Charles F. Lee was born around 1842 in Massachusetts to Artemis and Lucy Lee. His father was a merchant who owned $40,000 of real estate and $11,000 of personal property by 1860. Lee grew up and attended school in Templeton, Massachusetts, and by 1860, he was working as a clerk.
He enlisted in the Union army on September 19, 1861, and mustered in as a corporal in Company A of the 18th Massachusetts Infantry on October 12. He was wounded in the right hip in the Second Battle of Bull Run on August 30, 1862. As he explained the following month, the bullet struck "the bone [and] glanced round inside of the leg thence to the spine, or rather near the spine where it now remains; the consequence is that my back aches all the time, there has not been a minute since I was wounded to the present time but what I have been in pain." He mustered out in Washington, D.C., on October 20. He applied for a federal pension in March 1863 and eventually secured one.
Lee received a commission as a 2nd lieutenant in Company D of the 57th Massachusetts Infantry on October 21, 1863. He was discharged for disability on May 17, 1864. He eventually became a 1st lieutenant in Company H of the 55th Massachusetts Infantry. He mustered out in Charleston, South Carolina, on August 29, 1865. He returned to Templeton after the war and became a farm worker. He married Mary A. Hare in Templeton on January 1, 1872. He died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 22, 1875.