Lee’s last campaign brought him to Columbia

After the war that made him one of the most admired military leaders in history, Robert E. Lee devoted what influence he had to guiding the South toward recovery, stability, and renewal as part of a transformed nation.

He did this in part by serving as a model American citizen, a living example of reconciliation.

He also did it as an innovative educator as president of Washington College, known today as Washington and Lee University. With his health failing toward the end, a doctor recommended he take a trip South to rest. That brought him, however briefly, to Columbia.

At noon on Friday, Oct. 9, award-winning history teacher Mike Burgess will deliver a free lecture titled “Strike the Tent: The Last Campaign of Robert E. Lee, 1865–1870.” The lecture, at the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum, is open to the public as part of the museum’s regular Noon Debrief program.

Starting in 1861, Lee had led the Confederacy’s foremost army from victory to unlikely victory over the vastly superior assets of the U.S. Army. That all came to a halt at Appomattox. He rejected a number of promising business opportunities to accept the presidency of Washington College because he wanted to train “young men to do their duty” in the new world in which they would live.

Their duty as gentlemen would not be to wage war, but to further the cause of peaceful coexistence. Lee recruited students from the North and made certain they were well treated on campus and in town (Lexington, Va. – also the home of Virginia Military Institute). When some failed to get the message, several Southern students were suspended.

He broke new ground by adding such previously scorned fields of study as journalism, engineering, business and law, believing those occupations should be intimately linked with the liberal arts.

But in late 1869 and early 1870, his health was failing. His staff and family urged him to go on a tour of the South for Rest and Recuperation. Perhaps they should have sent him in a different direction, because the trip turned out to be far from restful.

Before he had passed through Charlotte into South Carolina, the word was out all along the course of his tour: Robert E. Lee is coming!

His brief stop in Columbia provided a good example. Burgess compares it to the arrival of the Beatles in New York in 1964 – total mania, however kindly intended.

By the time his train pulled into the Charlotte Depot that was then located at Blanding and Barnwell, there was not only a crowd chanting their adoration of their hero, but a band was playing and fully prepared to lead a parade.

The weary Lee knew he had to at least get off the train and express his appreciation to his admirers. But by now, it was clear that this was no trip for a man who needed rest. That fact was underlined when he was wined and dined in Savannah.

It would never be Lee’s fate to live a life of leisure. He passed away in October 1870, not long after a stroke.

About the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum

Founded in 1896, the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum is an accredited museum focusing on South Carolina’s distinguished martial tradition through the Revolutionary War, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, Vietnam, the War on Terror, and other American conflicts. It serves as the state’s military history museum by collecting, preserving, and exhibiting South Carolina’s military heritage from the colonial era to the present, and by providing superior educational experiences and programming. It recently opened a major new exhibit, “A War With No Front Lines: South Carolina and the Vietnam War, 1965-1973.” The museum is located at 301 Gervais St. in Columbia, sharing the Columbia Mills building with the State Museum. For more information, go to https://crr.sc.gov/.