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Guaranteed Human.

And we return to our American stories.

Up next, a short history of one of the most consequential and controversial figures

in American history, Robert E. Lee. Dr. Alan Gelzo, author of Robert E. Lee,

A Life, is here to tell the story of the confederacies' most powerful general. Let's get into the story. Take it away, Dr.

Gelsso. 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 like to move up. When the Mexican

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