Robert E. Lee and Son

This is a photographic copy of a daguerreotype portrait of Robert E. Lee and his son William Henry Fitzhugh "Rooney" Lee, dated about 1845. Robert E. Lee became a Confederate general and led the Army of Northern Virginia from June 1862 until its surrender on April 9, 1865. "Rooney" Lee, the second son of Lee and Mary Randolph Custis Lee, joined the Confederate cavalry during the Civil War, eventually rising to the rank of general. Michael Miley, who ran a photographic studio in Lexington in the postwar years and into the early twentieth century, made this copy.