new biography of robert e lee

A Surprising New Bio of Robert E. Lee

A new book about about General Robert E. Lee offers support to those who argue for removing confederate monuments.  Its author taught history at West Point, and he has nothing good to say about the man idolized by many in the South. 

As a kid, Ty Seidule aspired to be a Southern gentleman like Robert E. Lee.  His school text books were filled with praise, and wherever he went in Virginia Lee was a hero.

“I was bused across town in Alexandria from the white elementary school to the segregated all black school," he recalls, "and what was the name of that school?  Robert E. Lee Elementary, named in 1961.”

Later he would attend Washington and Lee University, but while getting his PhD in history at Ohio State, Seidule learned some unsavory things about the General.  Lee was, for example, a wealthy slaveholder who inherited a plantation from his in-laws.

“Where his father-in-law kept families together, he didn’t do that.  He actually broke every family apart for a profit," Seidule says.  "He ordered his enslaved people whipped and said to ‘lay it on well and pour brine water on their wounds,’ so he was seen by the enslaved people at Arlington as a cruel, cruel person.”

And when the nation prepared for Civil War,  Seidule argues Lee showed himself to be a traitor by going against the Union.

“There were eight U.S. Army Colonels from Virginia. They were all West Point graduates. Seven of those colonels stay with the United States, and one and only one – Robert E. Lee – chooses to do that. He commits treason.”

During the war, he affirmed his racist beliefs.

“When he went north into Gettysburg, his army captured freed black people to bring them back for sale into Virginia, and at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 his soldiers slaughtered black prisoners of war.”

And at his alma mater, West Point, Lee was remembered that way.

“In the 19 th century, West Point banished Lee from their collective memory, because he was a traitor," Seidule explains.  "He only came back in the 1930’s – the memory of him, things named after him – because it was a reaction to integration, in the 1950’s when the army started integrating, in the 1970’s when black cadets started coming in great numbers.”

During those times, he says, textbooks were rewritten to tell lies about the Civil War and Reconstruction.

“One, the war wasn’t fought over slavery, which is just a bald-faced lie. Two, that enslaved people were happy – that it was the best form of labor, which is another monstrous lie.  Slavery featured the lash, rape, torture, murder, and the worst thing for enslaved families – breaking these families apart and selling them to the Deep South.”

When he served as a professor at West Point, Seidule was anxious to remind students of Lee’s true nature, but he got into big trouble for that.

“I couldn’t talk about these things openly in uniform.  It was just too hot, particularly under the Trump administration I couldn’t talk about these subjects.  It brought too much heat to the army and West Point.”

But now he’s teaching at Hamilton College in upstate New York – sharing his views through a book called Robert E. Lee and Me.  In it he argues that taking down statues of Lee and other confederates does not erase history, but it does end commemoration.

“Commemoration is who we honor as a society, and who we honor should represent our values today, not those values of 1860 or 1930.  We have an opportunity to do that now in a way that we haven’t in the past – to honor the diversity, the value and courage of real Americans.”

By doing that, he says, this country can finally confront slavery – what he calls the virus in our soil – and continue the progress made through the civil rights movement. 

Robert E. Lee

Robert E. Lee was the leading Confederate general during the U.S. Civil War and has been venerated as a heroic figure in the American South.

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Who Was Robert E. Lee?

Robert E. Lee became military prominence during the U.S. Civil War, commanding his home state's armed forces and becoming general-in-chief of the Confederate troops toward the end of the conflict. Though the Union won the war, Lee earned renown as a military tactician for scoring several significant victories on the battlefield. He became president of Washington College and, renamed Washington and Lee University after he died in 1870.

Quick Facts

FULL NAME: Robert Edward Lee BORN: January 19, 1807 DIED: October 12, 1870 BIRTHPLACE: Stratford, Virginia SPOUSE: Mary Custis (1831-1870) CHILDREN: George Washington Custis, William “Rooney,” Robert Jr, Mary, Anne, Eleanor Agnes, and Mildred ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Capricorn

Early Years

A Confederate general who led southern forces against the Union Army in the U.S. Civil War, Robert Edward Lee was born on Jan. 19, 1807, at his family home of Stratford Hall in northeastern Virginia.

Lee saw himself as an extension of his family's greatness. At 18, he enrolled at West Point Military Academy, where he put his drive and serious mind to work. He placed second in his graduating class after four spotless years without a demerit and wrapped up his studies with perfect scores in artillery, infantry, and cavalry.

Wife and Children

After graduating from West Point, Lee married Mary Custis, the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington (from her first marriage before meeting George Washington) in 1831. The couple wed on Mary Custis’s family plantation in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. They would make the estate their primary home for the next 30 years. In 1857, Mary inherited the Arlington plantation outright following her father’s death. However, after the outbreak of the Civil War, Union troops occupied the plantation, and the federal government seized the land. In 1864, the government began constructing a new national cemetery to bury and honor the war’s military dead. After that, the former Custis/Lee home was transformed into one of the most hallowed places in American history— Arlington National Cemetery .

Together, they had seven children: four daughters (Mary, Annie, Agnes, and Mildred) and three sons (Custis, Rooney, and Rob) who followed their father to serve in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

Early Military Career

While Mary and the children spent their lives on Mary's father's plantation, Lee stayed committed to his military obligations. His loyalties moved him around the country, from Savannah to St. Louis to New York.

