October
23, 2006
Significant Achievements of Robert
Edward Lee
By:
Dr. Frank J. Collazo
Introduction:
Robert Edward Lee
(1807-1870)
Brilliant Confederate General whose military
genius was probably the greatest single factor in keeping the Confederacy alive
through the four years of the
American Civil War.
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"With all my devotion to the Union and
the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able
to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my
home. I have therefore resigned my
commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State, with the
sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be
called on to draw my sword..." Lee in a letter to his
sister, April 20, 1861 |
Lee was born on January 19, 1807, in
Stratford, Virginia, the son of Lighthorse Harry Lee. He was educated at the U.S. Military Academy and graduated second
in his class in 1829, receiving a commission as second lieutenant in the
engineers. After becoming a first
lieutenant in 1836, and captain in 1838, he distinguished himself in the
battles of the Mexican War and was wounded in the storming of Chapultepec in
1847. For his meritorious service he
received his third brevet promotion in rank.
He became superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy and was later
appointed colonel of the cavalry. He
was in command of the Department of Texas in 1860, and, early the following
year was summoned to Washington, D.C. when the War Between the States seemed
imminent.
President Abraham Lincoln offered him the
field command of the Union forces, but Lee declined. On April 20, three days after Virginia seceded from the Union, he
submitted his resignation from the U.S. Army.
On April 23 he became commander in chief of the military and naval
forces of Virginia. For a year he was
military adviser to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of
America, and was then placed in command of the army in northern Virginia. In February 1865 Lee was made commander in
chief of all Confederate armies; two months later the war was virtually ended
by his surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. His great battles included those of
Antietam, Chancellors Ville, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg. See Civil War, American; see also
separate articles on the battles mentioned.
Only the superior resources and troop
strength of the Union overcame the masterly strategy of Lee. His campaigns are almost universally studied
in military schools as models of strategy and tactics. He had a capacity for anticipating the
actions of his opponents and for comprehending their weaknesses. He made skillful use of interior lines of
communication and kept a convex front toward the enemy, so that his
reinforcements, transfers, and supplies could reach their destination over
short, direct routes. His greatest
contribution to military practice, however, was his use of field fortifications
as aids to maneuvering. He recognized
that a small body of soldiers, protected by entrenchments, can hold an enemy
force of many times their number, while the main body outflanks the enemy or
attacks a smaller force elsewhere. In
his application of this principle Lee was years ahead of his time; the tactic
was not fully understood or generally adopted until the 20th century.
Lee applied for but was never granted the
official postwar amnesty. He accepted
the presidency of Washington College, now Washington and Lee University, in the
fall of 1865; within a few years it had become an outstanding institution. He died there on October 12, 1870. All Americans have long revered Lee as an
ideal by southerners and as a hero. His
antebellum home is now known as Arlington House, the Robert E. Lee Memorial,
and is a national memorial. In 1975
Lee's citizenship was restored posthumously by an act of the U.S. Congress.
Robert E. Lee Boyhood Home
Personal Data: Robert E. Lee (January 19, 1807
– October 12,
1870)
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President
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Quick
Facts:
Robert
Edward Lee
American
soldier, Confederate General in the Civil War
Date
Baptized: January 19, 1807
Death: October 12, 1870
Place
of Birth: Stratford, Virginia
Known
for battling Union forces in the Civil War, utilizing skill in anticipating
enemy tactics even though his army was outnumbered.
Encouraging
reconciliation and peaceful reunification after the Civil War.
Milestones:
1829
- Graduated from United States Military Academy at West Point
1829-1846
- Served as an engineer in the United States Army
1847
- Served as staff officer in the Mexican War and was involved in victories at
Veracruz and Chapultepec Castle.
1852
- Returned to West Point, serving as superintendent until 1855
1859
- Suppressed John Brown's anti-slavery insurrection at Harper's Ferry
1861
- Rejected Lincoln's offer to command Union forces in the Civil War because he
was unwilling to fight against his home state of Virginia.
1862
- Repulsed Union forces near Richmond as commander of Virginia forces.
Defended Fredericksburg.
1863
- Forced to retreat at Gettysburg.
