This is the final chapter in the series on the Lee Family of Virginia, covering the last of the great Lees, the last of the Virginia Cavaliers, the last shining flower of the Virginia gentry: Fitz Lee, the nephew of Robert E. Lee and Laughing Cavalier of cavalry fame. This is the story of how a strong-willed and vivacious boy wreaked havoc at West Point, dominated the Plains with his bravery, rose on his merits to become one of the best commanders of the Civil War, and rebuilt Virginia in the war’s aftermath…before later going on to lead troops as a Major General in the United States Army and command the occupation of Cuba. It is a story of duty and honor in the best tradition of the Virginia gentry and Virginia gentlemen, and a fitting end to the story of the Lees of Virginia.
Fitz was a titan, and his story ought be better known. In fact, this is my favorite of the episodes I did on the Lee family. So, instead of doing the usual paywalled transcript, I have included the script in full, and it is formatted as an article would be. If you don’t like watching videos, I would recommend reading it, as this story is really one you ought know: the courage, fortitude, and good humor in the face of death and ruin is something we should all take to heart. Further, as Fitz was quite the Cavalier in his personal life—particularly when it came to ladies and liquor—many of the tales are quite entertaining.
As a reminder, you can watch for free (but with ads) on Spotify or YouTube! Enjoy!
The Laughing Cavalier: Fitz Lee’s Life
“From plume to spur a cavalier, who nobly wore a noble name”. Such was the famous line about Fitz Lee, and it was the perfect way of describing him, as was Douglas Southall Freeman’s name for him: The Laughing Cavalier.
Fitz was that. He graduated toward the bottom of his class at West Point–45 out of 49–because he so enjoyed a bit of off-campus recreation. He rose by his merit during the war to lead the cavalry after the death of Stuart, fighting with distinction, as a leader, from the Chickahominy Raid and Second Manassas to the bitter aftermath of Gettysburg. His exceptional service–characterized by dedication and conscientiousness–paired well with his distinguished lineage, and he much more than Stuart leaned into the Cavalier side of that identity and heritage. The jovial,convivial general often slipped away from the front in times of inaction to attend balls in Richmond and Petersburg, where he was always a hit with the ladies, living up to the best that could be expected of a cavalier in modern times.
In this, he was quite different from most of the other generals of the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee, Jackson, and Longstreet were austere men. A Calvinistic brotherhood that as silent and reserved, grim and impassive. Not Fitz.
To the soldiers who followed his waving black ostrich plume through the dust and gunpowder of fifty pitched battles, he was “The Laughing Cavalier.” To the people of the Old Dominion, who would later sweep him into the Governor’s Mansion by acclamation, he was simply “Our Fitz.”
Fitzhugh Lee was not just the last Lee–the last man of the line to attain any prominence, to rise above the dignified mediocrity of a competent professional career and be a great man of history in the tradition of his ancestors–was the living, boisterous antithesis of his famous uncle Robert. Where Uncle Robert was measured, restrained, and deeply uncomfortable with personal display, Fitz was a roaring tempest of good cheer, physical vitality, and patrician ease. He possessed a round, handsome, sunburnt face framed by a luxuriant, curling brown beard, bright, dancing blue eyes that flashed with mischief, and an infectious, booming laugh that could carry across a cavalry bivouac.
He had an unquenchable appetite for life that no military setback could extinguish: he loved thoroughbred racehorses, fine Virginia hams, old Madeira, lively fiddlers, midnight banquets, and pretty women. Where his cousin Rooney Lee was the quiet, athletic giant, and his cousin Custis Lee was the melancholy West Point scholar, Fitz was the life of every camp and the monarch of every ballroom. Even in the freezing, starvation trenches of Petersburg, with the army crumbling and the world ending around him, Fitz Lee could be found sitting before a blazing pine-knot fire in his headquarters tent, strumming a banjo, singing comic minstrel songs, and cracking ribald jokes with the humblest private cannoneer.
Yet beneath that genial, jovial exterior beat the heart of one of the most audacious, resilient, and professionally accomplished combat commanders in American military history. Fitzhugh Lee was no parlor soldier. He was a warrior who bore upon his massive body the horrific scars of his trade: an Indian arrow that had driven clean through his right lung on the Texas frontier, leaving him for dead in the sagebrush, and a federal shell fragment that had torn through his thigh at the Battle of Opequon, shattering the bone and dropping his third horse of the afternoon.
