Civil War
When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, his father and his two older brothers, Custis and Rooney, all chose to serve Virginia in the Confederate Army. To his mother's dismay, the following year, Rob joined them. In 1862 Rob served as a private in the Rockbridge Artillery.
After the Battle of Sharpsburg, he was promoted to the rank of Captain and assigned to serve as aide to his older brother Custis. The latter was a major general and aide-de-camp to the Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and was involved in defending Richmond, Virginia.
Read more about this topic: Robert E. Lee, Jr.
Famous quotes by civil war:
“Luxury, or a refinement on the pleasures and conveniences of life, had long been supposed the source of every corruption in government, and the immediate cause of faction, sedition, civil wars, and the total loss of liberty. It was, therefore, universally regarded as a vice, and was an object of declamation to all satyrists, and severe moralists.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)
“The utter helplessness of a conquered people is perhaps the most tragic feature of a civil war or any other sort of war.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)
“Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)