Opening paragraphs.................

Robert Edward Lee was the less-than-longed-for fifth child of a mother in uncertain health and reduced financial straits struggling essentially alone to maintain the facade of family in a hold that was never hers.  The infant's father was a war hero in a war that had been over for a quarter century.  He was desperately in debt, in flight from his creditors, and apparently oblivious to the realities of his fading fame and absent integrity.  Robert had an inauspicious advent, and during his early childhood his family circumstances got worse.
-Emory M. Thomas,  Robert E. Lee:  A Biography