MR. BFRY BREAKS DOWN YOUR WORLD

Rebel General, College President, Gentleman

Slideshow: Photographs of Washington and Lee University

By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER

Lexington, Va.

By the time Robert E. Lee reluctantly became its president, five months after surrendering at Appomattox, the institution then known as Washington College had a long history and a striking campus. It traced its origins, somewhat uncertainly, to a Presbyterian boys' school founded about 1749, and with more assurance to a school that existed in a different location by 1773. The pleasing row of colonnaded college buildings that greeted Lee in September 1865 had been finished in the 1840s, complete with a statue of the college's famous benefactor, George Washington, that stood atop the cupola of the center building. Flanking the row were four handsome Greek Revival houses, one of which had been promised to Lee.

But the war had left the college a shambles and its once-splendid endowment practically worthless. Most of its hundred or so students had enlisted in the Confederate Army — a company of students and alumni known as the Liberty Hall Volunteers stayed together, despite casualties, throughout the war — and the college itself had narrowly escaped destruction by Union troops. It had survived the war years with a handful of faculty members teaching a few schoolboys too young to fight. The trustee dispatched to seek Lee out and offer him the presidency, Judge John Brockenbrough, did so with borrowed money and in a borrowed suit, and the house promised to Lee was still occupied by a renter when he arrived.

Within a few years, though, the college had an enrollment of 400 and a faculty numbering more than 20. The existing buildings had been repaired, thanks partly to the influx of tuition payments, and new buildings had been added — a gymnasium, a chapel, a dining hall. Among academic purchases had been thousands of library books and an orrery — a machine that demonstrated the movement of the solar system's known planets — as big as a small room. Lee had incorporated an existing law school into the institution, started programs in business and journalism, and begun contemplating an agriculture program, all as part of a strategy to add elements of practical modern instruction to the college's classical education.

Besides working closely with the faculty, Lee also brought the college to the attention of several wealthy donors, including Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the reaper; William W. Corcoran, a Washington banker; and George Peabody, a Massachusetts philanthropist. He took a personal interest in the progress of every student, at the same time sweeping aside a maze of old rules and regulations and replacing them with a single admonition: Students should behave like gentlemen.

Perhaps it was not a surprise that Lee succeeded so well as a college president. Trained as an engineer at the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., he was hard-working, thoughtful, articulate, and endearingly modest. A capable field commander, he was also experienced as an educator: From 1852 to 1855 he served as superintendent at West Point. But what is a surprise is how well what is now called Washington and Lee University has preserved his legacy, which survives in everyday interactions on the campus as well as in a small but rewarding museum in the chapel that Lee built. At a time when many colleges struggle to give students any sense of connection to those who preceded them, Washington and Lee seems to do so comfortably and as a matter of course.

According to Taylor Sanders, a history professor, the university's 2,150 students feel Lee's influence daily in a longstanding tradition he is credited with beginning — "that at Washington and Lee you always speak to everyone you meet on the campus."

And Lee's requirement that students behave like gentlemen is the basis of the institution's honor system, which is administered entirely by students and extends beyond the classroom to cover their behavior in dormitories, on playing fields, and in downtown Lexington. Mr. Sanders also notes that Lee was the first president of the college to allow students to form fraternities, which became an important part of life on the campus: "He knew boys like to join things." The Kappa Alpha Order, a national fraternity founded by four Washington College students in December of 1865, chose Lee as the role model for its members.

The Lee Chapel and Museum is a more tangible reminder of Lee's time in Lexington, and it serves an unusual dual purpose. It accommodates thousands of vacationers and Civil War buffs who come to this small, hilly town eager to see Lee's final resting place, in a family crypt just across from the lower-level room Lee used as his office once the chapel was completed. It also celebrates the university's history, marking not only Lee's contributions but also those of the institution's earliest backers, from obscure Presbyterian preachers to President Washington, to whom Lee was related by marriage. Patricia A. Hobbs, director of the museum, says it has about 60,000 visitors a year.

Exhibits include a number of portraits donated by the Lee family, including a Charles Willson Peale portrait of Washington; drawings Lee did as an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers; the trousers of a Washington College student wounded in action during the Civil War; and the letter in which Lee accepted the college presidency — even though he worried that he might still be prosecuted for his role in the war and might "draw upon the College a feeling of hostility" in some quarters. Also on display are a photograph of Lee on his horse, Traveller, and a watch chain fashioned from strands of Traveller's mane. The horse's bones, dug up from his original burial site and later displayed on the campus for decades, are now interred just outside the chapel, near the crypt. Visitors leave pennies and sometimes apples and carrots on the stone marking the site.

The museum also displays artifacts from before and after Lee's presidency. A 1798 letter from George Washington, for instance, thanks the trustees for renaming what had been called Liberty Hall Academy in his honor — a move the trustees made after Washington donated 100 shares of James River Company stock that was worth tens of thousands of dollars. The three-story stone building that then housed the academy, by way of comparison, was valued at $3,500. Also on view are pieces of crockery and other items discovered during an archaeological dig at the ruins of that same stone building, which burned in 1803 and left two outer walls that still stand on a hill beyond the football stadium. A more modern artifact is a copy of the 1975 act of Congress restoring Lee's citizenship.

The plain, red-brick chapel was designed by an engineer from the neighboring Virginia Military Institute, Col. Thomas Williamson. (A colleague from the military institute, C.W. Oltmanns, designed the spacious new house that Lee and his family moved to — and that is still the university president's house.) In addition to two galleries, the museum includes Lee's carefully preserved office, the chapel proper, and a memorial chamber behind the chapel that houses a large statue of Lee asleep in his uniform on a camp cot. The chapel, which seats about 525, is still the university's largest assembly hall, and it is regularly used for all kinds of university events. "It's an active, living, breathing building," Ms. Hobbs says, but it's also one in which it's impossible not to think about the university's long history.

Not everything about that history strikes modern visitors as praiseworthy, of course. Women were not admitted as undergraduates until 1985. Before 1966, the institution had enrolled only one black student — in 1795. A cheating scandal rocked the football team in the 1950s. And Mr. Sanders recalls that in the early 1800s a future United States senator, John J. Crittenden, "was expelled for calling the food slop and attacking the steward with a knife."

Plenty of other colleges and universities, of course, have histories nearly as interesting as Washington and Lee's, even if they don't number famous generals among their presidents. But hardly any put their histories on display in any engaging fashion — often the best that can be hoped for is a dry book by a retired history professor, supplemented by portraits of dead presidents in the administration building. Lee's years in Lexington, by contrast, spring to life not only in the university museum but also in a well-researched 1981 account by Charles Bracelen Flood, Lee: The Last Years (Houghton Mifflin), which was assembled partly from papers in the university archives.

Lee died October 12, 1870, after a stroke that followed a period of declining health. A photograph in the museum shows the columns of the familiar colonnade wrapped in mourning, and a huge crowd outside the chapel, where Lee's body lay. It's a moving scene, itself as telling a memorial as any man could have.