Robert E. Lee Birthday. Confederate General

Jan. 19 is the birthday of Robert E. Lee, a man we should all try to emulate. He was so nearly a perfect human being that it is hard for our modern minds to come to grips with him.
We have grown cynical. We've seen too often men who gain fame but lack virtue. We've seen too many flawed heroes marketed like soap. In contrast, Lee was the genuine article, the last of the Christian knights.

When secession came, Lee was offered the command of the Union Army. What a temptation to a professional military man. Lee was opposed to secession, though he recognized the right of states to withdraw from the union. He agonized over the decision. He simply could not bring himself to lead an invading army to fight his family and friends in Virginia. He did the honorable thing and resigned his commission.


He went through West Point without a single demerit, was a hero of the Mexican War, and married and remained faithful to his wife even though she became an invalid at a young age.


His fame earned during the tragic war was worldwide. Always at a disadvantage in numbers and equipment, he conducted brilliant campaigns. The New England historian Charles Francis Adams said: "My contention is that Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia never sustained defeat. Finally, it is true, succumbing to exhaustion, to the end they were not overthrown in fight."

It was not his courage and military skills, however, that make him unique. To Lee, Christianity was not something to be flaunted, but a way of life. Fame didn't faze him. He remained humble. He never took credit for victories, ascribing them to God and to his men. There is no record of his ever uttering a vulgarity or speaking ill of the enemy. He is the only general I've ever heard of whose men loved him.


Gen. Ulysses S. Grant bristled when he heard the radical Republicans had indicted Lee for treason after the war, and he warned Washington, "I will resign the command of the Army rather than execute any order directing me to arrest Lee or any of his commanders so long as they obey the laws." The charge was dropped. Gen. Winfield Scott said, "Lee is the greatest military genius in America."


Unlike today's generals, so many of whom seek to become millionaires on a paltry record by making expensive speeches and accepting corporate directorships, Lee turned down all the offers of gifts and lucrative positions that flooded in after the war, including the offer of an estate in England. "I have enough and am content," he said in refusing one gift.

His letters to his children are full of advice to seek knowledge and virtue. "The more you know, the more you find there is to know in this grand and beautiful world. It is only the ignorant who suppose themselves omniscient," he wrote to one daughter.

Instead, he accepted the post of president of what is now Washington and Lee University at a most modest salary. He told his young students there was only one rule: They were to act like Christian gentlemen.


Lee answered a request for an interview by a biographer, "I know of nothing good I could tell you of myself."

"Gain knowledge and virtue and learn your duty to God and your neighbor. That is the great object of life," he said in another letter. "The first business of education is to draw forth and put into habitual exercise the former dispositions such as kindness, justice and self-denial."


In today's me-first, egocentric world, that is hard to grasp, but Lee was indeed a genuinely humble man - and one of the greatest.