The conventional wisdom holds, for example, that Lee disdained secession, but once his state took that step he was duty bound to follow. But these documents show that he was not actually opposed to disunion in principle. He simply wanted to exhaust all peaceful means of redress first, remarking in January 1861 that then “we can with a clear conscience separate.”

The writing is blurred and the paper nearly translucent, but the scene it portrays is vivid. In a recently discovered letter, Mary Custis Lee, the eldest daughter of Robert E. Lee, describes how her father wrestled with the decision to resign his commission in the United States Army and side with the South. The letter, found in a folder of fragments at the Virginia Historical Society, was written in 1871 to Charles Marshall, Lee’s former aide-to–camp, as he prepared to write a biography of the great general.

It provides the most reliable information currently available to historians, overshadowing the questionable second-hand accounts that scholars once had to rely on. Not only was Mary Custis Lee an eyewitness to the scene, but her letter was written just a few years after the war, whereas the traditional depictions did not appear until decades later.

And her words fundamentally alter the story of Lee’s fateful choice. Lee biographers have long claimed that his decision to leave the Army was an inevitable one, driven by the pull of relatives, state and tradition. However, as his daughter shows us, in the end the decision was highly personal, made in spite of family differences and the military conventions he revered.

Lee’s decision to give up his 35-year Army career came after a week of cataclysmic events: the southern capture of Fort Sumter, Lincoln’s call for 75,000 troops to protect federal property and, on April 17, the secession of Virginia.

The days had been personally traumatic as well. Like many border-state families, the Lees and their friends were sharply divided on the issues. When Lee consulted his brothers, sister and local clergymen, he found that most leaned toward the Union. At a grim dinner with two close cousins, Lee was told that they also intended to uphold their military oaths. (Samuel Phillips Lee would become an important admiral in the Union navy; John Fitzgerald Lee retained his position as judge advocate of the Army.) Sister Anne Lee Marshall unhesitatingly chose the northern side, and her son outfitted himself in blue uniform. Robert’s favorite brother, Smith Lee, a naval officer, resisted leaving his much-loved berth, and Smith’s wife spurned her relatives to support the Union cause.

At the same time, many of the clan’s young men, such as nephew Fitzhugh Lee, were anxious to make their mark for the South in the coming conflict, creating a distinct generational fault line.

Matters became more complicated when, on April 18, presidential adviser Francis P. Blair unofficially offered Lee the command of the thousands of soldiers being called up to protect Washington. Fearing that such a post might require him to invade the South, Lee immediately turned down the job. Agitated, he went to tell his mentor, Gen. Winfield Scott, the Army’s commander in chief. Another dramatic scene followed. Scott, though a proud Virginian, had dismissed as an insult any hint that he himself would turn from the United States. When Lee offered to sit out the troubles at his home, Arlington, the general told him bluntly: “I have no place in my army for equivocal men.” Greatly distressed, Lee returned to Arlington to contemplate his options.

Although his wife called it “the severest struggle of his life,” historians have long trivialized Lee’s decision. It was “the answer he was born to make,” biographer Douglas Southall Freeman put it. “A no-brainer,” said another. But daughter Mary’s letter, along with other previously unknown documents written by his close family and associates, belies such easy assessments. These newly found sources underscore just how complex and painful a choice it was to make.

Read More: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/the-general-in-his-study/