July 30, 2025 • 9 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Robert E. Lee is best known for leading Confederate forces during the Civil War, but his final role may be one of his most revealing. After the war, he accepted a position as president of a struggling college in Virginia, where he devoted himself to rebuilding and mentoring the next generation. Historian Allen Guelzo shares how this quiet period helped redefine Lee’s legacy and shaped what would later become Washington and Lee University. We'd like to thank the Bill of Rights Institute for allowing us access to this wonderful audio, originally a part of their Scholar Talks series on YouTube.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, a
short history of one of the most consequential and controversial
figures in American history, Robert E. Lee. Doctor Alan Gelzo,
author of Robert E. Lee A Life, is here to
tell the story of the Confederates, of the Confederacy's most
(00:31):
powerful general. Let's get into the story. Take it away,
doctor Gelso Robert E.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Lee, just to give you the basic skeleton outline, was
born in eighteen oh seven at Stratford Hall on the
Northern Neck of Virginia, which had been the ancestral home
of many of the Lee family, a family which had
roots in Virginia back into the seventeenth century. He attends
West Point. He is class of eighteen twenty nine graduates
(00:58):
second in his class. When I say second, he missed
graduating first really by a couple of digits. It was
like one of those batting average contests where you have
to take it out to the fourth digit to determine
who the winner is. And is posted to the elite
Corps of Engineers and spends a good deal of the
(01:18):
rest of his professional life in the Army's Corps of
Engineers doing really Corps of engineering things He mainly is
devoted to fortification construction, and as a specialty within that
Coastal fortification is something of a specialty within that kind
of engineering, which requires a great deal of imagination. And
(01:40):
it has to be said that Lee was a very
good engineer and a very dedicated engineer. He also was
a very frustrated engineer because promotion in the army as
a whole, and in the corps of engineers was sclerotic,
to say the least. The great advantage of army employment
it was that it was guaranteed and secure. The downside
(02:03):
was that it was slow. And Lee experiences this and
it's a source of great frustration. He would like to
move up. When the Mexican War comes, he sees this
as an opportunity and he grabs it. He's sent off
on one engineering assignment, which doesn't look terribly promising, but
then he is seconded to the staff of Winfield Scott.
(02:23):
Winfield Scott is about to mount one of the most adventurous,
amphibious expeditions in American military history, and that is the
Joint Army Navy landing at Vera Cruz on the eastern
coast of Mexico. Lee is immediately ticketed by Scott as
(02:44):
an up and coming person and becomes a major part
of Scott's staff as a major assistance to Scott in
the capture of Vera Cruz Accompany. Scott's invasion of Mexico
passed the battle at Sara Gordo up to the battles
around Mexico City, which eventually end in the surrender of
Mexico City and the end of the Mexican War with
(03:06):
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. All through it, Lee is
very much Winfield Scott's right hand man, and Scott would
later say years later that all of the plaudits he
Scott won in the Mexican War were really due to
the advice that he garnered from Robert E. Lee. But
the war is over, Lee goes back to doing coastal
(03:27):
fortification with corp of Engineers. Is not terribly exciting, and
in fact it gets if anything, it gets worse, because
in eighteen fifty two he's assigned to become superintendent of
West Point. Now, I know that sounds glamorous on the
surface of it, in eighteen fifty two, it wasn't. At
this point, West Point is still very much a Corps
(03:49):
of Engineering school, which means that even though Lee is
the superintendent, he has virtually no discretion about what to do.
He is micromanaged for three years by the chief Engineer
in Washington, DC, and finally, at the end of it,
he is only too happy to grab an opportunity to
(04:10):
transfer out of the Corps of Engineers and accept a
commission as lieutenant colonel of the second Cavalry in Texas.
Texas is not what you would call in those days
an ideal posting. It gives you an idea of some
degree of his frustration that he's willing to accept this.
But off to Texas he goes as lieutenant colonel of
(04:30):
the second Cavalry, and there he really does nothing more
than chase commanches and various outlaws around the countryside to
no very particular purpose. He never really fires a shot
and anger himself. It is not until eighteen sixty one
the things begin to warm up. In eighteen sixty one,
he's recalled to Washington by Winfield Scott, ostensibly to help
(04:54):
rewrite the army regulations, but really Scott wants him in
Washington because the country is splitting apart. Seven southern states
have seceded from the Union, there is a possibility of conflict.
Scott wants Lee in Washington, because Scott's feeling is that
if anyone should take command of federal forces in dealing
(05:17):
with secession, it should be Robert E. Lee. The firing
on Fort Sumter takes place, and indeed Abraham Lincoln puts
into process an invitation to Lee. It comes through Old
Francis Preston Blair, one of the great political wire pullers
of Washington. Blair sits down with Lee and it basically
says to Lee, President Lincoln would like you to take
command of the armies in the field. And Lie says no,
(05:43):
which is a great surprise. But Lee explains it this way,
I cannot raise my hand against my native state. Now
Virginia at that point had not yet seceded, but it
was hovering on the brink of doing so. And Lee says,
I can't. I can't do that. What Lee does, in fact,
(06:04):
is not only refuse that invitation. He then goes home
and writes out a letter of resignation from the army.
