On Hallowed Ground Read Free Page B

servant, soldier, or citizen, that was
ever employed by me can with truth charge me with bad treatment.” 18 Yet the particulars in the slave’s account were confirmed by multiple witnesses and by the public record. Who told the truth?
It is impossible to know, but this much is documented: Lee sent agents to capture Arlington’s runaway slaves on at least three
occasions, he had them thrown in jail to await transport back to Arlington, and he had troublesome slaves banished to other
plantations, where they would be out of his sight and farther from the temptations of freedom. 19 Such treatment, while not as salacious as the whipping scene, is no less repugnant, and it provides insight into Lee’s dubious
moral inheritance at Arlington.
    On an intellectual level, Lee deplored the institution of slavery, which he believed to be “a moral & political evil in any
Country.” 20 At the same time, he supported the extension of slavery in the territories, and, like many of his contemporaries, he viewed
blacks as inferior to whites. He believed that African Americans were ill prepared for citizenship. On a personal level, he
felt duty-bound to protect the Custis family property—slaves included—until his father-in-law’s estate could be settled and
properly divided. Given the messy nature of Custis’s business affairs and the conflicting requirements of his will, this would
take years to unscramble. Custis had, for instance, flamboyantly left his four Lee granddaughters legacies of ten thousand
dollars each, but with no funds to pay for them. His estate was ten thousand dollars in debt when Lee stepped in as executor.
In one part of the will, Custis suggested that money for the legacies could come from selling land; a few paragraphs later,
that the legacies be paid from operations on the Romancock and White House estates. To complicate matters, Custis directed
that his slaves should be freed within five years of his death, after the debts of his estate had been cleared. Lee made a
choice. Instead of selling land, he intended to keep the slaves in bondage until they could work off their late master’s debt
and pay the bequests for the Custis granddaughters.
    “He has left me an unpleasant legacy,” Lee told his eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, in 1859. 21 The moral burden was onerous, as were the complications of farm and family life. After a few years on leave at Arlington,
Lee longed for the simplicity of soldiering. “I am no farmer myself, & do not expect to be always here,” he wrote a cousin. 22 He told another relative that he felt “very much in the way of everybody” at Arlington. 23 Having restored the old place to a respectable degree, whittled down Custis’s debts, planned for his daughters’ legacies,
and placed Romancock and White House on a functioning basis, Lee declared provisional victory and decamped from Arlington
in February 1860 to rejoin his cavalry unit in Texas. The slaves were not yet liberated, but it appeared to Lee that they
soon would be.
    Within a year, however, events pulled Lee back to Washington, where the Civil War was about to break upon the nation. Texas had seceded in February 1861, declaring itself an independent
republic and ejecting Union forces—including Lee’s cavalry regiment. Six other states from the Deep South had already joined
the Confederate States of America. With his native Virginia still on the fence, Lee made a slow and sorrowful journey across
the country, wrestling with the hard choices he would face at home.
    “If Virginia stands by the old Union,” he told a friend as he prepared to leave Texas, “so will I. But if she secedes . .
. then I will still follow my native state with my sword, and if need be with my life.” 24 He expressed similar sentiments in a letter to his son Rooney: “Things look very alarming from this point of view,” he wrote
from Texas. “I prize the Union very highly & know of no personal