General Lee

Fold3 (not cheap, but probably worthwhile) has an article about Robert E. Lee:

12 October 1870: General Robert E. Lee dies"The education of a man is never completed until he dies" is a statement attributed to Robert E. Lee, whose education was completed in 1870 as death reached him only five years after surviving the Civil War as the head of the Army of the Confederate States of America (CSA).
General Lee died in Lexington, Virginia, on 12 October 1870, at the age of 63. Mourners at his funeral stood on the steps of Arlington House, the residence of the Lee and Custis families for decades, now known as The Robert E. Lee Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.
Lee was born on 19 January 1807, at his family's Stratford Hall plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia. After attending West Point, he forged a promising military career, distinguishing himself in the Mexican-American War. Later, he would command the CSA and, in the last years of his life, serve as president of Washington College, now Washington and Lee University.
Many more documents relating to Lee and his family can be found in Fold3's Civil War Collection.
As a second-year student at West Point in 1827, Cadet Robert E. Lee appears on a list of assistant professors at the academy in Letters Received by the Adjutant General, 1822-1860. Lee's name and signature appear often within that title and in the later set of Letters Received by the Adjutant General, 1861-1870. In an 1855 document, Lee accepts an appointment of Lieutenant Colonel and swears allegiance to the United States of America. Later, he's recommended for promotion to brigadier general by J.M. Porter in a letter to President Buchanan. It was an appointment that didn't happen, despite Porter's effusive endorsement.
Prior to the Civil War, Lee headed a board of officers tasked with examining effective signal communications. His 1859 reports consists of 179 pages. When Virginia voted to secede from the Union on 17 April 1861, Lee felt obligated to fight for his home state and signed a resignation letter three days later. In his new position, he wrote a letter to General McClellan regarding an exchange of prisoners on 24 July 1862,
Confederate Amnesty Papers contain applications of former Confederates for presidential pardons and, while there are many post-war oaths of allegiance to the USA by former CSA officers like General George E. Pickett and Lee's nephew Fitzhugh Lee, General Lee's request and pardon are not among them. Learn the story behind it in the Spring 2005 issue of NARA's Prologue magazine.
After his death, Robert E. Lee's legacy strengthened in both the South and the North. He is remembered as a brilliant military leader, a devoted family man, and a great American.

 

Rico says that Lee is still God-like among many Southerners...

Prologue magazine has more on the man:

 

On a spring day 140 years ago, Union General Ulysses S. Grant and Confederate General Robert E. Lee met in the parlor (painting above) of Wilmer McLean's house in Appomattox Court House, Virginia. On that historic occasion, 9 April 1865, the two generals formalized the surrender of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, thus bringing an end to four years of fighting between North and South.
After agreeing upon terms of the armistice, the generals each selected three officers to oversee the surrender and parole of Lee's army. Later that day, Lee and six of his staff signed a document granting their parole.
On 29 May 1865, President Andrew Johnson issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon to persons who had participated in the rebellion against the United States. There were fourteen excepted classes, though, and members of those classes had to make special application to the President.
Lee sent an application to Grant, and wrote to President Johnson on 13 June 1865:

Being excluded from the provisions of amnesty & pardon contained in the proclamation of the 29th Ulto; I hereby apply for the benefits, & full restoration of all rights & privileges extended to those included in its terms. I graduated at the Mil. Academy at West Point in June 1829. Resigned from the U.S. Army April '61. Was a General in the Confederate Army, & included in the surrender of the Army of N. Va. 9 April '65.

 

On 2 October 1865, the same day that Lee was inaugurated as president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, he signed his Amnesty Oath (above), thereby complying fully with the provision of Johnson's proclamation. But Lee was not pardoned, nor was his citizenship restored. And the fact that he had submitted an amnesty oath at all was soon lost to history.
More than a hundred years later, in 1970, an archivist at the National Archives discovered Lee's Amnesty Oath among State Department records (reported in Prologue, Winter 1970). Apparently Secretary of State William H. Seward had given Lee's application to a friend as a souvenir, and the State Department had pigeonholed the oath.
In 1975, Lee's full rights of citizenship were posthumously restored by a joint congressional resolution, effective 13 June 1865.
At the 5 August 1975, signing ceremony, President Gerald R. Ford acknowledged the discovery of Lee's Oath of Allegiance in the National Archives and remarked: "General Lee's character has been an example to succeeding generations, making the restoration of his citizenship an event in which every American can take pride."