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. Kelso, 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 core 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 war comes, he sees this as an

opportunity, and he grabs it.

He's sent off on one engineering assignment, which doesn't look terribly promising.

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