1858 (16 page)

In the autumn of 1858, in the middle of his fourteen-month leave from the military, Lee gave himself a deadline to decide what kind of life he wanted—to return to the army or remain a planter. Colonel Lee had often toyed with the idea of resigning from the army. He had gone to West Point and forsaken the life of a Southern gentlemen to devote his days to the military, but from time to time he tired of it, complaining that there had been few rewards and little satisfaction. He had only been in one real military action, the Mexican War, where he had distinguished himself. Prior to that conflict, and for years after it, he had lived the mundane life of an underpaid and unappreciated officer. He was fifty-one years old and had never been promoted to general, a position he felt he deserved. It rankled him. Others with lesser skills had become generals, yet he had not. Complaining of “a system of favoritism,” he often daydreamed about resigning.

While he was home at Arlington House in 1858, Lee would again be denied that promotion. He felt that Congress had never allocated the funds required for him to do his job as a soldier, whether as an engineer, superintendent at West Point, or cavalry leader and post administrator. The army was rife with petty politics that appalled him. Lee feared living out his army life as a mere colonel while others his age in the private sector were spending their golden years in the ease and comfort of their homes. In fact, most of the men he had served with in Mexico, such as U. S. Grant and Jefferson Davis, had left the service.
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He missed Virginia, too, where he could enjoy a wonderful life in retirement. Lee was not just a man who was born in Virginia, but a man who loved his home state and, as the offspring of a Revolutionary War hero, was one of its favorite sons. His wife was the great-granddaughter of George Washington. And of course he never really enjoyed leaving his beloved wife and children behind and riding off to some desolate army base far away, as he had been forced to do quite often. Now, too, with rheumatism and advanced and crippling arthritis, plus the responsibility of running Arlington following the death of her father, his wife could no longer accompany him to far-off posts.

The idea of quitting the army had intrigued him for nearly twenty years. As early as 1838, when he was just thirty-one years old, Lee considered leaving the military. He wrote a friend, “I wish all were done and I was back again in Virginia. I volunteered my services last year to get rid of the office in Washington and the [army] at last agreed to my going. I was cognizant of so much inequity in more ways than one, that I feared for my morality, at no time strong, and had been trying for two years to quit. I spent last winter partly on duty and partly not. Had a pleasant time with some friends in Virginia and now here working for my country.”
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That conflict about the service remained with him all of his adult life and from time to time, when friends and relatives asked whether Lee thought the military was a good career for their sons, he told them no.

Lee was very conflicted about his future. A few months later, he wrote a friend that the camaraderie he had always enjoyed in the army was a major reason that he wanted to stay. He would have his family back in Virginia, but he would be leaving his longtime confidants in the service.

His love of the army was so great that at one point in 1858 he wrote that he felt guilty being away from it, even though he was with his wife and family. “I feel that I ought to be with my regiment and this feeling deprives me of half the pleasure I derive from being here.”
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Lee’s deadline of autumn 1858 to make up his mind on whether to resign from the army and end his long military career came and went. He could not make up his mind because there was still much physical work to be done to refurbish Custis’s homes and lands and too much legal work in the courts over the will. He had not resolved the old man’s debts, either. Lee gave himself another deadline to make a decision: December 1, 1858, the end of his army furlough. He was frustrated, writing of the interminable legal delays, “I have never proceeded so slowly before in anything I have undertaken.”
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That December deadline came and went too because Robert E. Lee had still not turned the Custis farms into profit-making enterprises, no matter how hard he tried. He wrote his son around that time that, “It does not aggrieve me to tell you that it will take a stronger man than I am to supply funds for…Arlington [and] the White House if this state of things is to continue. When will it end?”
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By then, Colonel Lee realized too that running a plantation was very hard work, full of frustration, and not at all the charming, casual life of moonlight, magnolias, and late-afternoon mint juleps served on the veranda depicted in the romantic novels about the Old South that enjoyed popularity at the time.

Lee’s estate transactions, due to their complexity, then became hopelessly bogged down in the courts. Probate judges told Lee that he had to turn to the Circuit Court of Virginia to make a determination about the terms of the will. The reason, as Lee feared, was that Custis had directly linked the distribution of $10,000 to the sale of the lands and the emancipation of his slaves within five years, but
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when that had been accomplished. Could the court free the slaves while land sales were still pending? Would the land sales revenue cover the $10,000 debt? Would the debts have to be paid before the slaves could be freed? The issue was as complicated for the court as it had been for Custis. At the end of November, when his old boss Jefferson Davis was making his secessionist speeches in Mississippi and laying claim to being the leading secessionist in the nation, a disheartened Lee was told that the court could not hear his case until May of 1859.

He put off his decision about returning to the service once again, writing General Winfield Scott, head of the army, that “I have been occupied ever since my arrival from Texas in settling the estate of the late G.W.P. Custis and have earnestly endeavored so to arrange it, so as to enable me to return to my regiment this fall. I find it, however, impossible to do so and without going into a narration of matters still unfinished and requiring my personal attention, I will only state that the terms of Mr. Custis’s will are found to be so indefinite and admit of so many different versions, that I have been compelled to apply to the Circuit Court.”

