Robert E. Lee’s son Rooney slated for execution

   Behind-the-ranks drama played out in mid-1863. Two Kentucky cavalrymen, William F. Corbin and Thomas J. McGraw, were caught in Kentucky recruiting for a new company. The district commander, Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside, quickly issued an order, stating that anyone caught recruiting “behind the lines” was to be treated as a spy and executed. Confederate officials in Richmond ordered the commander of Libby Prison to select two captured Federal officers to execute in retaliation. With word passing between the lines of the measure, Federal General in Chief Henry Hallack ordered two additional Confederate officers to be held, ready for execution, if the Confederates carried through with their plans. You can read more of this back story here and here.

   One of the Confederate officers selected for retaliatory measures was Robert E. Lee’s son, Rooney Lee. William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, called Rooney by his family, was born May 31, 1837, at Arlington, the third son of Robert and Mary Custis Lee. He attended Harvard University, but withdrew before graduating, being commissioned as a lieutenant in the 6^th United States Infantry in 1857. He served two years in Utah and California before resigning and farming at “White Hall,” on the Virginia Peninsula.[1]

   Rooney was commissioned a captain of cavalry in May 1861, rising to the rank of colonel, 9^th Virginia Cavalry, by April 1862. He was extremely active in many of Stuart’s escapades, from the ride around McClellan, the Seven Days, and at Turner’s Gap in the Maryland Campaign. Twice, Stuart recommended Lee for promotion to brigadier general, a promotion which finally came in November 1862. Lee commanded a brigade composed of the 2nd North Carolina Cavalry, 9^th, 10^th, 13^th, and 15^th Virginia Cavalry. Lee battled Stoneman during the Chancellorsville campaign. 

W.H.F. Lee

   While fighting on June 9, 1863, at Brandy Station, Rooney was wounded in the thigh. Robert E. Lee instructed that his son be taken to the Hill Mansion in Culpeper, when he visited him that evening. The next day, Rooney was taken to Hickory Hill, the home of his wife’s family, in Hanover County. Rob, Robert E. Lee’s youngest son, took Rooney to Hickory Hill, where they were joined by their mother and two sisters. Members of the 11^th Pennsylvavia Cavalry paid Hickory Hill a visit on June 26, capturing Rooney and incarcerating him at Fort Monroe the following day.[2]

   Rooney Lee’s arrival at Fort Monroe coincided with the debate regarding retaliation for the plight of the Kentucky Confederates. The names of two Federal captains imprisoned at Libby Prison were drawn on July 6, and word passed to Lt. Col. William H. Ludlow. Ludlow obviously informed his superior, for on July 12, he recommended that two Confederate officers who were prisoners of war be selected for retaliation if the two Federals were executed. On July 15, Henry Halleck ordered Ludlow to “immediately place General W.H.F. Lee and another officer selected by you not below the rank of captain, prisoner of war, in close confinement and under strong guard, and that you notify Mr. R. Ould…that if…Sawyer…and…Flinn… or any other officers or men in the service of the United States not guilty of crimes punishable with death by the laws of war, shall be executed by the enemy, the aforementioned prisoners will be hung in retaliation.”[3]

   Robert E. Lee learned about his son’s capture on July 7, while on the way back from the Gettysburg campaign.[4] Word of the holding of Rooney Lee and another officer spread via newspapers. “Prominent Rebel Officers Held as Hostages,” reported one Massachusetts paper. While the newspaper had the wrong Lee – it was G.W.C. Lee and not Fitz Hugh Lee, the paper reported that the officers “were removed from the McClellan hospital to Fortress Monroe, and placed in a casemate under guard, and notice sent to the rebel government that if they executed Capts. Sawyer and Flynn, whom they now have in close confinement and under sentence in Richmond, that Gen. Lee and Capt. Winder will be executed in retaliation.”[5]

   The Daily Richmond Whig reported that the execution of Lee and the other officer took place, then “the black flag will be immediately raised in every army, and the war will be horrible but short.”[6] Tensions remained high through August. Ludlow still believed that Sawyer and Flinn could be executed.[7]

  Of course Robert E. Lee and other members of his family, include Rooney’s wife Charlotte, were worried about the wounded officer. On August 2, 1863, Lee wrote Mary that he had heard that Rooney was up walking around on crutches. Charlotte was planning to try to visit Rooney at Fort Monroe, but Lee counseled against it. “The only way of accomplishing it is to get permission from Mr. Secretary Stanton in Washington through Mr. [Robert] Ould to take the flag of truce boat to Old Point. I do not think he would grant it in her case. It having been refused to others, which they would not feel as much objection in obliging, & I believe their permission is always coupled with the obligation to take the oath of allegiance to the U.S.”[8]

   Rooney’s confinement at Fort Monroe brought problems for the officers in charge. Local ladies weekly brought baskets of delicacies to Rooney.[9] Brig. Gen. S.D. Meredith complained in November 1863 that Rooney needed to be moved to some other “point where he will not be lionized as he is here. No prisoner of ours, whatever his rank, receives such treatment in Richmond.” It was recommended that Rooney be sent to Johnson’s Island, the same place where the two Kentucky officers were executed. The order for Rooney’s move to Johnson’s Island came on November 10. A day later, that order was changed and Rooney was sent to Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor.[10]

   Rooney’s wife, Charlotte Wickham, was never well, especially after Rooney was kidnapped by the Federals from her family’s home. Mary Chesnut, in her diary, recorded that Custis Lee, another of Robert E. Lee’s sons, even “offered himself to the Yankees in place of his brother, as he was a single man with no wife and children to be hurt by his imprisonment .   . . But the Yankees preferred Rooney.”[11] Charlotte died on December 26, 1863. Rooney was finally exchanged for Sawyer and paroled in March 1864. He rejoined the cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia and was promoted to major general on April 23, 1864. When Wade Hampton, who replaced Stuart, transferred to South Carolina, Rooney commanded the Confederate cavalry south of the James River. Rooney Lee surrendered and was paroled at Appomattox.

