The Gettysburg Experience
magazine, a publication exploring the Gettysburg of yesterday and today. We offer an array of interesting articles – most of which have a direct relation to historic Gettysburg from the Colonial era through the turn of the 21st century, often with an emphasis on the famous battle that occurredin the summer of 1863.

The Gettysburg Experience also offers a comprehensive Events Calendar (for those who want to know what special happenings to attend when they visit – any time of the year), delicious recipes, Gettysburg trivia, profiles of people and area businesses,

Having served the Gettysburg area since 1997, The Gettysburg Experience now extends our magazine to a wider circulation of readers, offering a glimpse into one of America’s most fascinating towns.

By the time Robert E. Lee led his army in the Battle of Gettysburg, the beloved general, at age 56, was already suffering from serious illness and devastating losses – and not just to his army. In 1862, he lost his family home at Arlington, his wife and daughters reduced to refugee status. He was shocked to learn of the death of daughter, Annie, to typhoid fever; and two grandchildren, offspring of his son, Rooney, to infant illnesses. A few months before the fight at Gettysburg, Lee learned that the constant pains in his chest were the result of a progressively fatal heart disease. Keenly sensing his mortality, Lee realized that the people of the South depended on his leadership, and hoped to bring a conclusive, knockout blow to the Federal army. That blow never came. Lee survived seven more years after Gettysburg, and outlived the fated Confederacy for five years. Though those years were finally a time of peace, it was a difficult and sorrowful time for Virginia’s most celebrated man.

When the Confederates laid down their arms at Appomattox, General Lee was just 58 years old. Middle aged and in decent physical condition due to his years of military upbringing, Lee might have enjoyed many years of life yet, had his heart been in better shape – and not just from the physiological issues. The war had taken its toll upon the devoted Virginian, and its outcome affected him mentally and emotionally as well as physically. “He was exhausted in body,” wrote his biographer, Douglas S. Freeman, “heavy of heart, and troubled for the future of the defeated Southern people.”1

As a paroled prisoner of war, Lee was careful not to violate the law of the nation to which he had surrendered. On May 5, 1865, General George Meade visited Lee, and attempted to persuade him to take an oath of allegiance to the Union, explaining that if Lee would do so, many in the South would follow his example. Lee demurred, preferring to wait and see how the Union would treat the conquered South before he did so. The two generals parted company amicably. Meade later wrote that he felt “really sad to think of his [Lee’s] position, his necessities, and the difficulties which surrounded him.”2

General Lee was homeless and practically penniless at war’s end, as the Custis property had been sold for taxes and turned into a cemetery for the Union slain. After appearing before Congress in February 1866 to explain his actions in the war, he passed by the old homestead in Arlington and sadly gazed at it for a time. He never went back. By now he had a new position as President of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia. It provided honorable employment, and he spent the remaining years of his life in rebuilding, repairing, and expanding the institution. He was invigorated by the company of youth, which he saw as the hope of the future. “You can work for Virginia,” he told them, “to build her up again, to make her great again…We failed, but in the good Providence of God, apparent failure proves a blessing.” He often resigned his fate as the will of Providence: “Knowing how our God mixes in the cup he gives us to drink in this World, the sweet with the bitter.” Most of the last years of Lee's life were infused with the bitter part.3

What he likely perceived as the worst failure was the painful memory of Gettysburg. Known even while the war still waged as the pivotal changing point of the conflict, in the years after the war, Lee’s most famous battle was on the minds of many in the South.

When he came to Washington to testify before Congress in 1866, Lee was thronged like a matinee idol upon his arrival at the Metropolitan Hotel. Asking for privacy, Lee was nevertheless pestered continually by veterans and civilians who wanted to meet him. One Confederate veteran, who had gained a meeting with the general, boldly asked that if he had ever chanced to meet Lee, he would ask, “What was the reason you failed to gain the victory at Gettysburg?”