He was a master tactician who understood cavalry warfare with piercing clarity. It was Fitzhugh Lee whose brilliant, daring reconnaissance discovered that the Union right wing was “in the air” at Chancellorsville, opening the path for Stonewall Jackson’s immortal flank march; it was Fitzhugh Lee whose dismounted cavalrymen held the crossroads of Todd’s Tavern and the Brock Road in May 1864, fighting with carbines in the burning underbrush to secure Spotsylvania Court House for the Confederate army by a margin of mere minutes; and it was Fitzhugh Lee who, refusing to surrender at Appomattox, drew his sabre, spurred his horse, and led a desperate, thundering breakout charge through the Federal lines.
Most extraordinary of all, Fitzhugh Lee occupies a unique and breathtaking pinnacle in the military annals of the Republic: he was the rare American soldier who wore the uniform of a general officer in two opposing armies across two different centuries.
As a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant in the antebellum 2nd United States Cavalry, he learned the art of war riding alongside Albert Sidney Johnston, George H. Thomas, and his uncle Robert on the wild Comanche frontier of Texas. Four years later, he donned the Confederate gray, rising by sheer battlefield gallantry to become a major general and the final Chief of Cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia.
And then, thirty-three years after the guns fell silent at Appomattox—after serving as Governor of Virginia and surviving the horrors of the Spanish reconcentration camps and the explosion of the USS Maine as United States Consul General in Havana—sixty-two-year-old Fitzhugh Lee did the unthinkable: he put on the dark blue uniform of the United States Army once more. Commissioned by President William McKinley as a Major General of U.S. Volunteers, Fitzhugh Lee rode at the head of an American army corps in the Spanish-American War, with the grandson of Ulysses S. Grant serving proudly upon his personal staff.
From wild cadet escapades and near-expulsion at West Point to hand-to-hand combat on the freezing plains of Pecan Bayou; from the laughing, plume-waving cavalry sweeps of the Peninsula and the Wilderness to the smoke-filled backrooms of post-Reconstruction Virginia politics; and from the diplomatic tempest of Havana Harbor to the ultimate symbol of national reconciliation, this is the magnificent, unvarnished story of Major General Fitzhugh Lee—the cavalier who wore two uniforms, fought for two nations, and remained throughout it all, from plume to spur, the unconquered spirit of the Old Dominion.
II. ACT 1: THE WILD BOYHOOD & WEST POINT ESCAPADES (1835–1856)
To be born a Lee in the Commonwealth of Virginia was to inherit a legacy of public greatness; but to be born Fitzhugh Lee was to unite two of the most illustrious, founding bloodlines in the history of the American Republic.
He was born on November 19, 1835, at Clermont, an expansive, rolling country estate situated five miles west of Alexandria in Fairfax County, Virginia. His father was Sydney Smith Lee—known affectionately throughout his life simply as “Smith”—the older brother of Robert E. Lee. Smith Lee was a distinguished, handsome, and universally beloved officer in the United States Navy. A veteran of thirty years at sea and descendant of the Lees of Leesylvania, Smith had served with gallantry in the Mexican War, had commanded the naval battery at the Siege of Veracruz under Winfield Scott, had sailed to Japan as Matthew Perry’s flag captain on the historic expedition of the “Black Ships” in 1853, and would eventually serve as the Commandant of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis before resigning to become a commodore in the Confederate Navy.
Fitz’s mother was Anna Maria Mason—known as “Nannie”—a woman of towering aristocratic pedigree, razor-sharp intellect, and deep Virginia pride. Through his mother, young Fitz was the direct great-grandson of George Mason of Gunston Hall—the intellectual titan of the American Revolution, the man who drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776, and the uncompromising champion of civil liberties whose ideas formed the foundation of the Bill of Rights. On his father’s side, Fitz was the grandson of Major General Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, the dashing, brilliant Revolutionary cavalry commander, three-term Governor of Virginia, and intimate friend of George Washington.
Yet of all the aristocratic influences that shaped his youth, none was more pervasive or indulgent than that of his wealthy, childless godmother: Mrs. Anna Maria Goldsborough Fitzhugh of Ravensworth.
