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

In October 1859, Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee, commanding the Second U. S. Calvary, in Texas, was home on leave, laboring to untangle the affairs of his late father-in-law's estate.  Despite a brilliant military career - many thought him the most capable officer in the U. S. Army - he was a disappointed man.  Nobody understood better than Lee how slowly promotion came in this tiny army, or knew more exactly how many officers were ahead of him in the all-important ranking of seniority and stood between him and the seemingly unreachable step of being made a permanent full colonel.  He did not suppose, given his age, which was fifty-two, that he would ever wear a brigadier general's single star, still less that fame and military glory awaited him, and although he was not the complaining type, he often expressed regret that he had chosen the army as a career.  An engineer of considerable ability - he was credited with making the mighty Mississippi navigable, which among other great benefits turned the sleepy town of Saint Louis into a thriving river port - he could have made his fortune had he resigned from the army to become a civil engineer.  Instead, he commanded a cavalry regiment hunting renegade Indians in a dusty corner of the Texas frontier, and not very successfully at that, and was now home, in his wife's mansion across the Potomac from Washington, methodically uncovering the debts and the problems of her father's estate, which seemed likely to plunge the Lees even further into land-poor misery.  Indeed, the shamefully run-down state of the Arlington mansion, the discontent of the slaves, he and his wife had inherited, and the long neglect of his father-in-law's plantations made it seem only too likely that Lee might have to resign his commission and spend his life as an impoverished country gentleman, trying to put things right for the sake of his wife and children.
-Michael Korda,  from the Preface to Clouds of Glory:  The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee