Lee had a privileged upbringing typical of the planter class. A member of the American gentry, her family were one of the First Families of Virginia. She was a sickly child, often travelling around to various natural springs in Virginia with her mother in search of healing benefits.[1] When she was seven years old, Lee suffered from an eye injury.[1][3] While away at boarding school in 1857, she was sent home with an intestinal problem.[1] Lee helped educate her younger sister, Mildred, and prepared her for life at boarding school.[1] She also taught some of the enslaved children on her family's plantation to read and write, even though this was illegal in Virginia.[1][4]
When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, Lee was sent with her sister, Agnes, to Ravensworth, their cousin's plantation in Fairfax County, Virginia.[1] She brought along the family silver and portraits for safekeeping.[1] That spring, she joined her mother and sister at White House, another relative's plantation along the Pamunkey River.[1] The family were placed under house arrest by the Union Army but were released after General George B. McClellan arranged for them to be sent across Confederate lines to join Robert E. Lee in Richmond.[1]
In August 1862 Lee contracted typhoid fever.[1][4] She and Agnes moved to Jones Springs, a mineral spring in Warren County, North Carolina, in an effort to improve her health.[1][5] Her state continued to decline and, after a few weeks, her mother came down from Virginia to nurse her.[1] She died on October 20, 1862, in the presence of her mother and sister.[1][6] Upon learning of her death, her father wrote, "To know that I shall never see her again on earth, that her place in our circle which I always hope one day to rejoin is forever vacant, is agonizing in the extreme."[1] She was buried in North Carolina in the Jones family's cemetery.[7][8] In 1866, a group of women had an obelisk, known as the Anne Carter Lee Monument, built at her gravesite.[5][9] In 1994, members of the Lee family arranged for her remains to be brought to Lexington, Virginia, where she was reinterred in the University Chapel.[1][8] The moving of her remains had been protested by local chapters of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and members of the Military Order of the Stars and Bars, who wanted the body to stay in North Carolina.[5]
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Anne_Carter_Lee, and is written by contributors.
Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.