Mrs. Fitzhugh was the widow of William Henry Fitzhugh, the grandee whose vast twenty-two-thousand-acre plantation in Fairfax County was one of the showplaces of the South. Doting on young Fitzhugh with unbounded maternal affection, Aunt Maria showered the boy with gifts, financed his schooling, bought him fine horses, and indulged his every whim. Growing up between Clermont and Ravensworth, young Fitz lived a life of boundless outdoor freedom. He spent his boyhood roaming through the oak forests of northern Virginia, hunting foxes with packs of hounds, swimming in the creeks, shooting quail, and acquiring that superb, instinctive, and fearless horsemanship that would later make him the terror of federal infantry.
He was a bright, quick-witted, and extraordinarily charming child, but from his earliest years, he displayed a total, unyielding aversion to indoor study. While his cousin Custis Lee was quietly mastering Latin grammar and algebra, Fitz was out in the stables, wrestling with the stable hands, boxing with his brothers, and playing practical jokes on the neighborhood gentry.
Despite this youthful exuberance, in 1852, at the age of sixteen, Fitzhugh Lee was appointed a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
His arrival on the high, granite bluffs above the Hudson River marked the beginning of one of the stormiest, entertaining, and most disciplined-defying cadet careers in the Academy’s history. West Point, after all, was an institution designed to break the wild individual will, molding young men into precise, mathematical, and unquestioning military instruments through a Spartan regimen of relentless inspections, compulsory study hours, and an unforgiving system of demerits.
Into this military monastery strode Cadet Fitzhugh Lee, bringing with him the relaxed, easy-going manners of the Virginia Tidewater’s ruling gentry, a profound horror of mathematics, and an unquenchable thirst for fun.
Fitz immediately established himself as the athletic hero and social monarch of the cadet corps. Standing five feet ten inches, possessing a barrel chest, massive arms, and extraordinary physical agility, Fitz was the undisputed champion boxer and wrestler of the Academy.
In the gymnasium and on the wrestling mats, no cadet could stand before him.
In the riding hall, mounted upon the wildest, most vicious dragoon horses that the cavalry detachment could provide, Fitz was in his natural element: he rode with a reckless, breathtaking grace, executing sabre cuts at the gallop, jumping hurdles without stirrups, and earning the awe of the French riding masters. Virginians were always good with their horses, and he was one of the greatest.
His classmates—who included future Civil War adversaries and comrades such as George Armstrong Custer, Judson Kilpatrick, John Bell Hood, Joseph Wheeler, and E. Porter Alexander—adored the jovial Virginian. He was the undisputed master of cadet revels: he could sing every tavern ballad known to man, play the flute, dance the Virginia reel, mimic the pompous accents of the tactical officers, and tell hilarious, dialect-laden stories that kept the barracks in an uproar of laughter until the small hours of the morning.
Yet on the drill field and in the classroom, Cadet Fitzhugh Lee was an absolute catastrophe. Academic study bored him to tears. He wrestled with chemistry, blundered through calculus, and barely scraped through engineering mechanics, consistently ranking near the bottom of every academic class.
Worse still was his disciplinary record. The West Point regulations prohibited drinking, smoking, card-playing, unauthorized absence, dirty equipment, and unbrushed uniforms; Fitzhugh Lee violated every single one of them constantly.
His greatest nemesis was Benny Havens’ Tavern. Situated off the military reservation, tucked away beneath the river cliffs at Highland Falls, Benny Havens was an illicit sanctuary where generations of West Point cadets sneaked out after tattoo to drink hot rum flips, eat roast turkey and oysters, and sing the famous cadet anthem: “Benny Havens, oh!”
Fitz Lee became Benny Havens’ most frequent, dedicated customer. Night after night, slipping past the cadet guards and climbing down the treacherous, icy granite cliffs above the Hudson, Fitz would vanish into the warm, smoky confines of the tavern, returning to the barracks at dawn smelling of tobacco smoke and applejack.
The demerits piled up with terrifying, geometric rapidity: tardy at roll call, late for chapel, out of uniform, tobacco in quarters, loud singing in barracks, unauthorized leave.
Under the Academy regulations, any cadet who accumulated two hundred demerits in an academic year was automatically dismissed from the service. By his second year, Fitz was hovering perpetually on the razor’s edge of expulsion, running totals of one hundred and eighty, one hundred and ninety, one hundred and ninety-five demerits.