In the presence of the shocked ushers and attendants at the hotel, Lee gently replied, “My dear sir, that would be a long story,” and refused to elaborate. It would not be the last time he was prodded into talking about Gettysburg, though he remained elusive except with his closest friends.4

In his last years, with health failing, and bearing up under a heavy sadness at what the war had wrought, Lee made a pilgrimage through the South. He visited the graves of his father and his beloved daughter, Anne; visited President Grant at the White House, and made the trek to Shirley Plantation a final time, to the home of his youth. “It was the loved home of my mother,” he remembered. “And a spot where I have passed many happy days of my early life.” The general was markedly depressed upon his return home.5

Lee spent much of the last years of his life in Lexington, avoiding crowds and in partial seclusion. He was approached by several publishers, from the Deep South to New York, salivating at the chance to publish his memoirs. For the first year after the war, Lee agreeably attempted to gather information for the writing of his autobiography, but soon realized that the task was too exhausting and too difficult to successfully articulate. There was another reason besides the dearth of accurate and detailed information, and the mammoth task. “The destruction, or loss, of all the returns from the army,” he wrote, “embarrasses me very much.” He later confided to students, “I think it wisest not to keep open the sores of war…obliterate the marks of a civil strife, and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.”6

Throughout the last years and days of the vanquished general, the subject of Gettysburg often arose among his closest friends. To Harry Heth, Lee insisted that invading Pennsylvania had been “a sound policy”, even though “mistakes had been made.” To Colonel William Allen, he explained that he “found himself engaged with the Federal army unexpectedly, and had to fight…[and that] victory would have been won if he could have gotten one decided, simultaneous attack on the whole line.” To Jubal Early, he wrote that it would be “difficult” to explain Gettysburg and the war in general,” to get the world to understand the odds against which we fought.” To others, among them Professor White at Washington College, he confided, “If I had had Stonewall Jackson with me, so far as man can see, I should have won the Battle of Gettysburg.”7

But General Jackson had not been at Gettysburg, the simultaneous attack on the whole Union line had not happened, and Lee lost the battle – the most important one of the war. The effects of that loss, and the plight of the South because of it, remained with Lee long after the guns on Pennsylvania soil were silent, embittering him for the rest of his life.

Because he did not want to blame any subordinate, at least publicly, for the loss at Gettysburg, and because he did not wish for continued acrimony among the populace, Lee remained silent and out of the public eye. In explaining the effect of the war, he once confided to his wife that “At present, the public mind is not prepared to receive the truth.” That truth, in part, was the realization and accompanying guilt he felt at the sheer volume of the loss of his men, the total waste of human life that was the cost of war – which he lost.8

In late September, 1870, a college student in Lexington remarked that Lee looked “bent and broken.” The walks from his home to the college were painful and arduous, due to the rapid deterioration of his heart. It appeared that Lee was tired of life. The war and its outcome had played a lion’s share in that fatigue.9

On September 28, 1870, a raging storm struck the town, and Lee complained that he had to go out into the elements to a meeting about a new steeple for the college chapel. The meeting did not go well, as Lee had predicted. No one knew of a manner to acquire the funds needed for the steeple. He ended the impasse by writing a check for the needed money out of his personal account, and went out into the drenching rain to go home. The military commander, who was known for his punctuality, arrived a few minutes late, where tea had been prepared. His wife chided him gently for his tardy arrival. As he sat down and prepared to say grace for the food and drink, he could not speak. His wife told him tea would make him feel better and offered him a cup, but he could neither reply nor take it. He was put to bed, and doctors were summoned. Diagnosed with cerebral congestion, he remained housebound, between life and death, for the next two weeks. Though he spoke a few times more, most of those fourteen days were silent ones. Mildred Lee commented on the stillness of that time. “He would lay straight and motionless,” she remembered, “gasping, with that solemn, unutterable look into the flames we placed on the hearth….& the words seemed frozen in all our mouths. He was speechless, and so were we.”10

On October 8, he refused medicine or nourishment, even when his daughter Agnes urged him. He waved away the spoon and weakly uttered, “It is no use.” When Custis asked him to try and get better, Lee shook his head and pointed upward, saying nothing.11

Until then, perhaps because they refused to see it, Lee’s wife and children thought he would recover. Rooney, Robert Jr. and Mary were away, visiting friends when they received the news that their father was dangerously ill. Trying to reach Lexington, the torrential rains and subsequent flooding of the upper James Valley prevented them from reaching home in time. When Lee died, only his wife, his son, Custis, and his daughters, Mildred and Agnes, were present.

