Robert E. Lee was born on January 19, 1807, at Stratford Hall, entering a world that would eventually pull him into the defining conflict of nineteenth-century American life. He held citizenship in the United States and, later, in the Confederate States of America, a dual civic identity that reflected the fracture running through the country during his lifetime. His native language was English, and his career unfolded against a backdrop of military service that consumed most of his adult years.

Lee received his education at the United States Military Academy, the institution that set the course for a long career in uniform. His occupations over the years included service as a soldier and army officer, but also work as a cartographer, a technical dimension that placed him among those who combined fieldwork with precision mapping. That range of skills ran alongside his more visible roles in command.

When the Civil War began, Lee's career took on its most consequential shape. He took command of the Army of Northern Virginia in 1862 and led that force through years of fighting until its surrender in 1865. Near the end of the war, he was also appointed overall commander of the Confederate States Army, a role that placed him at the top of the Confederate military structure during its final months. These two commands, one sustained over years and one held briefly at the close, defined the arc of his wartime service as a Confederate general.

Lee died on October 12, 1870, in Lexington, roughly five years after the war's end. The Library of Congress records him under the authorized label "Lee, Robert E. (Robert Edward), 1807–1870," a designation that traces the full span of a life that began at Stratford Hall and ended in Lexington.