
Lee had to, on a number
of occasions,

assert himself in the field,
expose himself to enemy fire,

because of the fact

that he could not either trust
certain commanders

or he had lost men in the field.

And so taking on those increased
demands and those burdens

in the field, they took
a tremendous physical

and emotional toll on him.

He got very little sleep--
one of his staff officers said

not more than two hours of sleep
per night in a row.

Lee was past his mid-50s.

This was a very
difficult period for him,

and the one time
that we know for certain

that he broke down physically

came at the North Anna
in late May

when he literally
was confined to his cot

and could not take the field,
even though there was an opening

to deal a significant blow
against Grant's army.

NARRATOR:
As Lee languished, officers
closest to him wondered

if their commander
was finally spent.

His heart trouble had
never really abated.

He'd talked at various times
about taking himself

out of the battle,

and now it appeared to some
he'd be compelled to do so.

Instead, Lee hauled himself
out of his army cot

and back to the campaign.

GALLAGHER:
He was doing everything
he'd done before and more.

He was absolutely unsparing
of himself in that regard,

held himself
to a very high standard.

And he expected no less from
everyone who served under him.

CARMICHAEL:
Lee could never see
in other people weakness.

He saw in himself this amazing
ability to sacrifice

physically
as well as emotionally,

to go at great lengths
to fulfill his obligations

to the Confederacy

and he expected, demanded,
that everyone below him,

all the way down to the private,

no matter how difficult
their hardships might be,

that they also do their duty.

NARRATOR:
Lee stood toe-to-toe with Grant
for six bloody weeks.

When the Overland Campaign
ground to a halt

at the end of June, 100,000 men
had been killed or maimed.

The wastage backed up
into both capitals.

Washington's hospitals
overflowed;

its cemeteries were full.

U.S. Quartermaster Montgomery
C. Meigs got permission

from Abraham Lincoln to turn
Lee's home, Arlington,

into a military burial ground.

And he made sure
some of the first graves

were right next to the house,
in Mary Lee's flower garden.

PRYOR:
Meigs felt that Lee
should have to look at this.

Should he ever be able
to come home again,

he would have to look at what
he had been responsible for.

He would have to look
at these graves

and see the carnage
that he had created.

NARRATOR:
By the fall of 1864,

Grant had shoved Lee's Army
of Northern Virginia

back into its holes,
into muddy defensive trenches

outside Petersburg, Virginia.

The last, best hope for
the Confederacy was politics:

the presidential election
of 1864.

But that hope died

when Abraham Lincoln defeated
the Peace Party candidate,

George McClellan.

GROOM:
I think Lee knew
that the cause was lost.

He knew when you're besieged,
you're besieged.

There wasn't any...
there was no way out.

THOMAS:
I think Lee persisted

in the belief that he was
a professional.

He was a soldier.

His duty was to fight.

NARRATOR:
The hurt for Lee was watching
the demise of his army.

He had birthed and nurtured it,

had made it an extension
of his own person,

and now he had to watch it
suffer in the muddy trench.

GROOM:
It was an ongoing tragedy

the last day of the... well,
the last week of the war.

I mean, he saw his army falling
apart in front of him

and there was nothing
he could do about it.

He knew that basically
the game was up.

The choices were getting
fewer by the hour.

NARRATOR:
In early April 1865,

Grant began inviting Lee
to give up the fight,

and Lee finally relented.

"I suppose there is nothing
for me to do

but go and see General Grant,"
he told an aide.

"And I would rather die
a thousand deaths."

THOMAS:
Lee went off by himself
in an orchard.

His staff tried to keep people
away from him

because he had to come
to terms, really,

with the death of his army.

This was what he had
given his life to

and he realized, I'm sure,

that he would never do anything
so important again.

And he'd failed.

And, uh, it was over.

NARRATOR:
In a meeting with Grant

at a private home in Appomattox,
Virginia, in April 1865,

Lee agreed to surrender
his Army of Northern Virginia

on Grant's terms.

Lee was obliged to beg Grant
for food for his defeated men,

but he refused to betray
a scintilla of emotion

to his conqueror.

"Whatever his feelings,"
Grant later wrote,

"they were entirely concealed
from my observation."

As Lee strode out onto the porch
following the meeting,

one of his staff officers saw

the familiar twitch and flush
at the general's neck,

heard Lee's voice break
as he called for his horse.

GLATTHAAR:
And then he returned back
to his headquarters tent.

As he went by,
Porter Alexander had arranged

for soldiers to be standing
alongside the road

to salute their commander.

Then Lee, in conjunction
with Charles Marshall,

drafted General Order
Number Nine

in which he announced the
surrender to the troops.

LEE (dramatized):
After four years
of arduous service

marked by unsurpassed courage
and fortitude,

the Army of Northern Virginia
has been compelled to yield

to overwhelming numbers
and resources.

FELLMAN:
He's saying it wasn't
our inward fortitude that lost,

it wasn't that our cause
wasn't just.

They had more guns
and they had more men

and they crushed us with
superior material force.

And that implies we still have
superior moral force.

The cause for which we fought
is as noble as it always was.