The situation was made exquisitely, excruciatingly painful by a supreme twist of family fate: in September 1852, the newly appointed Superintendent of the United States Military Academy arrived at West Point. It was none other than Fitz’s own uncle: Colonel Robert E. Lee. Robert E. Lee had graduated from West Point in 1829 without a single demerit in four years—the legendary, spotless “Marble Model.” But, then again, that is in comparison to a demigod, which is a bit unfair. As Nichols puts it in his biography of Fitz:
“On Fitz’s behalf, it should be said emphatically that to compare anybody with Robert E. Lee is just plain unfair, as most Virginians would agree”
Still, Fitz had many more demerits than he ought have let himself accumulate, and they were wearing on his uncle.
Now, the immaculate uncle sat in the Superintendent’s office, reviewing the daily disciplinary reports of the corps, only to find his own nephew’s name perpetually heading the list of delinquents. Robert E. Lee loved his brother Smith and was deeply fond of Fitz; but Colonel Lee was a man of duty. He refused to show the slightest favoritism, leaning backward with rigid severity to ensure that his nephew was treated with the same cold justice as any penniless immigrant cadet from Ohio.
The uncle summoned the nephew to his office for private, agonizing interviews. Robert E. Lee lectured, pleaded, and warned; he wrote anxious, distressed letters to Fitz’s mother, lamenting that the boy was squandering his talents and throwing away his future through sheer, thoughtless self-indulgence.
Fitz would stand before his majestic uncle, looking sorrowful, admitting his faults, and promising with all his heart to reform; yet within forty-eight hours, Cadet Fitz would be caught slipping back down the cliffs toward Benny Havens!
Describing these exploits, and the planning that went into Fitz having a bit of fun, Longacre writes, in his biography of Fitz:
“Some of Fitz’s infractions showed great skill in both planning and execution. It was said that he “used to pass the sentries whenever [he] pleased and roam about contrary to all regulations.” He managed this by propping a dummy under his bedcovers to circumvent hasty bed checks and then slipping out of his room in various forms of disguise. On at least one occasion, the petite, smooth-faced cadet donned “a dress and fixings,” took the arm of a fellow cadet in civilian clothes and a fake beard, and flounced past an inattentive sentry.”
In the spring of 1854, the crisis reached its explosive climax. Fitz was caught red-handed in a flagrant breach of discipline involving an unauthorized nocturnal expedition to Benny Havens, combined with an accumulation of demerits that crossed the fatal two-hundred threshold.
His patience exhausted, and determined that the integrity of the Academy must be upheld at all costs, Superintendent Robert E. Lee took the ultimate, painful step: he initiated formal court-martial proceedings against his own nephew, recommending to the Secretary of War that Cadet Fitzhugh Lee be summarily dismissed from the United States Military Academy.
Dismissal from West Point meant utter social ruin, dishonor to the Lee name, and the death of Fitz’s military career. Yet at that desperate hour, an extraordinary event occurred, one that was a testament to the profound affection that Fitzhugh Lee inspired among his comrades: Learning that Fitz was about to be expelled, the entire Class of 1856 assembled in an emergency meeting. The cadets drafted a petition to Superintendent Lee and the Academic Board. In order to save Fitz, the members of his class offered to take a solemn, collective “pledge of honor”: every cadet pledged that if the authorities would suspend Fitzhugh Lee’s expulsion and remit his surplus demerits, the entire class would bind itself to refrain from leaving the post, from visiting Benny Havens, and from committing any serious breach of discipline for the remainder of the academic year.
Twice during his cadet career, the class took this collective pledge to save Fitz from the executioner’s ax. The first time it didn’t work, but the court-martial board chose leniency, so Fitz skated by.
The second time, faced with this staggering demonstration of class loyalty, and moved by the boy’s genuine remorse, Superintendent Lee and the War Department relented. The charges were dropped, the demerits adjusted, and Fitz was permitted to remain.
Fitz scraped through.
On July 1, 1856, Cadet Fitzhugh Lee walked onto the plain at West Point to receive his diploma. Out of a graduating class of forty-nine cadets, Fitzhugh Lee graduated ranked forty-fifth.
