By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 12, 2007; C01

RICHMOND Two old steamer trunks sit in the rare-book room at the Virginia Historical Society, looking worn and forlorn. The smaller one was once red but the paint has faded to a dull rust. The larger one is brown with a piece of tin patching a hole in the top. On one side, a name is stenciled: "M. LEE."

That's Mary Custis Lee, Gen. Robert E. Lee's adventurous eldest daughter. In 1917, she stored these wooden trunks in the "silver vault" in the basement of Burke & Herbert Bank & Trust in Alexandria. A year later, she died at the age of 83. Her trunks sat in a dusty corner of the vault for 84 years, unclaimed, until E. Hunt Burke, the bank's vice chairman, discovered them in 2002.

Burke called his high school classmate Rob E.L. deButts Jr., who is Robert E. Lee's great-great-grandson. Together, the two men descended into the vault. Burke carried a basket of old keys.

"The first one I pulled out was a perfect fit," he says.

The trunks were stuffed with Lee family papers -- a priceless cache of 4,000 letters, photographs and documents. DeButts carted them to the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, which houses the world's largest collection of Lee papers. He spent a week there, sitting at a desk in the research library, reaching into Mary Custis Lee's trunks and picking out treasures and trash.

"He'd pull out a pile of her postcards and then he'd pull out something from the Colonial period and then he'd pull out letters from Robert E. Lee," says Lee Shepard, the society's senior archivist. "There was no rhyme or reason to it. She was the unofficial family historian, but she was also a bit of a pack rat."

One day, deButts called Shepard's office from the library. "You have got to come down here," he said, sounding excited. Shepard hustled downstairs and deButts showed him what he'd just picked out of the trunk: an envelope containing three cloth stars -- general's stars -- that Lee cut off his Confederate uniform after he surrendered at Appomattox.

A few weeks ago, Shepard opened the Mary Custis Lee papers to the public. It's a strange and eclectic collection. There are postcards that Mary Custis Lee gathered in Paris, Egypt and Atlantic City. And a fan she picked up in China. And a dried rose she plucked in a garden in Khartoum. There's a list of 266 slaves owned by one of her ancestors in 1766. And an account book kept by her mother's step-great-grandfather, George Washington. There's a handful of letters her father wrote to her during the Civil War. And another collection of letters that illuminate -- but do not quite solve -- the mystery of how Robert E. Lee's daughter happened to be arrested in Alexandria in 1902 for refusing to leave the black section of a trolley car.

On Christmas Day 1861 -- the first Christmas of the Civil War -- Robert E. Lee took a piece of white paper, folded it to make a four-page booklet, and wrote a letter to his daughter Mary.

"Having distributed such poor Xmas gifts as I had to those around me, I have been looking for something for you," Lee wrote. "I send you some sweet violets that I gathered for you this morning while covered with dense white frost that glistened in the bright sun like diamonds and formed a broche of rare beauty and sweetness, which could not be fabricated by the expenditure of a world of money. Yet how little it will purchase. But see how God provides for our pleasure in every way. May he guard and preserve you for me, my dear daughter. Among the calamities of war the hardest to bear perhaps is the separation of families and friends."

It's a sweet, sentimental letter, but only for a while. When the general brings up a painful subject -- the fact that their estate, Arlington, has been occupied by the Union Army -- his anger is palpable.

"Your old home if not destroyed by our enemies has been so desecrated that I cannot bear to think of it," he writes. "I should have preferred it to have been wiped from the earth, its beautiful hill sunk, its sacred trees burned rather than to have been degraded by the presence of those who revel in the ill they do for their own selfish purposes."

It was typical of the letters that Lee wrote to his seven children -- lyrical, passionate and filled with sometimes contradictory emotions.

"He's a marvelous letter-writer -- expressive, lusty, funny, charming," says Elizabeth Brown Pryor, author of "Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters," which was published this spring. "You have a very real, emotional person who's writing these letters."

Pryor included letters from the trunk in her book. They reveal a man who is much more complex and emotional than the aloof "marble man" portrayed in most biographies. "Far from being this remote person, he's telling us what it was like to be there and what it was like to be him," she says. "He is a very complex, vulnerable, engaging yet troublesome human being."

On Sept. 23, 1862 -- a few days after Lee's army retreated to Virginia after an unsuccessful invasion of Maryland -- the general wrote to Mary on a piece of cheap blue paper. Now, nearly 144 years later, the words are barely legible. "We had two hard fought battles in Maryland and did not consider ourselves beaten as our enemies supposed," he wrote. "We were greatly outnumbered and opposed by double if not treble our strength and yet we repulsed all their attacks, held our ground and retired when it suited our convenience."

That's an interesting spin on the Battle of Antietam, an event that Abraham Lincoln considered a Union victory.

Lee was far less sanguine two months later, when he wrote to Mary after learning that his daughter Anne had died of typhoid fever at age 23. "In the quiet hours of night when there is nothing to lighten the full weight of my grief, I feel as if I should be overwhelmed. I had always counted, if God should spare me for a few days of peace after this civil war has ended, that I should have her with me. But year after year my hopes go out and I must be resigned."

"The fantastic thing about these wartime letters is that he's still open," Pryor says. "He allows himself to be amazingly vulnerable. Even during the war, they're very personal, very revealing letters."

Pryor was the first historian to see the letters found in Mary Custis Lee's trunks. And she's the only historian who has read a batch of letters that Lee wrote to his fiancee, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, before the young Army engineer married the rich great-granddaughter of Martha Washington in 1831. At the request of the Lee family, those letters have not been opened to the public, but Shepard believes they will be available within a year or two.

