Robert E. Lee and Slavery

In this letter, Robert E. Lee discusses a central dilemma of his own life, and of American history, slavery. Lee was a gradual emancipationist who criticized slavery as an evil system, but had only vague hopes that it would eventually end. He owned few slaves in his own right, but in 1857, as executor of his father-in-law's large estate, he became responsible for almost 200 slaves who lived and worked on three large Virginia plantations that George W. P. Custis had willed to his Lee grandsons. Lee's emancipation of slaves during the Civil War has been described as a personal rejection of slavery, but he was merely fulfilling his father-in-law's wishes, rather than acting in his own right. Lee had similarly provided for the liberation of the family of slaves that he owned after his death in a will written at the time of the Mexican War.

George Washington Parke Custis died in debt, leaving it to his son-in-law to sort out the financial obligations of his estate, including bequests to his grand-daughters (Lee's four daughters) and, at the same time, stipulating that all the Custis slaves be freed within five years. Before the Civil War, then Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee took an extended leave from the U. S. Army to attempt to settle the Custis estate, but without any great success. Lee saw his duty to emancipate the Custis slaves as a matter of honor-he had addressed it as the most important reason for requesting a leave of absence from the army-but he kept the slaves in bondage for the full period (five years) provided for in the Custis will in order to provide a source of income for the estate.

It was not until the end of December 1862, in the aftermath of the Battle of Fredericksburg, that Lee finally signed deeds of manumission for the slaves that remained on the Custis (now Lee) properties. By then, however, events largely had moved beyond his control; the federal government had seized "Arlington" in Alexandria, Virginia (the property of his son, George Washington Lee, to whom this letter is addressed), and Union forces had raided "the White House" and "Romancoke (the Custis properties of Lee's other sons, Fitzhugh and Robert E. Lee, Jr.). Many of the slaves in Lee's charge had used opportunities created by the war to escape to freedom. As he noted in this letter, "those who have left with the enemy, may not require their manumission."

Robert E. Lee's liberation of the Custis slaves took place only a few days before the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, simultaneously freeing-at least within the reach of Union forces-all the slaves that Lee set free. In no small part thanks to Lee's great skill as a soldier, it would take more than two additional years of bloody combat to put a final end to slavery in the United States. Paradoxically, in the last months of the Civil War, Lee would support an abortive attempt to enlist slaves into the Confederate army in exchange for their freedom.