His uncle Robert, who had recently departed West Point to assume command of the 2nd Cavalry on the frontier, breathed a sigh of immense relief from Texas. The wild boy of Clermont had survived the Academy; he was commissioned a Brevet Second Lieutenant in the United States Army; and he was about to ride out onto the bloodiest, most savage frontier in North America.
III. ACT 2: FRONTIER LEGEND – THE 2ND U.S. CAVALRY IN TEXAS (1856–1861)
In the late summer of 1856, following brief training at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania, twenty-year-old Lieutenant Fitzhugh Lee was assigned to the most celebrated, elite combat regiment in the United States military: the 2nd United States Cavalry.
The 2nd Cavalry had been created by an Act of Congress in 1855 at the personal instigation of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. Davis had designed the regiment as a specialized, hard-riding shock force of mounted riflemen, specifically trained and equipped to conquer the vast, semi-arid plains of western Texas and subdue the fierce, nomadic warriors of the Comanche and Kiowa nations. To ensure that the regiment was the finest fighting unit in the world, Davis had hand-picked its officer corps from the cream of the United States Army, and so the roster of the 2nd Cavalry was a staggering roll call of future Civil War legends:
The Colonel was Albert Sidney Johnston;
The Lieutenant Colonel was Robert E. Lee;
The Majors were William J. Hardee and George H. Thomas;
The Captains included Earl Van Dorn, E. Kirby Smith, and George Stoneman;
The Lieutenants included John Bell Hood, Charles W. Field, and Fitzhugh Lee.
Known throughout the army as “Jeff Davis’s Own,” the regiment was stationed across a chain of remote, isolated wooden and adobe forts stretching along the Texas frontier—Fort Mason, Fort Inge, Fort Belknap, and Camp Radziminski.
For four long years, Fitzhugh Lee lived in the saddle, patrolling the vast expanses of the Edwards Plateau, the Llano Estacado, and the valleys of the Brazos and Colorado rivers.
He learned the brutal, unforgiving art of frontier warfare: tracking raiding parties over waterless deserts, reading bent twigs and crushed grass, enduring the blistering hundred-degree heat of the Texas summers and the howling, freezing “blue northers” of the plains winters.
His massive frame hardened into corded steel; his horsemanship reached perfection, and his buoyant, cheerful disposition made him the idol of the grizzled enlisted dragoons, who would follow the laughing young lieutenant through the gates of hell.
The supreme trial of Fitz’s frontier career arrived in the spring of 1859. In April 1859, Captain Earl Van Dorn organized a punitive expedition of four cavalry companies, accompanied by fifty-eight loyal Caddo and Brazos Indian scouts under the famous frontiersman Lawrence Sullivan “Sul” Ross. Van Dorn’s objective was to strike deep into the unmapped heart of Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma and southern Kansas) to track down and destroy a large, defiant band of nomadic Comanches under Chief Buffalo Hump.
For three weeks, the cavalry marched northward through torrential spring rains, swimming swollen, muddy rivers and navigating through the trackless prairies. On the morning of May 13, 1859, Sul Ross’s Indian scouts detected the smoke of a Comanche encampment nestled in a deep, heavily wooded ravine along the Nescutunga Valley at a place known as Crooked Creek, in the Wichita Mountains. The encampment contained nearly one hundred Comanche warriors—the finest light horsemen on the continent, armed with short hunting bows, lances, and trade muskets.
Van Dorn immediately deployed his cavalry, sending two columns to seal the mouth of the ravine while he personally led a mounted charge into the village. Twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant Fitzhugh Lee was placed in command of a dismounted detachment, ordered to plunge directly into the dense, tangled jungle of black-jack oak, grapevines, and fallen timber that choked the bottom of the ravine, to root out the Comanches who had taken cover in the brush.
Drawing his Colt dragoon revolver and brandishing his sabre, Fitz plunged into the thicket at the head of his men.
The ravine was a death trap. The Comanches, fighting with desperate fury to protect their families, were concealed behind rocks and fallen trees. Arrows whistled through the leaves with terrifying velocity; the air was thick with the sulfur smoke of black powder and the screams of dying men. Fitz fought his way through the brush, dropping two warriors with his revolver.
Suddenly, bursting through a screen of dense sumac into a small clearing, Fitz found himself face-to-face with a massive, copper-skinned Comanche warrior who was rising from the brush barely eight feet away. The warrior had already drawn a three-foot ash hunting arrow back to the feathers of his sinew-backed bow, aiming directly at the young lieutenant’s heart.