1865
- Named commander in chief of Confederate Armies. Surrendered at Appomattox Court House, leading to the end of the
Civil War.
Lee's
father was the Revolutionary War hero Henry Lee, and his wife Mary Custis Lee
was a descendent of Martha Washington.
1865-1870
- Lee served as president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee
University).
After the
Civil War, Lee's request for amnesty was rejected and his citizenship was not
restored until 1975.
Early Life and Career: Robert E. Lee
was born at Stratford Hall Plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia, the fifth
child of Revolutionary War hero Henry Lee ("Lighthorse Harry") and
Anne Hill (née Carter) Lee. He entered
the United States Military Academy in
1825. When he graduated in 1829,
second in his class of 46, not only had he attained the top academic record,
but he had no demerits. He was
commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers.
Engineering Family: L ee served for just over seventeen months at Fort Pulaski
on Cockspur Island, Georgia.
In 1831, he was transferred to Fort Monroe
at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula and played a major role in
the final construction of Fort Monroe and its opposite, Fort Calhoun. Fort Monroe was completely surrounded by a moat. Fort Calhoun, later renamed Fort Wool,
was built on a man-made island across the navigational channel from Old Point Comfort
in the middle of the mouth of Hampton Roads. When construction was completed in 1834,
Fort Monroe was referred to as the "Gibraltar
of Chesapeake Bay."
While he was stationed at Fort Monroe, he married Mary Anna Randolph Custis (1808–1873), the
great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, at Arlington House, her
parents' home just across from Washington, D.C. They eventually had seven children, three
boys and four girls: George Washington Custis, William H. Fitzhugh, Robert Edward, Mary,
Annie, Agnes, and Mildred. All the
children survived him except for Annie, who died in 1862.
Lee served as an assistant in the chief engineer's
office in Washington from 1834 to 1837, but spent the summer of 1835 helping
to lay out the state line between Ohio
and Michigan. In 1837, he got his first important
command. As a first lieutenant
of engineers, he supervised the engineering work for St. Louis harbor and for the upper Mississippi
and Missouri rivers. His work there earned him a promotion to captain. In 1841, he was transferred to Fort Hamilton
in New York Harbor, where he took charge of building fortifications. There he served as a vestryman
at St. John's Episcopal Church, Fort Hamilton.
Lee as Slave Holder: As a member of
the Virginia
aristocracy, Lee lived in close contact with slavery
before he joined the Army, but he never held more than about a half-dozen
slaves under his own name. When Lee's father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, died in
October 1857, Lee (as executor of the will) came into control over some 63
slaves on the Arlington plantation. Although the will provided for the slaves
to be emancipated "in such a manner as to my executors may seem most
expedient and proper", providing a maximum of five years for the legal
and logistical details of manumission, Lee found himself in need of funds to
pay his father-in-law's debts and repair the properties he had inherited. He
decided to make money during the five years that the will had allowed him
control of the slaves by working them on the plantation and hiring them out to
neighboring plantations and to eastern Virginia.
Lee, with no experience as a large-scale slave driver,
tried to hire an overseer to handle the plantation in his absence, writing to
his cousin: "I wish to get an energetic honest farmer, who while he will
be considerate and kind to the negroes, will be firm & make them do their
duty." But Lee failed to find a
man for the job and had to take a two-year leave of absence from the army in
order to drive the slaves himself. He
found the experience frustrating and difficult; the slaves were unhappy and demanded
their freedom. Many of them had been
given to understand that they were to be made free as soon as Custis died.
In May 1858, Lee wrote to his son Rooney that "I
have had some trouble with some of the people. Reuben, Parks and Edward, in the beginning of the previous week,
rebelled against my authority and refused to obey my orders. They said they were as free as I was, etc.,
etc. I succeeded in capturing them and
lodging them in jail. They resisted
till overpowered and called upon the other people to rescue them." Less than two months after they were sent
to the Alexandria jail, Lee decided to remove these
three men and three female house slaves from Arlington, and send them under
lock and key to the slave-trader William Overton Winston in Richmond who was instructed to keep them in
jail until he could find "good and responsible" slaveholders to work
them until the end of the five year period.
