[1] He attended boarding schools during much of the 1850s, while his father, a career U.S. Army officer, was serving in the Mexican–American War and as Superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.

[1] When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, his father and his two older brothers, Custis and Rooney, all chose to serve Virginia in the Confederate Army.

Junior stood by expecting to hear a few words of affection from his father, but Lee did not recognize his own son, hidden by the grime of black powder on his face.

[2] After the Maryland Campaign, he was promoted to lieutenant and assigned as an aide to his older brother General William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, rising to the rank of captain before the end of the war.

He turned south and was in the room in Greensboro, North Carolina, when Jefferson Davis got confirmation that the elder Lee had surrendered at Appomattox.

After the war, Lee lived and farmed Romancoke Plantation on the north bank of the Pamunkey River in King William County, which he inherited from his maternal grandfather George Washington Parke Custis.