[Captain Jack Aubrey]

Lyrics have never made any sense to me.

Back with my wife in Tennessee
And one day she said to me
“Virgil, quick! Come see
There goes Robert E. Lee”
Now I don’t mind, I’m chopping wood
And I don’t care if the money’s no good
Just take what you need and leave the rest
But they should never have taken the very best

There goes THE Robert E Lee. That’s what you hear in the song. A riverboat. Lee was never in Tennessee during the war.

[Revel]

The song was written by Robbie Robertson, who spent about eight months working on it.[1] Robertson said he had the music to the song in his head and would play the chords over and over on the piano but had no idea what the song was to be about. Then the concept came to him and he researched the subject with help from the Band’s drummer Levon Helm, a native of Arkansas.[2][1] In his 1993 autobiography, This Wheel’s on Fire, Helm wrote, “Robbie and I worked on ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ up in Woodstock. I remember taking him to the library so he could research the history and geography of the era and make General Robert E. Lee come out with all due respect.”

The lyrics tell of the last days of the American Civil War, portraying the suffering of the protagonist, Virgil Caine, a poor white Southerner. Dixie is the historical nickname for the states making up the Confederate States of America.[3] The song’s opening stanza refers to one of George Stoneman’s raids behind Confederate lines attacking the railroads of Danville, Virginia at the end of the Civil War in 1865:

[Fiji Hill]

The lyrics refer to the postwar era, when Confederate money was no longer good and the steamship Robert E. Lee began passenger service in the Mississippi valley.

[redangus]

The Robert E Lee was a train locomotive.