In 1859, three of the Arlington slaves—Wesley Norris,
his sister Mary, and a cousin of theirs—fled for the North but were captured a
few miles from the Pennsylvania border and forced to return to Arlington. On June 24,
1859, the New York Daily
Tribune published two anonymous letters (dated June 19, 1859
and June 21, 1859) each of which claimed to have heard that Lee had the
Norrises whipped and went so far as to claim that Lee himself had whipped the
woman when the officer refused to. Lee
wrote to his son Custis that "The N. Y. Tribune has attacked me for my
treatment of your grandfather's slaves, but I shall not reply. He has left me an unpleasant
legacy."
Biographers of Lee have differed over the credibility of
the Tribune letters. Douglas S. Freeman, in his 1934 biography of
Lee, described the letters to the Tribune as "Lee's first
experience with the extravagance of irresponsible antislavery agitators"
and asserted that "There is no evidence, direct or indirect, that Lee
ever had them or any other Negroes flogged.
The usage at Arlington and elsewhere in Virginia among people of Lee's
station forbade such a thing."
Michael Fellman, in The Making of Robert E. Lee (2000), found
the claims that Lee had personally whipped Mary Norris "extremely
unlikely," but not at all unlikely that Lee had had the slaves whipped:
"Corporal punishment (for which Lee substituted the euphemism 'firmness')
was an intrinsic and necessary part of slave discipline. Although it was supposed to be applied only
in a calm and rational manner, overtly physical domination of slaves,
unchecked by law, was always brutal and potentially savage."
Wesley Norris himself discussed the incident after the
war in an 1866 interview printed in the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Norris stated that after they had been
captured, and forced to return to Arlington, Lee told them that "he would
teach us a lesson we would not soon forget." According to Norris, Lee then had the three of them tied to
posts and whipped by the county constable, with fifty lashes for the men and
twenty for Mary Norris (he made no claim that Lee had personally whipped Mary
Norris). Norris claimed that Lee then
had the overseer rub their lacerated backs with brine.
After their capture, Lee sent the Norrises to work on
the railroad in Richmond, Virginia, and Alabama. Wesley Norris gained his freedom in January
1863 by slipping through the Confederate lines near Richmond to
Union-controlled territory. Lee freed
all the other Custis slaves after the end of the five year period in the
winter of 1862, filing the deed of manumission on December 29,
1862.
Mexican War, West Point, and Texas
Robert
Edward Lee as a U.S. Army Colonel before the Civil War
Lee distinguished himself in the Mexican War (1846–1848). He was one of Winfield Scott's
chief aides in the march from Veracruz
to Mexico City. He was instrumental in several American
victories through his personal reconnaissance as a staff officer; he found
routes of attack that the Mexicans had not defended because they thought the terrain
was impassable.
He was promoted to major after the Battle of Cerro Gordo on 18 April
1847. He also fought at Contreras, Churubusco, and Chapultepec, and was wounded at the
latter. By the end of the war, he had
been promoted to lieutenant colonel. After the Mexican War, he spent three years at Fort Carroll
in Baltimore harbor, after which he became the
superintendent of West Point in 1852. During his three years at West Point, he
improved the buildings, the courses, and spent a lot of time with the
cadets. Lee's oldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, attended
West Point during his tenure. Custis Lee graduated in 1854, first in his
class.
In 1855, Lee became Lieutenant Colonel of the 2nd U.S.
Cavalry (under the command of Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston) and was sent to the Texas frontier. There he helped protect settlers from
attacks by the Apache and the Comanche. These were
not happy years for Lee, as he did not like to be away from his family for
long periods of time, especially as his wife was becoming increasingly ill.
Lee came home to see her as often as he could.
Harper's Ferry and John Brown, 1859: When John Brown seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in October 1859,
Lee was given command of detachments of Maryland
and Virginia
militia, soldiers , and United States Marines, to suppress the
uprising and arrest its leaders. By
the time Lee arrived later that night, the militia on the site had surrounded
Brown and his hostages. When on October 18 Brown refused the demand for
surrender, Lee attacked and in three minutes of fighting Brown himself was
captured.
When Texas
seceded from the Union in February 1861, General David E. Twiggs
surrendered all the American forces (about 4000 men, including Lee) to the
Texans. Twiggs immediately resigned from the U. S. Army and was made a
Confederate general. Lee went back to Washington, where he was offered a
senior command of the U.S. Army.