And he might have stopped right there, but at that
same moment he receives an invitation from the state authorities,
the Virginia State authorities in Richmond to come there and
help them oversee the organization of state forces. And he
(06:28):
agrees to do that, so he goes to Richmond. He
is commissioned as a brigadier general of Virginia Forces. When
Virginia joins the Confederacy, he's made a general in the
Confederate Army, and from that point he takes off. He
becomes General Lee. He becomes the man who is the
victor in the Peninsula Campaign of eighteen sixty two, Victor
(06:50):
at Second Bull Run, escapes near destruction at Antietam, Victor
at Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg near Victor at Gettysburg, fights things
out against Ulysses Grant in eighteen sixty four in the
Overlin Campaign, undergoes the Siege of Richmond and finally surrenders
to Ulysses Grant at Appomatos Courthouse on April ninethe eighteen
(07:13):
sixty five. And that is usually where people think the
book end occurs in Lee's life. Actually it's not, because
he's offered, and it's a very strange offer. He's made
the offer by Washington College in the Upper Shenandoah to
become their president. It was an act of desperation on
their part. This was a small college which hardly hardly
(07:35):
had a pulse. The surprising thing is that Lee accepts.
He becomes president of Washington, and to everybody's surprise, turns
into a remarkably successful college president. Completely revamps the curriculum
he gets starts moving people away from the traditional Greek
and Latin classics curriculum to a more vocationally oriented curriculum
(07:58):
with engineering and journalism business. He is enormously successful in
raising money and in bulking up the student body, to
the point that by the time of his death in
eighteen seventy, he has made Washington College an educational powerhouse
on a par with the University of Virginia. Those last
five years of his life were really the most successful
(08:20):
years of his life. And curiously he shocked one student,
but he said, the great mistake of my life was
taking a military education. In other words, I should have
been doing something like this all of my life. So
Robert E. Lee, then, who had suffered over the years
increasingly from heart trouble heart attacks, finally succumbs to a
stroke and a heart attack and dies on October twelfth,
(08:43):
eighteen seventy and is buried there on the campus of
the college, which then renames itself as Washington and Lee University.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
And a terrific job on the editing by our own
Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to the Bill of
Rights Institute for allowing us to use this phenomenon audio
which was originally a part of their Scholar Talk series.
And of course a special thanks to doctor Alan Gelzo
for all of his work on the Civil War and
that period. There's simply no one better the short history
(09:14):
of Robert E. Lee here on our American Stories
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, a
short history of one of the most consequential and controversial
figures in American history, Robert E. Lee. Doctor Alan Gelzo,
author of Robert E. Lee A Life, is here to
tell the story of the Confederates, of the Confederacy's most
(00:31):
powerful general. Let's get into the story. Take it away,
doctor Gelso Robert E.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Lee, just to give you the basic skeleton outline, was
born in eighteen oh seven at Stratford Hall on the
Northern Neck of Virginia, which had been the ancestral home
of many of the Lee family, a family which had
roots in Virginia back into the seventeenth century. He attends
West Point. He is class of eighteen twenty nine graduates
(00:58):
second in his class. When I say second, he missed
graduating first really by a couple of digits. It was
like one of those batting average contests where you have
to take it out to the fourth digit to determine
who the winner is. And is posted to the elite
Corps of Engineers and spends a good deal of the
(01:18):
rest of his professional life in the Army's Corps of
Engineers doing really Corps of engineering things He mainly is
devoted to fortification construction, and as a specialty within that
Coastal fortification is something of a specialty within that kind
of engineering, which requires a great deal of imagination. And
(01:40):
it has to be said that Lee was a very
good engineer and a very dedicated engineer. He also was
a very frustrated engineer because promotion in the army as
a whole, and in the corps of engineers was sclerotic,
to say the least. The great advantage of army employment
it was that it was guaranteed and secure. The downside
(02:03):
was that it was slow. And Lee experiences this and
it's a source of great frustration. He would like to
move up. When the Mexican War comes, he sees this
as an opportunity and he grabs it. He's sent off
on one engineering assignment, which doesn't look terribly promising, but
then he is seconded to the staff of Winfield Scott.
