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And we continue with our American stories.

Up next, the story of one of the most controversial, beloved, and complex generals in

American history. Here to tell the true story of Robert E. Lee is Alan C. Gelsso, author of Robert E. Lee,

A Life. We'd like to thank the folks at the Bill of Rights Institute for allowing us to use this audio

originally a part of their scholar talk series. Take it away, Alan. Robert E. Lee, just to give you

the basic skeleton outline, was born at 1807 at Stratford Hall on the northern neck of Virginia,

which had been the ancestral home of many of the

Lee family, a family which had roots in Virginia back into the 17th century. He attends West Point.

He is class of 1829, graduates second in his class. When I say second, he missed graduating first,

really by a couple of digits.

It was like one of those batting average contests where you have to take it out to the fourth

digit to determine who the winner is and is posted to the elite Corps of Engineers and spends a good

deal of the rest of his professional life in the Army's Corps of Engineers

doing really Corps of Engineering things. He mainly is devoted to fortification construction

and as a specialty within that, coastal fortification is something of a specialty within

that kind of engineering, which requires a great deal of imagination.

And it has to be said that Lee was a very good engineer and a very dedicated engineer.

He also was a very frustrated engineer because promotion in the army as a whole and in the Corps of Engineers was sclerotic, to say the

least. The great advantage of Army employment was that it was guaranteed and secure. The downside

was that it was slow. And Lee experiences this, and it's a source of great frustration. He would

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