Part 3

Robert E. Lee
by Roy Blount

(Page 3 of 3)

Sometimes eleven Oneida warriors, on their own horses, joined his cavalry troop for the sport of the thing. Harry learned their language and sat them down to dine in the field with him and the other officers, from chinaware and sterling cups. Without the medicines, elixirs, and food Harry Lee's raiders captured from the enemy, Washington's army would not likely have survived the harrowing winter encampment of 1777-78 at Valley Forge, during which men were reduced to eating their boots. Washington became his patron and close friend.

At length Sir William Howe sent a full regiment of cavalry, more than three hundred men, to capture Lee dead or alive. They cornered him in a farmhouse. Harry and a handful of his men took their shots carefully enough to repulse the British three times. Then Harry ran outside, looked into the distance, and whooped, "Here comes our infantry! We'll have them all!" Although these reinforcements were imaginary, the British fled, leaving scores of dead and wounded behind. Again, only one of Harry's men was wounded, and he but slightly.

This was one of several hairbreadth escapes Harry made as he plagued the British in Virginia and North Carolina under Nathanael Greene and in South Carolina alongside Francis Marion, "the Swamp Fox." Then, with the war nearly over, Harry decided he was underappreciated, so he impulsively resigned from the army.

That was a mistake. In 1785, however, Harry was elected to the Second Continental Congress. In 1788 he helped lead the fight in Virginia to ratify the U.S. Constitution. Ironically, in light of later developments, it was Harry who offered the most notable defense of the phrase "We, the people." Patrick Henry insisted that it should be "We, the states," but Harry said, "This system is submitted to the people for their consideration because on them it is to operate, if adopted. It is not binding on the people until it becomes their act."

In 1791 Harry was elected governor of Virginia. In 1794 Washington put him in command of the troops that bloodlessly put down the Whiskey Rebellion (farmers protesting an excise tax) in western Pennsylvania. In 1799 he was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he famously eulogized Washington as "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen."

By that time, however, he had swapped Washington five thousand acres of real estate for a horse named Magnolia. That was just another of his impulsive acts. He had also tried to repay a loan from Washington with property to which he lacked title. That was much worse. It was a betrayal of his hero and a sign of personal disorder that Harry would project onto the common people. Harry's bad head for business, and his growing contempt for the general public, would lead him at last into a trap he couldn't escape.

In 1819 Harry's defense of "We, the people" would serve as the touchstone for Chief Justice John Marshall's ruling that "[t]he government proceeds directly from the people...and is declared to be ordained 'in order to form a more perfect union.'...The assent of the States...is implied....But the people were at perfect liberty to accept or reject it; and their act was final....The government of the Union, then,...is emphatically and truly a government of the people." As the concept of "the people" has evolved over the years-to include people without property, freed slaves, women, black people denied civil rights-the Constitution has remained flexible enough, over more than two centuries, to support the gradually strengthening notion of American liberty and inclusiveness.

In the nineteenth century, however, Harry lost his own flexibility, which had so dazzled the redcoats. His fast and loose speculation in hundreds of thousands of the new nation's acres went sour. One of his creditors defaulted on a huge loan. Harry was reduced to chicanery. He withheld his married daughter's dowry, gave a bad check to a friend. When in 1808 he wrote to his old college chum James Madison, now secretary of state, asking to be sent abroad, Madison did not respond. Mortified, in ill health, with all his stratagems exhausted, Harry spent a year in debtors' prison, where he wrote his war memoirs, which are energetic.

In the memoirs Harry proclaimed a determination to revive the Federalist glory, symbolized by the iconic Washington, which he felt had been obliterated by Jeffersonian democracy. He accused the Republicans, as the relatively populist Jeffersonians were known, of vitiating the central government and the military, of falsely linking Federalism with monarchism (Republicans had been known to express suspicions that the Federalists wanted to make Washington king), and of destroying what should have been a boom economy. Harry extolled Washington, exaggerated his own role-considerable though it had been-in defending the southern colonies, and strongly implied that Thomas Jefferson, as wartime governor of Virginia, had shown cowardice by briefly withdrawing from Richmond under British invasion. The memoir vexed Jefferson until his dying days, but it did not sell. In 1809 Harry was out of prison, but deep in a financial and psychological hole.

When Harry was a young bachelor, his father had asked him why he never visited brothels. He had replied, "I am ever sensible of the good name this family enjoys in the county, sir." Now the disorder of his own affairs and his gift for making prominent enemies had sullied that name. Harry turned his shame and anxiety outward: Indulgence of the masses was leading to anarchy, which would undo the Revolution and give way to monarchy. When he'd defended "We, the people," he'd actually meant "We, the gentlemen." He was no longer a gentleman himself, for all intents and purposes, and someone had to be blamed.

Jefferson and Madison, Harry argued, were forcing the nation into a disastrous war with Great Britain. Alexander Hanson of Baltimore, publisher of a Federalist newspaper, was of the same opinion, and after what is now known as the (as it turned out, quite nearly disastrous) War of 1812 was declared, Hanson attacked the Republicans' war inflammatorily. Baltimore was a Republican town, not a pacifist one. A mob stormed the newspaper plant and tore the whole building down. Hanson left town but returned with a defense force of armed Federalist partisans. Harry, who had been a friend of Hanson's father, came to Baltimore and took command.

A mob surrounded the newspaper's new office, so threateningly that Lee, over Hanson's protests, persuaded the Federalists to let themselves be locked up in jail-with pistols-for their safety. Then the mob stormed the jail. Loath to die at the hands of people such as these, Lee suggested that the Federalists shoot each other, honorably. He was voted down. When the rabble burst in, Harry denounced them as "base villains" until they clubbed and strangled him insensible. The mob killed one of the Federalists (the mob called them Tories) and were content in the belief that they had killed eight others-including Lee.

He wasn't dead (and the war was indeed ill advised), but he was defaced. A man who saw him the next day said, "Lee was black as a negro." He would spend the rest of his days in physical misery from injuries, external and internal, inflicted by the mob.

He was fifty-eight when Robert saw him return home broken. Harry had lost his fortune and lots of other people's money, as well as all of his horses. He and his household-his second wife, Ann Carter Lee, and their five surviving children, of whom Robert was the next to last-had departed the Lee ancestral home, the mansion called Stratford, where Robert was born, for a smaller rented house in Alexandria. Ann had always preferred her ancestral home at Shirley, Virginia, where she and the children spent so much time that Robert probably had not seen much of his father even when he wasn't in jail. Harry's self-dramatizing ways were still engaging enough, apparently, that his family continued to find him dashing, or encouraged him to believe that they did, but now that sentiment was limited-and tenuously-to that household.

Under the conditions of bankruptcy that obtained in those days, Harry was still liable for his debts. Some months after being brought back home, 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.

© 2003 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Roy Blount, Jr., grew up in Georgia and served in the army before becoming a celebrated humorist and cultural journalist. He has written for magazines as diverse as Sports Illustrated and The New York Review of Books and is the author of numerous books that include his recent memoir Be Sweet.