(02:23):
Winfield Scott is about to mount one of the most adventurous,
amphibious expeditions in American military history, and that is the
Joint Army Navy landing at Vera Cruz on the eastern
coast of Mexico. Lee is immediately ticketed by Scott as
(02:44):
an up and coming person and becomes a major part
of Scott's staff as a major assistance to Scott in
the capture of Vera Cruz Accompany. Scott's invasion of Mexico
passed the battle at Sara Gordo up to the battles
around Mexico City, which eventually end in the surrender of
Mexico City and the end of the Mexican War with
(03:06):
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. All through it, Lee is
very much Winfield Scott's right hand man, and Scott would
later say years later that all of the plaudits he
Scott won in the Mexican War were really due to
the advice that he garnered from Robert E. Lee. But
the war is over, Lee goes back to doing coastal
(03:27):
fortification with corp of Engineers. Is not terribly exciting, and
in fact it gets if anything, it gets worse, because
in eighteen fifty two he's assigned to become superintendent of
West Point. Now, I know that sounds glamorous on the
surface of it, in eighteen fifty two, it wasn't. At
this point, West Point is still very much a Corps
(03:49):
of Engineering school, which means that even though Lee is
the superintendent, he has virtually no discretion about what to do.
He is micromanaged for three years by the chief Engineer
in Washington, DC, and finally, at the end of it,
he is only too happy to grab an opportunity to
(04:10):
transfer out of the Corps of Engineers and accept a
commission as lieutenant colonel of the second Cavalry in Texas.
Texas is not what you would call in those days
an ideal posting. It gives you an idea of some
degree of his frustration that he's willing to accept this.
But off to Texas he goes as lieutenant colonel of
(04:30):
the second Cavalry, and there he really does nothing more
than chase commanches and various outlaws around the countryside to
no very particular purpose. He never really fires a shot
and anger himself. It is not until eighteen sixty one
the things begin to warm up. In eighteen sixty one,
he's recalled to Washington by Winfield Scott, ostensibly to help
(04:54):
rewrite the army regulations, but really Scott wants him in
Washington because the country is splitting apart. Seven southern states
have seceded from the Union, there is a possibility of conflict.
Scott wants Lee in Washington, because Scott's feeling is that
if anyone should take command of federal forces in dealing
(05:17):
with secession, it should be Robert E. Lee. The firing
on Fort Sumter takes place, and indeed Abraham Lincoln puts
into process an invitation to Lee. It comes through Old
Francis Preston Blair, one of the great political wire pullers
of Washington. Blair sits down with Lee and it basically
says to Lee, President Lincoln would like you to take
command of the armies in the field. And Lie says no,
(05:43):
which is a great surprise. But Lee explains it this way,
I cannot raise my hand against my native state. Now
Virginia at that point had not yet seceded, but it
was hovering on the brink of doing so. And Lee says,
I can't. I can't do that. What Lee does, in fact,
(06:04):
is not only refuse that invitation. He then goes home
and writes out a letter of resignation from the army.
And he might have stopped right there, but at that
same moment he receives an invitation from the state authorities,
the Virginia State authorities in Richmond to come there and
help them oversee the organization of state forces. And he
(06:28):
agrees to do that, so he goes to Richmond. He
is commissioned as a brigadier general of Virginia Forces. When
Virginia joins the Confederacy, he's made a general in the
Confederate Army, and from that point he takes off. He
becomes General Lee. He becomes the man who is the
victor in the Peninsula Campaign of eighteen sixty two, Victor
(06:50):
at Second Bull Run, escapes near destruction at Antietam, Victor
at Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg near Victor at Gettysburg, fights things
out against Ulysses Grant in eighteen sixty four in the
Overlin Campaign, undergoes the Siege of Richmond and finally surrenders
to Ulysses Grant at Appomatos Courthouse on April ninethe eighteen
(07:13):
sixty five. And that is usually where people think the
book end occurs in Lee's life. Actually it's not, because
he's offered, and it's a very strange offer. He's made
the offer by Washington College in the Upper Shenandoah to
become their president. It was an act of desperation on
their part. This was a small college which hardly hardly
(07:35):
had a pulse. The surprising thing is that Lee accepts.
He becomes president of Washington, and to everybody's surprise, turns
into a remarkably successful college president. Completely revamps the curriculum
he gets starts moving people away from the traditional Greek
and Latin classics curriculum to a more vocationally oriented curriculum
(07:58):
with engineering and journalism business. He is enormously successful in
raising money and in bulking up the student body, to
the point that by the time of his death in
eighteen seventy, he has made Washington College an educational powerhouse
on a par with the University of Virginia. Those last
five years of his life were really the most successful
(08:20):
years of his life. And curiously he shocked one student,
but he said, the great mistake of my life was
taking a military education. In other words, I should have
been doing something like this all of my life. So
Robert E. Lee, then, who had suffered over the years
increasingly from heart trouble heart attacks, finally succumbs to a
stroke and a heart attack and dies on October twelfth,
(08:43):
eighteen seventy and is buried there on the campus of
the college, which then renames itself as Washington and Lee University.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
And a terrific job on the editing by our own
Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to the Bill of
Rights Institute for allowing us to use this phenomenon audio
which was originally a part of their Scholar Talk series.
And of course a special thanks to doctor Alan Gelzo
for all of his work on the Civil War and
that period. There's simply no one better the short history
(09:14):
of Robert E. Lee here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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