The Start of the Civil War: Lee privately ridiculed the
Confederacy in letters in early 1861, denouncing secession as
"revolution" and a betrayal of the efforts of the Founders. The
commanding general of the Union army, Winfield Scott,
told Lincoln he wanted Lee for a top command.
Lee said he was willing as long as Virginia remained in the Union. Lee
was asked by one of his lieutenants
if he intended to fight for the Confederacy or the Union, to which he replied,
"I shall never bear arms against the Union, but it may be necessary for
me to carry a musket in the defense of my native state, Virginia, in which
case I shall not prove recreant to my duty."
After Ft. Sumter fell on April 14 it was obvious that
Virginia would quickly secede and so Lee turned down the offer on April 18,
resigned from the U.S. Army on April 20, and took up command of the Virginia
state forces on April 23. At the
outbreak of war, he was first appointed to command all of Virginia's forces
and then as one of the first five full generals of Confederate forces. Lee, however, refused to wear the insignia
of a Confederate General stating that, in honor to his rank of Colonel in the
United States Army, he would only display the three stars of a Confederate
Colonel until the Civil War had been won and Lee could be promoted, in
peacetime, to a General in the Confederate Army.
After commanding Confederate forces in western Virginia,
and then the coastal defenses along the Carolina seaboard, he became military
adviser to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, whom he knew from West
Point.
Commander, Army of Northern Virginia: In the spring of
1862, during the Peninsula Campaign, the Union Army of the Potomac under General George B. McClellan advanced upon Richmond
from Fort Monroe,
eventually reaching the eastern edges of the Confederate capital along the Chickahominy River. Following the wounding of General Joseph E. Johnston at the Battle of Seven Pines, on June 1,
1862, Lee assumed
command of the Army of Northern Virginia, his first
opportunity to lead an army in the field. Newspaper editorials of the day
objected to his appointment due to concerns that Lee would not be aggressive and
would wait for the Union army to come to him.
He oversaw substantial strengthening of Richmond's
defenses during the first three weeks of June and then launched a series of
attacks, the Seven Days Battles, against McClellan's
forces. Lee's attacks resulted in
heavy Confederate casualties, and they were marred by clumsy tactical
performances by his subordinates, but his aggressive actions unnerved
McClellan, who retreated to a point on the James River where Union naval forces were in
control. These successes led to a
rapid turn-around of public opinion and the newspaper editorials quickly
changed their tune on Lee's aggressiveness.
After McClellan's retreat, Lee defeated another Union
army at the Second Battle of Bull Run. He then invaded Maryland, hoping to
replenish his supplies and possibly influence the Northern elections that fall
in favor of ending the war.
McClellan's men recovered a lost order that revealed Lee's plans. McClellan always exaggerated Lee's forces,
but now he knew the Confederate army was divided and could be destroyed by an
all-out attack at Antietam.
Yet McClellan was too slow in moving, not realizing Lee had been
informed by a spy that McClellan had the plans. Lee urgently recalled Jackson and in the bloodiest day of the
war, Lee withstood the Union assaults.
He withdrew his battered army back to Virginia.
McClellan's
Failure to Destroy Lee's Army: Disappointed by
McClellan's failure to destroy Lee's army, Lincoln named Ambrose Burnside
as commander of the Army of the Potomac.
Burnside ordered an attack across the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg. Delays in getting bridges
built across the river allowed Lee's army ample time to organize strong
defenses, and the attack on December 12, 1862,
was a disaster for the Union. Lincoln then named Joseph Hooker
commander of the Army of the Potomac.
Hooker's advance to attack Lee in May, 1863, near Chancellorsville, Virginia, was defeated
by Lee and Stonewall Jackson's daring plan to divide the
army and attack Hooker's flank. It was
an enormous victory over a larger force, but it came at a great cost, as
Jackson, Lee's best subordinate, was fatally wounded by his own troops.
