Robert Edward Lee was born on 19 January at the family estate of Stratford, Virginia. He graduated in 1829 at the West Point Military Academy. He became an officer in the U.S. Army. From 1829 until the beginning of the war in Mexico, he performed various engineering assignments throughout the United States, most important of which was the construction of channels in St. Louis. He participated in the war against Mexico 1846.-1848., then fought against the Indians on the border area of Texas. In 1859, he successfully stopped the uprising of John Brown, who was an abolitionist. Although he opposed the secession of the Southern, slaver states, after his native Virginia seceded, he resigned from the U.S. Army and joined the Confederate armed forces. He was a military adviser to the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis from 1861 to 1862. In the spring of 1862, he took command of the Army of Northern Virginia. With numerical and materially weaker forces, Lee managed to defeat the Union Army more than once, at Bull Run in August 1862, and at Chancellorsville in May 1863. But he lost the key battle at Gettysburg, after which his army's fate was sealed. He led a series of battles against U.S. Grant since May 1864 until April 1865 when he was compelled to surrender his army at Appomattox. After the war, he withdrew to his home in Richmond, but because of poor finances, he became President of the Washington College in 1865, where he remained until his death, on 12 October 1870.