PRYOR:
Lee is saying to himself, "Yes,
it was still worth the effort."

He had given it his all and
never shirked from doing that,

and that that was meritorious
in itself.

LEE (dramatized):
You will take with you the
satisfaction that proceeds

from the consciousness of duty
faithfully performed

and I earnestly pray that a
merciful God will extend to you

His blessing and protection.

I, Robert Edward Lee,

do solemnly swear, in the
presence of Almighty God,

that I will henceforth
faithfully support, protect

and defend the Constitution
of the United States,

and the Union of the States
thereunder, and that I will,

in like manner, abide by and
faithfully support all laws

and proclamations which have
been made

during the existing rebellion

with reference to the
emancipation of slaves,

so help me God.

NARRATOR:
In April of 1865, a defeated
Robert E. Lee returned

to his wife and family

at their rented home
on Franklin Street in Richmond.

Only the charity of President
Lincoln and General Grant

saved him from being hanged
as a traitor.

For the next five years,
Lee hid himself away

at the presidency
of a small college

in the mountains
of western Virginia.

When he felt able,

Lee took solitary rides
on his horse, Traveller,

confiding to his
old war-time companion.

"I feel sure of his discretion,"
he wrote to a friend.

GALLAGHER:
He was extremely unhappy

with much of the political
landscape

in the wake of the war.

But he kept that to himself.

He believed that
if you lose a war,

you do what
the winner says to do.

And I think that's what he tried
to do after the Civil War

in a public sense.

In a public sense,

it was all about reunion
and reconciliation.

In a private sense,
a very different story.

CARMICHAEL:
Lee, to the day he died,

believed that the wrong side
had won this war,

and that was something that he
could not explain away easily.

And so the faith that he had

that there was a God who would,
in fact, favor his people

and that God was just
and righteous...

R.E. Lee had a very difficult
time reconciling that belief

to what he had seen
on the battlefront

and what he saw
after Appomattox.

He saw a landscape now peopled
with individuals

that he couldn't recognize.

These are not slaves anymore,
they're free black people

and they're asserting
their political rights.

There are poor white people who
are demanding to be treated

with the same respect that a
slave-holder was treated with.

So Lee comes into that
postwar period bewildered.

NARRATOR:
Robert E. Lee had
little inclination

to work through what his life
and his war had meant...

and even less time.

In October of 1870,

just five and a half years
after his surrender,

Lee suffered a massive stroke
and died a few days later,

at home in Virginia,
surrounded by his family.

In death as in life, Robert
E. Lee divided the nation.

The former slave
Frederick Douglass spoke

for those who were offended

by the "nauseating flatteries
of Robert E. Lee."

"It would seem

"that the soldier who kills
the most men in battle,

"even in a bad cause,
is the greatest Christian

and entitled to the highest
place in heaven."

Southern partisans deified
their now-fallen commander,

placing his memory at the head
of a grand and noble Lost Cause.

The glory that eluded Lee
in life

attached itself to him in death,
turning him, literally,

into a bronzed god,
a marble man.

FELLMAN:
The minute he dies,
at the first memorial services,

both General Early, who was
really the political leader

of this Lost Cause movement,

and Jefferson Davis
gave eulogies.

And they said, more than being
a great general and a great man,

he was a pure Christian

and his soul was
clear and clean.

It was as if they are saying
he was a saint.

So he can stand in
for all that's best in us

and we can strive
the way he strove

and reach this place of
a Christian white commonwealth

where all is pure.

NARRATOR:
For the next quarter century,

admirers of the Confederate
cause funded and erected

monuments to Robert E. Lee
by the scores.

And for a full century after his
death, the memory of General Lee

was rigorously burnished,
and not just by Southerners.

President Theodore Roosevelt
called Lee,

"the very greatest
of all the great captains

that the English-speaking
peoples have brought forth."

"We recognize Robert E. Lee

as one of our greatest
American Christians,"

said President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

"and one of our greatest
American gentlemen."

Lee himself had had to face
the hard and unidealized truth.

He looked around
at the end of his life

and what he saw was misery.

His soaring ambition,
his superhuman physical stamina

and his unbending resolve

had been devastating
to those closest to him.

Virginia had been driven to its
knees, his family estate lost,

his sons financially
beleaguered,

his daughters homebound
and unhappy.

None would marry,

partly because a generation
of well-bred Southern males

had died in their father's army.

GORDON:
This is a man who had
pretty much devoted

his whole adult life to being
a professional soldier.

And really the biggest trial
and test of his career

was the Civil War, which meant
turning on his former comrades,

his nation, which of course his
own father had helped to create.

And he failed.

PRYOR:
He told one of his colleagues
at Washington College

that he thought the great
mistake of his life,

the great mistake of his life

was having taken
a military education.

And I think it's rather tragic
if he truly believed that,

because it's almost like showing
a sense of disappointment

in his whole life,

that the whole trajectory
of his life

from the time that he first went
to West Point

had come out to be something
that he viewed

as being a mistake, a failure,
something he regretted.

American Experience "Robert E.
Lee" is available on DVD.