As Lee lapsed into unconsciousness, his “mind wandering back to those dreadful battlefields”, his family anxiously kept the vigil. Once Mary heard him say, “Strike the tent.” On October 10 he regained consciousness, but was unable to speak, only looking forlornly at his care givers. He died on the morning of October 12, at about 9:30 a.m., a welcome release from a life that had become increasingly painful on many levels.12

The floods made ordering difficult for a coffin for Lee’s remains. Two days after the general’s passing, a youth saw a coffin box floating near an island a few miles from town. Hastening to the spot, the coffin was procured, and the general was placed inside. He was buried in the chapel, where he had spent his last normal day of life, in a meeting that he had wanted to miss and still went, duty bound. That chapel now bears his name. It is a reminder of the extent of Lee’s determination to serve, even when he would have preferred to do otherwise – much like a summer’s day in Pennsylvania in 1863.13

Though Lee did not speak in the moments before his death, in his delirium during the last days of his life, he had spoken of the battlefield – a natural occurrence for a lifelong soldier. Was he thinking of Gettysburg, or another battle, or several? It can never be known. However, one aspect of Gettysburg is certain. The Confederate loss: of both the battle and the voluminous number of casualties incurred there made Gettysburg a most difficult memory for Lee, and it bothered him for the rest of his life. Lee may have even courted death to release him from the sorrow of those post-war years, a daily reminder of the unbearable burden he quietly bore. Until the end of his life, the Confederate loss at Gettysburg plagued Robert E. Lee, and he was tired of the inner struggle that, for him, could never be resolved. “The army did all it could,” he wrote to a friend after Gettysburg. “I fear I required of it impossibilities.”14

In a grander, more sweeping way than the Battle of Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee helped his Confederate brethren to accomplish an even greater impossibility than the odds they faced at Gettysburg.

Though Abraham Lincoln is remembered, and rightly, for keeping the nation intact, there was another who deserves a tribute of his own for his role in the survival of the United States. Perhaps it was destiny that Robert E. Lee was the commander of the most famous of the Confederate armies, and the man to whom the Southern populace looked for guidance. His well deserved renown by those who followed him in battle, his gracious manner in utter defeat, his refusal of perpetual guerilla warfare, and his quiet exhortations to those around him to put the past behind them ameliorated the devastated South and brought them back into the Union – just as General Meade had predicted. No other nation, so torn by civil war, ever accomplished such a reconciliation before or since.

Sources: Cleaves, Freeman. Meade of Gettysburg. Norman, OK: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1960 (reprint). The Confederate Veteran, vol. XVI, 1908, p. 645. Freeman, Dr. Douglas S. R.E. Lee. Vols. 3 and 4. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940, 1945. Freeman, Dr. Douglas S. “Morale in the Confederate Army.” Speech given October 26, 1939, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, PA; copy, Gettysburg National Military Park. Pryor, Elizabeth Brown. Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters. New York: Viking Press, 2007. Trudeau, Noah Andre. “Unwritten History: Why Didn’t Lee Write His Memoirs?” Civil War Times, August 2010, pp. 54-59.

End Notes:
1. Freeman, vol. 4, p. 188.
2. Cleaves, p. 338.
3. Freeman, vol. 4, pp. 483, 257.
4. Ibid., p. 250-251.
5. Freeman, “Morale in the Confederate Army.” Copy, Gettysburg National Military Park.
6. Trudeau, 57. Freeman, vol. 4, p. 483.
7. Freeman, vol. 3, pp. 160-161; vol. 4, pp. 475. Trudeau, p. 56.
8. Trudeau, p. 56.
9. Pryor, p. 462.
10. Ibid., p. 463.
11. Freeman, vol. 4, p. 490.
12. Pryor, p. 463-464.
13. The Confederate Veteran, p. 645.
14. Freeman, vol. 3, p. 155.