Battle of Gettysburg: The battle fought July 1 through July 3,
1863 is considered by most military historians to be the turning point in the
American Civil War. The Battle of
Gettysburg was a decisive engagement in that it arrested the Confederates'
second and last major invasion of the North, destroyed their offensive
strategy, and forced them to fight a defensive war in which the inadequacies
of their manufacturing capacity and transportation facilities doomed them to
defeat.
The
Army of the Potomac, under the Union general George Gordon Meade, numbered
about 85,000; the Confederate army, under General Robert E. Lee, numbered
about 75,000. After the Battle of
Chancellors Ville on May 2 to 4, an important victory for the Confederates,
Lee divided his army into three corps, commanded by three lieutenant generals:
James Long street, Richard Stoddert Ewell, and Ambrose Powell Hill. Lee then formulated a plan for invading
Pennsylvania, hoping to avert another federal offensive in Virginia and
planning to fight if he could get the federal army into a vulnerable position.
He also hoped that the invasion might increase Northern war-weariness and lead
the North to recognize the independence of the Confederate States of
America. In pursuit of this plan, Lee
crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains, proceeded up the Shenandoah Valley, and,
crossing Maryland, entered Pennsylvania.
Upon learning federal troops were north of the Potomac, Lee decided to
concentrate his whole army at Gettysburg.
On
June 30, confederate troops from General Hill's corps, on their way to
Gettysburg, noted federal troops that Meade had moved down to intercept the
Confederate army. The battle began on
July 1 outside of Gettysburg with an encounter between Hill's advance brigades
and the federal cavalry division commanded by Major General John Buford,
supported by infantry under Major General John Fulton Reynolds. Hill encountered stubborn resistance, and
the fighting was inconclusive until Ewell arrived from the north in the
afternoon. The Confederates pushed
against General Oliver Howard's corps and forced the federal troops to retire
from their forward positions to Culp's Hill and Cemetery Ridge, southeast of
Gettysburg. The fighting had been
heavy on both sides, but the Union troops suffered more losses. The
Confederates took prisoner more than 4000 men, and Federal General John
Reynolds was killed in battle.
The
federals did manage to capture Confederate General Archer, the first
Confederate officer to be taken prisoner after Lee assumed command of the
Confederate Army. The corps led by
Ewell did not move in to attack the Union troops but waited for General Long
street to bring in his corps to reinforce the outnumbered Confederate troops.
On
the following day, July 2, Meade formed his forces in the shape of a
horseshoe, extending westward from Culp's Hill and southward along Cemetery
Ridge to the hills of Little Round Top and Round Top. The Confederates, on the other hand, were
deployed in a long, thin, concave line, with Long street and Ewell on the
flanks and Hill in the center.
Lee,
against the advice of Long Street and despite the fact that he had no cavalry,
resolved to attack the federal positions.
Long Street was unable to advance until late afternoon, thus allowing
the federal troops to make preparations for the expected assault. General
Abner Doubleday of the Federal Army strengthened his hold on Cemetery Hill.
The federals held Cemetery Ridge and Little Round Top, but Long street moved
Confederate troops along Peach Orchard, driving the federals from their
positions there. Although Ewell won part of Culp's Hill, he was unable to
break the federal line there or on the eastern part of Cemetery Ridge.
On
the night of July 2, Meade held a council of war in which the decision was
made not to retreat. On the third day
of battle, the federals were secure in their positions and the Confederates
had lost their offensive stance.
General Lee decided to mount an attack despite opposition from other
Confederate generals. The offensive
did not begin until after noon. Groups
from three Confederate divisions, including the division led by Major General
George E. Pickett, totaling fewer than 15,000 men, took part in a memorable
charge on Cemetery Ridge against a withering barrage of federal artillery and
musket fire. The attack is known as
Pickett's Charge. Although the
Confederate troops breached Meade's first line of defense, the strain on the
Confederates proved too great, and they fell back, having lost over
three-fourths of their force.
With
the repulse of Pickett's Charge, the Battle of Gettysburg was virtually
over. On the night of July 4, Lee
began his retreat to Virginia, expecting a counterattack from the federal
army. Meade, however, did not attack,
due perhaps to heavy rains, which hampered pursuit of the retreating
Confederates. During the three days of
battle, the Union Army had about 23,000 casualties, and the Confederates had
at least 25,000.
