Crucible of the Civil War: Virginia from Secession to Commemoration

“I Owe Virginia Little, My Country Much”: Robert E. Lee, the United States Regular Army, and Unconditional Unionism

“I Owe Virginia Little, My Country Much” Robert E. Lee, the United States Regular Army, and Unconditional Unionism Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh Douglas Southall Freeman, perhaps Robert E. Lee’s greatest biographer , has called Lee’s decision to wage war against the Federal flag he had so faithfully served before the Civil War the “Answer He Was Born to Make.” Freeman’s biography remains a monumental work of scholarship, and popular perceptions of Lee’s secession rarely deviate from Freeman’s unquestioning acceptance of Lee’s decision. For example, on January 19, 1907, Charles Francis Adams, son of the wartime American minister to England and himself a former officer in the Army of the Potomac, delivered to Washington and Lee University an address marking the centennial of Lee’s birth that absolved Lee of the charge of treason, for “I do not see how I, placed as he was placed, could have done otherwise.” Lee’s presumably guiltless course also excuses by extension all of the serving and retired U.S. Army officers who drew their swords for the Confederate banner. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the U.S. government, Lee’s resignation from its service and immediate commission in the army of a hostile government can only be described as treasonous. Although Freeman and Adams cited Lee’s Virginia loyalties as reason enough for his conduct, many other Virginians with regular army backgrounds stayed loyal to the government that they had all at one point or another sworn to serve. These Unionist officers raise important questions about whether or not we can cite regional origin to explain and, at times, to justify an 36 K wayne wei-siang hsieh individual’s conduct during the secession crisis. After all, many of these men experienced the same personal and regional pressures to secede that Lee experienced, but they chose familial estrangement and regional ostracism for the sake of the uniform that Robert E. Lee repudiated. Lee, after all, had held a colonel’s commission in the U.S. Army at the time of Virginia’s secession and had received an excellent education at West Point at government expense. Indeed, Lee owed much of his welldeserved prominence to a military career supported by the U.S. government . Perhaps constitutional ideas about state’s rights or loyalties due to the Old Dominion justify Lee’s course in the final analysis, but surely the question requires more serious consideration than it has received. Forty-four out of 126, or a little over a third, of living regular army “Virginians ”—defined as West Point graduates who were born in Virginia or who claimed the state as either their place of appointment or residence on admission to the academy—chose to actively affirm their loyalty to Union over state in the midst of the Civil War. To use another measure of Unionist sentiment, twelve of eighteen (67 percent) Union generals born in the Old Dominion (including what later became West Virginia) were former regular army men, and out of those twelve, ten had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. A far higher percentage of Union generals from Virginia had regular army backgrounds than did Union generals as a whole (44 percent of all Union generals had held commissions as regular army officers). Four of the remaining six Union generals from Virginia without regular army experience had served as volunteers during the Mexican War, in which regulars had served as the core cadres of the American armies. These figures impress all the more in light of the widespread willingness of other former officials of the Federal government to support secession. The antebellum regular army exerted a powerful nationalizing influence on its members that was duplicated in no civilian institution. The U.S. Military Academy can serve as a rough proxy for the regular army’s officer corps due to both its institutional prominence in the U.S. Army and the substantial biographical data available on West Pointers. West Point had established a strong institutional dominance within the regular army’s officer corps beginning in the 1820s, and academy graduates held about 75 percent of regular army commissions in 1860. Furthermore , Academy-trained officers also tended to be more strongly Unionist: of Southern-born West Pointers in the service at the time of secession, 162 stayed with the Union and 168 joined the Confederacy, while of serving [3.143.17.127] Project MUSE...