Fitz raised his Colt revolver and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell upon a defective percussion cap with a hollow, sickening metallic click. At that same second, the Comanche loosed the bowstring. The heavy, steel-tipped hunting arrow struck Fitzhugh Lee with the force of a sledgehammer.
It entered his chest beneath the right armpit, punched through his ribs, plowed directly through his right lung, and tore out through his back beneath the shoulder blade.
The shock was staggering. The impact lifted the muscular, six-foot officer off his feet and threw him backward into the brush. As Fitz fell, the Comanche warrior dropped his bow, drew an eight-inch scalping knife from his belt, and lunged forward through the smoke to take the young officer’s scalp.
Help arrived in the nick of time. Bugler John W. Spangler of Company H, who had been following his lieutenant through the thicket, leaped forward, brought his Springfield carbine to his shoulder, and shot the charging warrior dead in his tracks. Other troopers rushed into the clearing, forming a defensive perimeter around their fallen commander.
The battle raged for two hours, resulting in the complete destruction of the Comanche encampment: fifty-four warriors were killed and seventy-five prisoners taken, at a cost of two cavalrymen killed and five wounded, including Captain Van Dorn, who was shot twice with arrows.
Meanwhile, in the brush of the ravine, Fitzhugh Lee lay dying in a widening pool of blood. The wound was horrific: the arrow had pierced the lung, and with every ragged breath, bright scarlet arterial blood and air foamed and bubbled from the gaping hole in his chest.
His face was ashen; his pulse was faint and fluttering, and the dragoon surgeon, Dr. James Carswell, knelt over him, shook his head with grave sorrow, and whispered that the young lieutenant could not possibly survive the night.
Even with death staring him in the face, Fitzhugh Lee’s irrepressible sense of humor refused to be extinguished–he was the laughing cavalier, after all. As he lay bleeding upon the prairie grass, his close friend and fellow lieutenant, Manning Kimmel, rushed to his side.
Kimmel was desperately anxious to cheer up his dying comrade. Taking off his military hat, Kimmel showed Fitz a bullet hole that had pierced the crown during the fighting, exclaiming with dramatic excitement: “Look here, Fitz! Look at this hole! The rascals came within an inch of blowing my brains out!” Fitz opened his eyes. He looked at the hat, looked into the anxious face of his friend, and despite the agonizing froth of blood bubbling in his throat, he gasped out a weak, sputtering whisper:
“Kimmel... acknowledge the corn, old fellow... didn’t you go behind a tree and shoot that hole in your hat yourself?”
Even as he hovered upon the threshold of eternity, “Our Fitz” could not resist cracking a joke at his comrade’s expense.
Fitz’s survival was nothing short of a medical miracle. Van Dorn’s expedition was stranded in the wilderness, four hundred miles from the nearest military hospital at Camp Radziminski. They could not remain at Crooked Creek; supplies were exhausted, and Comanche war parties were gathering. The wounded officers had to be transported across the wilderness.
The soldiers constructed an improvised, crude canvas litter, suspended by long ash poles between two pack mules—one mule walking in front, the other walking behind. Into this swinging hammock was placed the mangled, fever-wracked body of Fitzhugh Lee. For twenty-eight agonizing days, across three hundred and fifty miles of burning, rocky prairie, alkali flats, and swollen river crossings, the mule litter carried Fitzhugh Lee.
The pain was unspeakable.
With every jarring step of the pack mules, the lacerated lung throbbed with agony, threatening fatal internal hemorrhage.
To make matters terrifying, during one afternoon march across a steep, stony ravine, the rear mule was stung by a hornet, panicked, and bolted down the hill.
The litter tore loose, and the helpless, fever-wracked lieutenant was dragged across the jagged limestone rocks and cactus until the troopers managed to tackle the runaway animal.
But, through sheer, superhuman physical vitality and that buoyant spirit that refused to surrender, Fitzhugh Lee conquered death. He reached Camp Radziminski alive, spent five months recuperating under the care of his comrades, and by the autumn of 1859, his lung had healed. He rode back to his company, strapped on his revolvers, and resumed active field command.
Less than six months later, in January 1860, Fitzhugh Lee entered frontier lore once more in a legendary hand-to-hand duel along Pecan Bayou, near modern-day Brownwood, Texas. A fierce “blue norther” had swept the plains; the temperature had plummeted below freezing, with snow and sleet covering the ground.