Seven Day
Battles and other Combat Operations: Robert Edward Lee (January 19,
1807 – October 12,
1870) was a career U.S. Army
officer and the most successful general of the Confederate forces during the American Civil War. Lee at first opposed the Confederacy and nearly accepted a major
Union command, but when his home state of Virginia seceded he chose to join
with his family and neighbors and fight for Virginia. His first major command
came in June 1862 when he took over the Confederacy's premier combat force,
the Army of Northern Virginia, with
responsibility for defending Richmond.
Lee's greatest victories were in the Seven Days Battles and at Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, but he suffered
reverses in his two invasions of the North.
Narrowly escaping defeat at the Antietam in 1862, Lee was forced to return to
Virginia. At the Gettysburg in Pennsylvania in 1863, he was
decisively defeated and nearly captured.
During the war of attrition against Ulysses S. Grant
in the Overland Campaign of 1864 and the Siege of Petersburg in 1864-65, Lee inflicted
massive casualties on a foe superior in terms of men and matériel but was
unable to replace his losses and his army crumbled away.
Lee's surrender at Appomattox in April 1865 marks the end of
the war. His victories against
numerically superior forces won him enduring fame as an astute and audacious
battlefield tactician, but his strategic decisions--such as invading the North
and neglecting the Mississippi Valley, have generally been criticized by military
historians.
In 1865, as manpower reserves drained away, Lee promoted
a plan to arm slaves to fight for the Confederacy (and free them); the first
black Confederate combat units were in training as the war ended, though one
unit is known to have fought during the retreat from Richmond in April
1865. He blocked dissenters from
starting a guerrilla campaign to continue the war after his surrender at
Appomattox.
After the war, as a college president, Lee supported President Andrew Johnson's
program of Reconstruction and inter-sectional friendship, while opposing
the Radical Republican proposals to give newly
freed slaves the vote and take the vote away from ex-Confederates. He urged reconciliation between the North
and South, and the reintegration of former Confederates into the nation's
political life. Lee became the great
Southern hero of the war, and his popularity grew in the North as well after
1880. He remains an iconic figure of
American history to this day.
Ulysses S. Grant and the Union Offensive: In 1864, the new
Union general-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant sought to destroy Lee's army
by attrition, pinning Lee against his capital of Richmond. Lee stopped each attack, but Grant had
superior reinforcements and kept pushing each time a bit farther to the
southeast. These battles in the Overland Campaign
included the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House,
and Cold Harbor.
Grant eventually fooled Lee by stealthily moving his army across the James River.
After stopping a Union attempt to capture Petersburg, Virginia, a vital railroad link
supplying Richmond, Lee's men built elaborate trenches and were besieged in
Petersburg. He attempted to break the
stalemate by sending Jubal A. Early on a raid through the Shenandoah Valley
to Washington, D.C., but Early was defeated by
the superior forces of Philip Sheridan.
The Siege of Petersburg lasted from June 1864
until April 1865, with Lee's heavily outnumbered army shrinking daily because
of desertions by disheartened Confederates.
Commander-in-Chief of the Confederate
Forces
Lee
with son Custis (left) and Walter H. Taylor
(right).
On January 31, 1865,
Lee was promoted to general-in-chief of Confederate forces.
As the South ran out of manpower the issue of arming the
slaves became paramount. By late 1864
the Army so dominated the Confederacy that civilian leaders were unable to
block the military's proposal, strongly endorsed by Lee, to arm and train
slaves in Confederate uniform for combat.
Everyone understood that those slave soldiers and their families would
be emancipated. Lee explained,
"We should employ them without delay....[along with] gradual and general
emancipation."
The first units were in training as the war ended. As the Confederate army was decimated by
casualties, disease and desertion, the Union attack on Petersburg succeeded on April 2,
1865. Lee abandoned Richmond and retreated
west. His forces were surrounded, and
he surrendered them to Grant on April 9, 1865,
at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Other Confederate armies followed suit and
the war ended.
Lee resisted calls by some officers to reject surrender
and allow small units to melt away into the mountains, setting up a lengthy
guerrilla war. He insisted the war was
over and energetically campaigned for inter-sectional reconciliation. "So far from engaging in a war to
perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the
interests of the South."