G. W. Custis Lee
George Washington Custis Lee
b. 1832 · d. 1913
Eldest son of Robert E. Lee Robert E. Lee b. 1807 · d. 1870 United States Army officer who spent much of his childhood in Alexandria at the house on Oronoco Street before his West Point appointment, and who later commanded Confederate … and Mary Anna Custis Lee Mary Anna Custis Lee b. 1808 · d. 1873 Wife of , daughter of , and great-granddaughter of Martha Washington. Brought Arlington House and its Mount Vernon-derived collections into the Lee household. ; Confederate major general; later president of Washington and Lee University succeeding his father.
G. W. Custis Lee was born at 3200 Mount Vernon Memorial Highway 3200 Mount Vernon Memorial Highway Five-farm plantation on the Potomac owned by George Washington from 1761 until his death in 1799; home to Washington, his family, and more than three hundred enslaved people. … , the eldest son of Robert E. Lee and Mary Anna Custis Lee. He graduated first in his class at West Point in 1854, served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and resigned to join the Confederacy when his father did. He commanded a brigade in the closing campaigns of the war and was captured at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek (April 1865), days before Appomattox.
After the war he succeeded his father as president of Washington and Lee University, serving from 1871 to 1897. He inherited Arlington House and pursued a long legal action that won the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Lee (1882), confirming the Custis-Lee title to the property; he subsequently sold Arlington back to the federal government for $150,000.
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