Robert E. Lee — Portrait

In April 1861, Robert E. Lee was offered command of the army being raised to put down the rebellion. He was the obvious choice — thirty-two years in uniform, a brilliant engineer, the soldier Winfield Scott called the finest he had ever seen in the field.

He asked for a night to think and went home to Arlington, the house above the Potomac that had come to his wife through the Custis family and George Washington's household. He paced the floor above his family's heads until the small hours. He had argued against secession and called it revolution; he had written that he could see no greater calamity than a dissolution of the Union. He resigned anyway, on the grounds that he could not draw his sword against Virginia.

It cost him the house — the government buried its dead in the garden, which is why Arlington National Cemetery is there. It also arguably extended the war by two years. After Appomattox he refused every offer to trade on his name, took the presidency of a small bankrupt college in Lexington, and spent his last five years teaching.