Articles · Robert E. Lee
When his father-in-law George Washington Parke Custis died in 1857, Robert E. Lee became executor of an estate that included Arlington and several hundred enslaved people. Custis's will directed that they be freed within five years.
Lee managed the estate and its enslaved workers through years of legal and financial difficulty, a period marked by hardship and by accounts of harsh treatment that historians still debate.
In late 1862, near the deadline set by the will, Lee filed the deed of manumission freeing the Custis slaves—even as he commanded the army of a confederacy founded to preserve the institution of slavery, a contradiction at the heart of his legacy.
Lee's household cannot be separated from the war that followed. Broader context on the Union, slavery and command is gathered on the main Civil War archive.