Dates:
Known for: great-granddaughter of Martha Washington; wife of Robert E. Lee
Also known as: Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee, Mary Anne Custis Lee, Mary Ann Custis Lee
About Mary Custis Lee:
She was courted by Sam Houston, and rejected his suit. Later, she married Robert E. Lee, a distant relative, after his graduation from West Point. (They had common ancestors Robert Carter I, Richard Lee II and William Randolph, making them respectively third cousins, third cousins once removed, and fourth cousins.)
Highly religious from a young age, Mary Custis Lee was often troubled by illness. As the wife of a military officer, she traveled with him, though she was most happy at her family home in Arlington, Virginia.
Eventually, the Lees had seven children, with Mary often suffering from illness and various disabilities.
When Virginia joined the Confederate States of America at the beginning of the Civil War, Robert E. Lee resigned his commission with the federal army and accepted a commission in the army of Virginia. With some delay, Mary Custis Lee was convinced to pack up many of the family's belongings and move out of the home at Arlington, because its nearness to Washington, D.C., would make it a target for confiscation by the Union forces. And so it was -- for failure to pay taxes, though an attempt to pay the taxes was apparently refused. She spent many years after the war ended trying to regain possession of her Arlington home.
Robert returned after the surrender of the Confederacy, and they moved to Lexington, Virginia, where he became president of Washington College.
During the war, many of the family possessions inherited from the Washingtons were buried for safety; after the war many were found to have been damaged, but some -- the silver, some carpets, some letters among them -- survived. Those that had been left in the Arlington home were declared by Congress to be the property of the American people.
Neither Robert E. Lee nor Mary Custis Lee survived many years after the end of the Civil War. He died in 1870. Arthritis plagued Mary Custis Lee in her later years, and she died in Lexington on November 5, 1873 -- after making one trip to see her old home. In 1882, the U.S. Supreme Court in a ruling returned the home to the family, but Mary and Robert's son, Custis, sold it back to the government.
