Free George W. S. Trow by Meet Robert E Lee Page A

parade field after lunch. But he liked to work. He found science and drawing fun. He even liked to march. The life of a soldier pleased him.
    In two years Robert was allowed to go home and visit his mother. He was sad to find her very sick. But it was good to be home. He was glad to see his old friends again.
    The last two years at the Academy were the hardest. Robert’s class started with 87 boys in it. Only half finished. Robert did very well. Just one cadet got better marks. And he and Robert were chosen to lead all the cadets at West Point.
    When Robert was 21 he graduated from West Point and came home. He was an engineer in the Army now. His work was building forts.
    Mrs. Lee was very, very sick. Robert gave her medicine and sat by her bed. But before long she died.
    Robert was sad. He would miss his mother very much.
    After Mrs. Lee died, her coachman, Nat, had nowhere to go. He was old and sick. Robert wanted to help him. When the Army sent Robert to build a fort in Georgia, he took Nat with him. The warm weather would help the old man get better.

 

4
Marriage
     
    Soon after Mrs. Lee died, Robert began to visit a girl named Mary Custis. Her father was George Washington Parke Custis. He was George Washington’s adopted son. The Custis family lived at Arlington, a large house near Alexandria.
    When Robert could get away from Georgia, he often visited Arlington.
    Before long, Robert asked Mary to marry him. Mr. Custis was a rich man. He was not sure his only child should marry a poor army officer. But Mary wanted to marry Robert. At last her father agreed. On a rainy day in 1831, Robert E. Lee married Mary Custis at Arlington.
    The Army had given Robert a new job. He had to work at Fort Monroe, in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Robert and Mary went to live there.
    A few days later, horrible things happened near by. First, angry Negroes went from farm to farm killing white people.
    Then soldiers from Fort Monroe were sent out to get them. Almost 100 black people were killed. Many of them had done nothing.
    Weeks later the black leader, Nat Turner, was caught and hanged.
    Turner had been angry at white men for making black men slaves.
    Many Negroes had been brought from Africa to be slaves in the South. They were made to work in the fields. They had to work in white people’s houses without pay.
    Some white people were cruel to slaves. People like the Lees took good care of them. But no slave had a good life. It was a terrible thing to be owned by another man.
    But Robert E. Lee did not like to think about this kind of thing. He was a soldier. And soon he would be a father. To him the important things were his duty to the Army and his duty to his family.
    The Army sent Robert to work in Washington. Now the Lees could live at Arlington. Robert often had to be away. But he was always glad to come home to his growing family. In these years the Lees had seven children.
    Robert E. Lee was a soldier, but he had never fought a battle. Then in 1846 war broke out between Mexico and the United States. Lee was sent to fight. He said good-by to Mary and the children. He was off to war.

 

5
The Mexican War
     
    The big guns were ready. Captain Robert E. Lee had told the soldiers where to put them. He had made the men dig banks of dirt to hide behind.
    Lee was helping General Winfield Scott plan a great battle. The Army was about to attack Vera Cruz, a large Mexican town on the sea.
    The attack began. Soldiers fired the great guns at the walls of Vera Cruz. One of the men at the guns was Robert’s brother, Smith Lee. When he could, Lee went to stand by his brother’s gun. “I could see his white teeth through all the smoke of the fire,” Lee said in a letter to Mary.
    The Mexicans soon gave up Vera Cruz. General Scott thanked Lee for his work. Now the Army could move on to the Mexican capital.
    The march to Mexico City would be hard. General Scott asked Lee to find the best way to go. And he asked him to see what Santa Anna, the