Why, exactly, did Robert E. Lee fight for the Confederacy?
ROBERT E. LEE should not be understood as a figure defined primarily by his Virginia identity. As with almost all his fellow American citizens, he manifested a range of loyalties during the late-antebellum and wartime years. Without question devoted to his home state, where his family had loomed large in politics and social position since the Colonial era, he also possessed deep attachments to the United States, to the white slaveholding South and to the Confederacy— four levels of loyalty that became more prominent, receded or intertwined at various points. Lee’s commitment to the Confederate nation dominated his actions and thinking during the most famous and important period of his life.
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