"My mother I could sometimes circumvent and at times took liberties with orders, construing them to suit myself, but exact obedience to every mandate of my father was a part of my life and being at that time."  Robert E. Lee Jr. 


Born in 1843, Rob was away from Arlington at various boarding schools during for much of the 1850s and entered the University of Virginia in the fall of 1860. He seems to have been the only one of the Lee boys who did not seriously consider a military career before the War


However, when the war came, in spite of his mother's understandable concern, he enlisted in the “Rockbridge Artillery” as a private in 1862. Before very long he was appointed a Captain and served as aide to his brother Custis.


After the war he returned to Romancock, his inheritance from his grandfather George Washington Parke Custis, and eventually started a private business. He married twice: to Charlotte Haxall (November 1871) and, after her death, to Juliet Carter (1894).


Rob died in 1916. The room most closely associated with him at Arlington was no doubt the boys' chamber, which he may have occupied as a single room much of the time when his older brothers were away and when there were no male guests at Arlington.


In his own memory, perhaps the larger hall (after 1855, the white parlor) stood out. There, the whole family assembled to greet Robert E. Lee, Sr. upon his safe return from the Mexican War in 1848. The junior Lee and his namesake had never seen one another. To his everlasting chagrin, Rob's father did not recognize him and mistakenly embraced his playmate, Armisted Lippit, instead.


Rob recorded his memories of his family and life at Arlington in Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee, published in 1904. This firsthand account remains a valuable source of information on day-to-day life at Arlington House. Through Rob and his older brother Rooney, there are over twenty direct descendants of Mary and Robert E. Lee alive today."