Arthur and Sue Walenta

By the time Robert E. Lee was born in 1807, slavery had spread widely across the American landscape but was concentrated in the Deep South, in cotton-growing areas. Lee's home in northern Virginia, the so-called Upper South, grew almost no cotton. The cash crops of Virginia were tobacco, corn, and wheat, and its beautiful and bountiful Shenandoah Valley represented, for its day, what California's agriculturally rich Central Valley does today. But the horrific Virginia practice of breeding slaves for markets further south, the internal slave trade (the British Royal Navy having ended external slaving) drove some Virginia slaves to revolt, Nat Turner a case in point.

There, in what locals call the Old Dominion, 26 Cal alumni and I last fall set out to discover the real Robert E. Lee—not the man of marble or the ubiquitous general on horseback. With this Bear Trek, we commenced a three-phase American Civil War journey, each of which involved a two-week visit to sites designed around a key general—Lee, Grant, and Sherman—and a key region—the Upper South, the Mississippi West, and the Deep South.

By the time Lee was born, his Virginia homeland had already been a staging ground for much of America's history. Captain John Smith and company landed in Virginia in 1607 and founded the first British colony in North America, at Jamestown. During the American Revolution, the hotheaded patriot Patrick Henry of Virginia demanded either liberty or death, and Virginians Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, respectively. And four of the first five presidents were from Virginia.

Lee, a southern anti-secessionist, considered himself a Whig. But the death of the Whig Party in 1860 left Lee without a political rudder. Adrift, he followed his state into rebellion in 1861. Originally offered command of the Union Army by Abraham Lincoln, he instead accepted command of the Confederate forces. Localism helps explain why.

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