A Comanche raiding party had struck local ranches, stealing horses and slaughtering cattle. Lieutenant Fitzhugh Lee, accompanied by a small detachment of fourteen dragoons, tracked the raiders through the sleet for three days, following their trail by the bloody hoofprints in the frozen crust.
Near Pecan Bayou, Fitz surprised the Comanches in a dense cedar brake.
The horsemen scattered, and Fitz spurred his mount in pursuit of a massive Comanche warrior who was fleeing on foot toward a steep limestone bluff.
As Fitz galloped up, drawing his revolver, the warrior wheeled around, raised his rifle, and fired; the bullet whistled past Fitz’s ear, grazing his cheek.
Fitz leveled his revolver and pulled the trigger. Once again, as if cursed by frontier ironies, the freezing sleet had dampened the percussion powder: his pistol failed to fire! The warrior dropped his empty rifle, drew a long hunting knife, and lunged directly for Fitz’s stirrup.
Without hesitating for a second, Fitzhugh Lee dropped his useless pistol, vaulted from the saddle of his galloping horse, and tackled the Comanche in mid-air. The two muscular titans slammed into the freezing mud and ice, rolling over and over in a savage, life-and-death wrestling match. The Comanche was greasy with bear fat, squirming like an eel, stabbing ferociously with his knife, tearing Fitz’s coat to ribbons.
Fitz managed to seize the warrior’s wrist with his left hand, locking the knife away, but his boots were slipping on the frozen ice, and the Indian was slowly overpowering him by sheer leverage.
In that desperate split-second, Fitz’s mind flashed back to his boyhood days at Clermont and the wrestling mats at West Point. He remembered a classic, old-fashioned schoolboy wrestling trick known across the South as the “Virginia Heel.”
Hooking his right heel suddenly behind the Comanche’s left ankle, Fitz threw his entire massive, two-hundred-pound weight forward, executing a violent, twisting hip toss. The warrior was tripped off balance, his heels flying into the air, and he crashed violently backward onto the frozen ground, the back of his skull striking a limestone boulder with a dull, sickening thud.
Dazed and stunned, the warrior lost his grip on the knife; Fitz pinned his arms to the earth, wrested the weapon from his fingers, and subdued him. The exploit was celebrated across Texas.
Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, General-in-Chief of the United States Army, was so impressed by Fitzhugh Lee’s coolness, gallantry, and hand-to-hand skill at Crooked Creek and Pecan Bayou that he published a special General Order to the Army, officially citing First Lieutenant Fitzhugh Lee for distinguished valor in the presence of the enemy.
In the autumn of 1860, in recognition of his brilliant horsemanship and combat record, Fitzhugh Lee was assigned to a prestigious post: he was ordered back to West Point to serve as Assistant Instructor of Cavalry Tactics.
Returning to the Academy as a twenty-five-year-old frontier hero, his chest scarred by Comanche arrows, Fitz was an idol to the cadet corps. In the riding hall and on the plain, Lieutenant Fitzhugh Lee instructed a brilliant, spirited class of cadets in the art of the mounted charge, the use of the sabre, and cavalry reconnaissance.
Among the young men who rode beneath his watchful eye and learned cavalry tactics from his lips were future adversaries who would soon face him on the battlefields of Virginia: George Armstrong Custer, Wesley Merritt, Judson Kilpatrick, and James Harrison Wilson.
Then politics intervened.
Abraham Lincoln was elected; South Carolina seceded; the deep South followed. In April 1861, Fort Sumter fell, and on April 17, the Virginia Convention passed the Ordinance of Secession.
For Fitzhugh Lee, there was no agonizing, prolonged soul-searching. He loved the United States Army; he was proud of the 2nd Cavalry; and he held no personal hatred toward the North. Yet he was a Virginian, the son of Smith Lee, the nephew of Robert E. Lee, and the grandson of George Mason. His allegiance belonged to the Old Dominion.
In late May 1861, First Lieutenant Fitzhugh Lee sat down at his desk at West Point, penned his formal resignation from the United States Army, shook hands with his northern comrades, and boarded the train for Richmond.
The frontier phase of his life was finished; the grand, bloody drama of the Civil War was about to begin.
