Suppression of the Harper's Ferry uprising and capture of John Brown

Lee happened to be in Washington at the time of John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) in October 1859. He was summoned by the Secretary of War on October 17, informed that a slave uprising was taking place in Virginia, and given command of detachments of Maryland and Virginia militia, soldiers from Fort Monroe, and United States Marines, to suppress the uprising and arrest its leaders. Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart, who also happened to be in Washington at the time on business, was allowed to accompany Lee on his mission.^[5] By the time Lee arrived later that night, the militia on the site had penned Brown and his supporters up in the fire-engine house at the armory with several white hostages they had taken from slave-holding families in the area. Lee surrounded the house with troops and sent Stuart to deliver a demand for immediate surrender early in the morning on October 18. When Brown refused and demanded safe passage out of the town as a condition for releasing the hostages, Stuart signalled Lee and Lee sent the Marines to storm the fire-engine house. About three minutes later, the raid was over, with two Marines shot and four of Brown's party dead. Brown himself was badly wounded and captured.

Lee participated in the interrogation of Brown later that day, and turned Brown and his party over to the state of Virginia on October 19. Lee returned home briefly, then was ordered back to Harper's Ferry in late November, to command a detachment of federal troops to protect the arsenal from any further attempts. On December 9, a week after Brown was hanged, Lee received orders to return home. He testified before the Senate hearings on the raid, and then returned to his regiment on February 10 1860^[6]. When Texas seceded from the Union in 1861, Lee was called back to Washington, D.C., to wait for further orders.

Civil War

On April 18, 1861, on the eve of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln, through Secretary of War Simon Cameron, offered Lee command of the United States Army (Union Army) through an intermediary, Maryland Republican politician Francis P. Blair, at the home of Blair's son Montgomery, Lincoln's Postmaster-General, in Washington. Lee's sentiments were against secession, which he denounced in an 1861 letter as "nothing but revolution" and a betrayal of the efforts of the Founders. However his loyalty to his native Virginia led him to join the Confederacy.

At the outbreak of war, he was first appointed to command all of Virginia's forces and then as one of the first five full generals of Confederate forces. Lee, however, refused to wear the insignia of a Confederate General stating that, in honor to his rank of Colonel in the United States Army, he would only display the three stars of a Confederate Colonel until the Civil War had been won and Lee could be promoted, in peacetime, to a General in the Confederate Army.

After commanding Confederate forces in western Virginia, and then the coastal defenses along the Carolina seaboards, he became military adviser to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, whom he knew from West Point.

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