"These letters sparkle with sexuality, and with an impatient young man who hates his boss," Pryor says. "Again, it's a very different person from this rather austere image that we've had. One of the great things about all these letters is that he had a great sense of humor, a laughing-out-loud-in-the-library sense of humor."

Sparkle with sexuality? Robert E. Lee?

"I don't know if I'd describe them quite that way -- but then again I'm a guy," says Shepard, laughing. "But they do provide a fresh perspective on their relationship. This was obviously not a marriage of convenience. I mean, he was crazy about her. He really was."

Buried deep in one of Mary Custis Lee's trunks was a letter that Selina Gray, a former slave at Arlington, wrote to Robert E. Lee's widow, the woman who'd once owned her. It's one of several letters to reveal the complex relationship between the Lees and African Americans.

"Mrs Lee, I received your letter and was happy to hear from you," Gray wrote in 1872, "and I was hoping to see you once more at Arlington."

Arlington had changed since Mrs. Lee had last seen it in 1861, when the Union Army occupied her family home. As Gen. Lee had predicted in that Christmas letter to Mary, the Yankees had not been kind to his property. In 1864, Quartermaster Gen. Montgomery Meigs, a Georgian who'd remained loyal to the Union, showed his contempt for Lee by burying more than 16,000 dead soldiers on Lee's lawn, which is now known as Arlington National Cemetery.

"The place is changed so you would hardly know it," Gray wrote to Mrs. Lee. "Your things at the time of the war was taken away by every body so the officers would have them in their tents and all over the ground . . . the book case that you speak of I cannot tell you any thing of it. I don't remember seeing it since you left. I suppose it was carried off like everything else."

After the war, the Union Army allowed hundreds of former slaves, known as freedmen, to settle on the Lee plantation. "The whole of it is rented to the freemen," Gray wrote. "They have little huts all over that beautiful place."

Gray reported that she was living near Alexandria in "a comfortable home of my own," and she updated Mrs. Lee on what some of her other former slaves were doing. Then she added a postscript that explained the item she'd enclosed in the letter: "This piece of green and this rose bud I send you is some that you planted at your mother grave."

The letter found its way into Mary Custis Lee's trunk. The rosebud from her grandmother's grave did not.

In 1874, the Lee family filed suit to reclaim its Arlington estate. In 1882, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in the family's favor, saying, in essence, that the government cannot seize a man's land simply because he has led an army of rebellion against that government. Of course, the family members did not want to live in a cemetery, so they agreed to accept $150,000 for the land -- a huge sum in those days.

By then, Mary Custis Lee, who never married, was traveling the world, leading a life of luxurious vagabondage. She spent months in London, Paris and Rome, and a year in Australia. She took a round-the-world cruise, stopping in Japan, China, India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Java. She traveled to Palestine, Egypt and Sudan, to Mexico, the West Indies, Venezuela. She met Queen Victoria and Pope Leo XIII and spent one memorable Christmas as the guest of an Indian maharajah.

"She was not shy about using her father's name to gain entry," Shepard says. "She hooked up with European nobility and was introduced into society, as the saying was."

She financed her trips with the dividends from her wealthy family's investments, Shepard says. "But a lot of it was the kindness of strangers," he adds. "Because of who she was, she got freebies."

Along the way, she picked up plenty of souvenirs, and her trunks were stuffed with them: A bill from the Palace Hotel in Milan. A menu from a restaurant in Paris. A book called "Italian Simplified." An Indian newspaper. A ticket to the pyramids of Egypt. A timeline of Portuguese history. A schedule for the "Fast Night Train" from Grand Central Station to the Adirondacks. A letter from novelist Henry James, responding to her request for an autograph. Plus dozens and dozens of postcards, including one showing Kaiser Wilhelm on the front and Lee's hand-scrawled comment on the back: "This is the way he looked the other day, poor fellow."

In the archive biz, such stuff is known as "ephemeral material" -- a nice way of saying junk -- and there was a lot of it packed into Mary Custis Lee's trunks. But buried among the ephemera -- and the priceless letters from her father -- was a packet of papers related to the events of June 13, 1902, when she was arrested in Alexandria.

"She was sitting in the African American portion of the streetcar and a conductor told her to move and she refused," Shepard says. "He came back and she refused again. They took her to the police station, and when they found out who she was, she was released."

"BREAKS COLOR LINE," reads the headline in an unidentified newspaper article found in her trunk.

"Miss Mary Custis Lee of Alexandria, Va., has some of her celebrated father's disinclination to yield ground in response to coercion," begins another article from the trunk, this one fastened together with a rusty pin. It ends with a bit of editorializing: "It is nothing but petty tyranny for the state of Virginia to prohibit Mary Custis Lee from riding with negroes if she choose to ride with them."

The arrest made news around the world, inspiring several people to write, congratulating the general's daughter for defying segregation. "Please accept my thanks for your human action in breaking the color line in the sunny south," wrote a man from Alberta, Canada. "Only a dear good girl with a Christian heart would do that. God will reward you for such kindness of heart."

Was Robert E. Lee's daughter, in some perverse way, a forerunner of Rosa Parks?

"She was perceived that way by some people," Shepard says. "I don't know if it's accurate or not."

One newspaper reported that she refused to move because her luggage was too heavy. Another reported that she refused because she was sitting with her black maid. Unfortunately, nothing found in her trunks clears up the mystery.

"It's something we need to do more research on," Shepard says.

He smiles. "My understanding is that Mary Custis Lee was a rather formidable person," he says. "She had a stubborn streak. You didn't want to mess with her."