Mary Lee: the General’s Daughter During WWI

Mary Lee, General Robert E Lee’s oldest daughter was still alive during World War I.

Indeed, the southern lady was one of the most surprising people I discovered while researching A Poppy in Remembrance.

I had to put her in the book!

She had some fascinating comments to make about the Great War.

Who was Mary Lee?

Born in 1835 and the oldest daughter, Mary Custis Lee grew up in Arlington, Virginia, in the mansion that still stands in the national cemetery.

Raised by the educated and religious Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee, Mary Lee the daughter learned her first lessons at home.

When Mrs. Lee’s rheumatoid arthritis debilitated her, the running of the household, however, went to a cousin who lived with the family.

Her biography on the National Park Service website describes Mary Custis Lee as

“bright, willful, intelligent and cultivated, but she seems to have been somewhat of an outsider to the affairs at Arlington.

“By traveling, skating, riding and taking long walks, she stayed away from the house. She refused to help with the housework or to accompany her mother and sisters on their summer visits to the resorts.

“She was most outspoken and regarded by her sisters as bossy and self-absorbed.”

 Mary enjoyed Richmond’s society during the war and had several beaus, but never married.

Along with the rest of her sisters, she moved to Lexington when her father became the president of what eventually became Washington and Lee University.

Devout like her mother, Mary often invited people to Sunday School and was recognized as a ” person of strong, almost eccentric character, wholly devoid of fear, as were all the Lees.”

After her father’s death, Mary traveled the world collecting postcards and no doubt dining out on her fame as Bobby’s Lee’s last surviving child.

World War I reference

I came across her in a New York Times article written October 22, 1914, upon her arrival in London.

The correspondent asked about the seventy-nine year old woman’s reaction to the war:

“I am a soldier’s daughter and descended from a long line of soldiers, but what I have seen of this war, and what I can foresee of the misery which must follow, have made me very nearly a peace-at-any-price woman.”

She had been in Hamburg at the outbreak of the war.

The correspondent, understandably, wanted a reaction from the daughter of the Civil War’s premier general.

“My father often used to say that war was a terrible alternative, and should be the very last.

“I have remembered those words in the last three months, and I often wonder and wonder with many misgivings if in this case war was the last alternative.”

Historians have debated her point ever since August 5, 1914.

The Press

Mary Lee held scathing views of the press, then torn by propaganda from both sides.

“Much of what I see in the English press seems hysterical and without reason.

“The spy mania, for instance, and the senseless calling the Germans Huns and Vandals. I have known many German military men, and I cannot believe that these men are what the English imagination has painted them.”

Jock Meacham, one of my fictional characters, agreed with her.

A reminder of the American Civil War.

When I read the New York Times article, I realized both World War I and the Civil War had occured within the lifetimes of many people still alive.

Soldiers from both the north and the south had gathered in July 1913 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg.

That nearness of history came up several times in A Poppy in Remembrance for the Americans in the story.

Mary Lee’s memories overlapped as well.

“I am a soldier’s daughter, and got my first full view of life in the dark days of one of the world’s great civil wars, but it has been an altering experience for me to watch, one week in Germany and the next week in England, the handsome, the strong, the brave of both countries marching away to kill or to get killed, perhaps to return no more, perhaps to return maimed and useless men.”

Prescient about the war?

Mary Lee was a Southerner who respected the 1914 president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson.

But she held realistic views about war and its aftermath.

“My sympathy is with suffering wherever it exists–with the brave men who are fighting and suffering in the trenches and the brave women who, in practically all the homes of Europe, are waiting and suffering.”

Perhaps some of that sympathy came from her father.

“My father used to say it was not those who were killed in battle–often a quick and always a glorious death for a soldier–but those who, crippled and mangled and enfeebled, faced after the war a world that they could not understand and that had no place for them.”

Mary returned to her home in Virginia after the interview and lived long enough to see the entire war. She died in Virginia on November 22, 1918.

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