And then, at the end of the letter, after building such a strong case to remain a planter at Arlington House until the Circuit Court heard his case, Lee told General Scott that he would, however, if the army deemed his presence “necessary,” rejoin his regiment.

General Scott responded that his presence was not important since the country was not at war and there were no prospects for a war. Scott told Lee to remain home on an extended leave of absence until he had straightened out all of his family’s estate businesses. Lee did not appeal that decision and by the end of 1858 still wrestled with the great question of his life: the army or the plantation?
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Chapter Five

President James Buchanan was angry with anyone who opposed the proslavery Lecompton Constitution for Kansas, which he strongly endorsed, but none of its opponents drew his wrath as much as Stephen Douglas, the short, portly, brilliant Democratic senator from Illinois. It was Douglas, after all, who introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act that gave residents of the Kansas Territory the right to authorize slavery if they so desired. It was Douglas who had heralded “popular sovereignty,” or the people’s right to decide issues, for years. Now Douglas, a former state court judge, opposed the Lecompton Constitution, which authorized slavery in Kansas, in a rebuff of Kansans, his own party, and the president. Douglas’s opposition, the president felt, was not based on his convictions about the people’s right to choose, but on his hatred of Buchanan. It was yet another chapter in their feud, now a year old, that had threatened to split the Democratic Party in two.

The enmity between Douglas and Buchanan began just before Buchanan was inaugurated as president in March 1857, but the roots of it went back to the 1856 Democratic Convention in Cincinnati that nominated Buchanan for president. Buchanan, incumbent president Franklin Pierce, and Douglas were the three front-runners for the nomination, but none had a majority of votes during the first fourteen ballots. Douglas then conspired with Pierce to have him drop out of the race and throw his votes to Douglas. Even with Pierce’s delegates, though, and strong support from the South, Douglas did not have enough strength to capture the party’s nomination. Buchanan, sixty-five, a party veteran and moderate, was seen by most as the candidate who could mollify both North and South over slavery and get the country through four more years. Douglas graciously dropped out of the race and urged all to support Buchanan. He told those who pleaded with him to remain in the balloting that his public policy goals of national unity and political goals of a united party were far more important than his career. Besides, Stephen Douglas was just forty-three years old. He had time to satisfy his enormous ambitions; many at the convention assured him that the presidential nomination would be handed to him in 1860.

Douglas naturally assumed that Buchanan would be grateful that he stepped aside, permitting the Pennsylvanian to win the nomination and move on to defeat John C. Fremont in the general election, with Douglas campaigning hard for him (Douglas had contributed $42,000 of his own money to the Buchanan campaign).

The president-elect was not.

Buchanan arrived in Washington one month prior to his inauguration, and in a succession of busy days and nights met with outgoing President Pierce at the White House and then, separately, with leaders of the Democratic Party, including Douglas. The Little Giant felt that he was entitled to personally name several members of the cabinet and contribute to the shaping of national policy. He assumed that Buchanan would listen carefully to everything he had to say. He owed his nomination to Douglas. The Illinois senator was a powerful force in politics, the darling of the South since he introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the champion of the emerging northwestern states, and a favorite with the party in general. He was also the best debater and public speaker in the country, along with Republican William Seward. Washington was also a very socially conscious town and Douglas’s recent marriage to a much younger and extremely attractive woman, Adele Cutts, who possessed a penchant for parties, would ensure his place as a social lion in the political community.
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Buchanan did not feel he owed Douglas anything, was annoyed by his blustering about cabinet choices and let him know that he would not play any role in the administration. Buchanan was the president, after all, and did not need the impertinent Douglas to succeed. Douglas was furious that he had been frozen out. Another senator told a Buchanan friend that Douglas would “run amok” against the president and his policies in the Senate.
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Douglas knew that most farmers in Kansas were free-state men, opposed to slavery, and that most of the proslavery faction in Kansas were recent arrivals from Missouri. Under his popular sovereignty theory then, the free-state men should be able to abolish slavery in the territory when the day came for its residents to become a state, and that day had now arrived. His two-year-old Kansas-Nebraska bill was also unpopular back home in Illinois, where he was up for reelection in eleven months. Fifty-five of the state’s fifty-six newspapers were against the proslavery Lecompton Constitution. He had gained enormous popularity with Southerners when he introduced the Kansas-Nebraska bill, opening the door to slavery in the territories if residents desired to live in slave states, even though Northerners, and his neighbors in Illinois, were furious with him over his stand. Illinois crowds continually booed him and often shouted him down when he tried to discuss slavery, forcing him to leave in disgrace. Dozens of ministers signed petitions denouncing him. Some had accused the ambitious Douglas of supporting slavery in Kansas for personal political profit, that the people of Kansas “were mere hazards of [his] Presidential game.” Now, could he change his mind to please his constituents in Illinois but anger the same people that so heartily approved his original stand, the Southerners?
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They were already calling the free-state Kansans the “Topeka Traitors” and would lump Douglas with them. Could one important Democrat turn his back on the most important Democrat, President Buchanan?