   After the war, Rooney returned to farming, later serving as president of the Virginia Agricultural Society, then four years in the Virginia Senate, and several terms in the United States House of Representatives. He died in 1891. Jeffry Wert considered Rooney Lee “one of the finest generals in the cavalry corps of the Army of Northern Virgina.”[12]

 

 

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[1] Davis, ed., The Confederate General, 4:65.

[2] Knight, From Arlington to Appomattox, 281, 286.

[3] Official Records, Series II, 6:118.

[4] Knight, From Arlington to Appomattox, 296.

[5] The Standard-Times, July 18, 1863.

[6] Richmond Daily Whig, July 14, 1863.

[7] Official Records, Series II, 6:219.

[8] Dowdey and Manarin, Wartime Papers, 567.

[9] Pryor, Reading the Man, 367.

[10] Official Records, Series II, 6:484, 485, 495, 500.

[11] Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 450.

[12] Davis, ed., The Confederate General, 4:67.

French Blockade Runner? The arrest of Louis de Bebian.

   While the exact number of citizens arrested by the Lincoln Administration during the war is unknown (13,000-38,000) we really know the stories of only a handful. Clement Vallandingham and Rose O’Neal Greenhow come to mind. Louis de Bebian is not one of those names, but, in August 1861, he was arrested.

   Louis was born in 1829 on the French Island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. In 1855, he moved with his family to Wilmington, North Carolina, where he taught French and worked as a partner in O. G. Parsely & Company, lumber and commission merchants. Once the war commenced, he engaged in blockade running, traveling through the French Antilles, working on acquiring supplies for the Confederacy. It was determined to send de Babian to England and France, and on August 6, 1861, he boarded the schooner Adelso in Wilmington, bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia. Running into bad weather, the Adelso was forced to put into port in Newport, Rhode Island, on August 12. Upon hearing that the Adelso had sailed from a Southern Port, the USS Henrietta seized the ship’s cargo of spirits, turpentine, and rosin, and de Bebian.

William H. Seward

   No one was allowed to leave the Adelso, and all of the papers on board were seized. While de Bebian claimed to be simply a passenger, among the papers in his trunk was a letter authorizing him to purchase between 5,000 to 0,000 “army blankets,” 1,000 bags of coffee, “tons of iron of various sizes,” along with personal clothing. The items were to be shipped on a British or French vessel. Included were instructions on how to signal the shore once the vessel was off the coast of Wilmington, so a pilot could be sent out to guide the vessel into the Cape Fear River. Because of his French citizenship, he was allowed to go ashore on August 17, the same day that he made an affidavit stating he was simply a passenger. But de Babian was arrested on William H. Seward’s order on August 19 and sent to Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor. S, W. Macy, the collector at the port of Newport, found de Babian’s demeanor pleasant at first, but on his arrest, he “commenced abusing both the Government and the people of the United States… He also stated that he should go to England and blow the United States to hell, and then he would go to France and return with fifty ships of war and have full redress…” 

   A lengthy paper trail soon developed. De Bebian wrote Count Montholon, the French Consul in New York, of his plight. He then wrote to Price Napoleon, and the French Consul in Washington, D.C.  De Babian’s children, who lived in New York City, wrote to both the French Consul in New York, and to Seward, asking for their father’s release. In September, due to an attack of “violent diarrhoea,” de Bebian was paroled and allowed to visit his family in New York, a parole that was extended. In the meantime, but to the chagrin of Seward, the incriminating papers found in de Bebian’s trunks, were lost. On October 4, Seward ordered the release of de Bebian, and about a month later, he was on his way to Britain and France. Once in France, de Bebian complained of his treatment, and the loss of his papers, which the French Consul in Washington took up, asking for indemnity. Eventually, Seward came to the conclusion that de Bebian was not an “innocent passenger,” nor was the Adelso “a neutral vessel.”[1]

   Louis de Bebian spent little time in Europe. A North Carolina newspaper reported that after he was released, Seward granted him a passport, with an endorsement that de Bebian was “not to enter into any of the insurrectionary States.” He sailed to Britain, and then France, where he met with Emperor Napoleon. “The Emperor said that he should be allowed to return to his place of business, and the French Minister of Foreign Affairs prepared the necessary papers for the French minister at Washington.” De Bebian “returned to Washington and applied for a passport to Wilmington, but Seward refused it. The next day the French minister called on Seward and showed his papers, when Seward granted the passport.”[2] De Bebian was reported to be in Norfolk, Virginia, on February 4.[3]

Emperor Napoleon III 

   There is not much of a record of de Bebian for the rest of the War. Following the conflict, he moved to New York City, becoming an agent for a French steamer company. Louis de Bebian passed in December 1893, and is buried in the Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx County, New York. An obituary on findagrave states that his casket was carried into the church by twelve French sailors, all in uniform. It is not really clear just who de Bebian was working for. While he denounced the United States government, he might have just been seeking stock for his company. He does not appear in Bullock’s The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe, or in Wise’s Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running During the Civil Way. De Bebian’s arrest and imprisonment could have caused an international incident with France, something that Seward and the Lincoln administration wished to avoid.

 

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[1] Official Records, Series II, Vol. 2, 432-455.

[2] Fayetteville Semi-Weekly, February 6, 1862.

[3] The Daily Journal, February 5, 1862.