Who was Robert E. Lee? What is his history as a slave owner?

A career army officer, Lee didn't have much wealth, but he inherited a few slaves from his mother. Still, Lee married into one of the wealthiest slave-holding families in Virginia - the Custis family of Arlington and descendants of Martha Washington. When Lee's father-in-law died, he took leave from the US Army to run the struggling estate and met resistance from slaves expecting to be freed. Documents show Lee was cruel to his slaves and encouraged his overseers to severely beat slaves captured after trying to escape. Historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor said in a 2008 American Heritage article that Lee was angry about the slaves' demands for freedom and "resorted to increasingly harsh measures to maintain control," breaking up most slave families. One slave at Arlington, Pryor noted, called Lee, "the worst man I ever see." In an 1856 letter to his wife, Lee wrote that slavery is "a moral & political evil." Lee also wrote in the same letter that God would be the one responsible for emancipation and that blacks were better off in the US than Africa.