Publisher's Synopsis
General Robert E Lee (1807-70) was a US Army and later Confederate soldier, best known as a commander of the Confederate States Army. He commanded the Army of Northern Virginia in the American Civil War from 1862 until its surrender in 1865. Lee was a top graduate of the US Military Academy and an exceptional officer and military engineer in the US Army for 32 years. During this time he served throughout the US, distinguishing himself in the Mexican-American War, and serving as Superintendent of the US Military Academy. In 1831 he married Mary Anna Custis Lee, the adopted great granddaughter of George Washington, with whom he had 7 children - 3 sons and 4 daughters. When Virginia declared secession from the Union in 1861, Lee chose to follow his home state despite his desire for the country to remain intact and an offer of a senior Union command. During the first year of the war he served as a senior military adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis and when he took command of the Army of Northern Virginia in 1862 he emerged as an able tactician and battlefield commander, winning most of his battles, nearly all against far larger Union armies. After Lee surrendered the remnant of his army to Ulysses S Grant at Appomattox Court House in April 1865, the remaining Confederate forces capitulated. Lee then became president of Washington College (later Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, VA, and in that position supported national reconciliation. Robert E Lee, Jr. (1843-1914), the sixth of the the Lees' children, had not envisioned a military career like his father and brothers, but after the outbreak of the Civil War he enlisted in the Rockbridge Artillery as a private and was later promoted to captain, serving as aide to his older brother Custis who was himself a major general and aide-de-camp to Jefferson Davis. After the war he became a planter on a property he had inherited and in 1904 published this memoir which gives a first-hand account of day-to-day life at Arlington House during Lee Jr.'s youth, and is a valuable source of information on his father's entire life.