In 1846, Lee got the chance he had been waiting for his whole military career when the United States went to war with Mexico. Serving under General Winfield Scott, Lee distinguished himself as a brave battle commander and a brilliant tactician. In the aftermath of the U.S. victory over its neighbor, Lee was held up as a hero. Scott showered Lee with particular praise, saying that if the United States went into another war, the government should consider taking out a life insurance policy on the commander.

But life away from the battlefield proved difficult for Lee to handle. He struggled with the mundane tasks associated with his work and life. For a time, he returned to his wife's family's plantation to manage the estate following the death of his father-in-law. The property had fallen under hard times, and for two long years, he tried to make it profitable again.

Robert E. Lee and Slavery

Lee did not own slaves in his youth, but he and Mary Custis Lee inherited enslaved people from both his mother and her father, and it’s believed Lee himself owned between 10-15 enslaved people during his lifetime. His racial attitudes reflected much of his background, and while he wrote to Mary about the moral and political evils of slavery, he held views of white superiority. He saw slavery as necessary to maintain order between races. He opposed abolitionism, which he saw as a northern effort to inflict political will on the South.

When Lee’s father-in-law died in 1857, Lee became executor of his estate, tasked with managing the Arlington plantation. During this period, despite his father-in-law’s decree that his slaves be freed within five years of his death, Lee was accused of being a cruel and harsh overseer, with reports of beatings of some of the 200 enslaved people under his control, particularly those who had tried to escape.

In late 1862, to fulfill the terms of his father-in-law’s will, Lee signed deeds freeing some 150 of the enslaved workers at Arlington and other Custis plantations. Just a few months later, the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in January 1863, freeing enslaved peoples in Confederate territory. Despite the Proclamation, Lee, during his Gettysburg campaign later that year, continued his practice of seizing freed Blacks in Union territory to be sent into slavery in the South. Towards the end of the war, with the Confederacy desperate for recruits, he supported the idea of allowing enslaved peoples to serve in the army in exchange for their freedom. Still, the war ended before the policy was enacted.

Confederate Leader

In October 1859, Lee was summoned to put an end to an enslaved person insurrection led by John Brown at Harper's Ferry. Lee's orchestrated attack took just an hour to end the revolt, and his success put him on a shortlist of names to lead the Union Army should the nation go to war.

But Lee's commitment to the Army was superseded by his commitment to Virginia. After turning down an offer from President Abraham Lincoln to command the Union forces, Lee resigned from the military and returned home. While Lee had misgivings about centering a war on the slavery issue, after Virginia voted to secede from the nation on April 17, 1861, Lee agreed to help lead the Confederate forces.

Over the next year, Lee again distinguished himself on the battlefield. On June 1, 1862, he took control of the Army of Northern Virginia and drove back the Union Army during the Seven Days Battles near Richmond. In August of that year, he gave the Confederacy a crucial victory at Second Manassas (also known as the Second Battle of Bull Run).

But not all went well. He courted disaster when he tried to cross the Potomac at the Battle of Antietam on Sept. 17, barely escaping the site of the bloodiest single-day skirmish of the war, which left some 22,000 combatants dead.

From July 1-3, 1863, Lee's forces suffered another round of heavy casualties in Pennsylvania. The three-day stand-off, known as the Battle of Gettysburg , wiped out a vast chunk of Lee's army, halting his invasion of the North while helping to turn the tide for the Union.

By the fall of 1864, Union General Ulysses S. Grant had gained the upper hand, decimating much of Richmond, the Confederacy's capital, and Petersburg. By early 1865, the fate of the war was clear, a fact driven home on April 2 when Lee was forced to abandon Richmond. A week later, a reluctant and despondent Lee surrendered to Grant at a private home in Appomattox, Virginia.

"I suppose there is nothing for me to do but go and see General Grant," he told an aide. "And I would rather die a thousand deaths."

Final Years and Death

Saved from being hanged as a traitor by a forgiving Lincoln and Grant, Lee returned to his family in April 1865. He eventually accepted a job as president of Washington College in western Virginia and devoted his efforts toward boosting the institution's enrollment and financial support.

In late September 1870, Lee suffered a massive stroke. He died at his home in Lexington, Virginia, surrounded by family, on Oct. 12. He was buried in a chapel at nearby Washington College. Shortly afterward, the college was renamed Washington and Lee University.

Disputed Legacy and Statue

In the decades after the Civil War, sympathizers regarded Lee as a heroic figure of the South. Several monuments to the late general sprung up before the end of the 19th century, notably in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Dallas, Texas. Lee’s birthday is commemorated in several southern states. Until 2020, Lee-Jackson Day (also commemorating Civil War General Stonewall Jackson ) was celebrated each January in Virginia. Texas celebrates Lee on his Jan. 19th birthday as part of Confederate Heroes Day. Mississippi and Alabama celebrate a combined state holiday in late January honoring both Lee and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr , while Florida commemorates Robert E. Lee Day as an unofficial state holiday.

Lee's complicated legacy became part of the culture wars that engulfed the country more than a century later. While some sought to have statues of Confederate leaders removed from public view, others argued that doing so represented an attempt to erase history. In 2017, after the City Council of Charlottesville, Virginia, voted to move a Lee statue from a park, Charlottesville became the site of several protests and counter-protests; in August, numerous demonstrators clashed, resulting in one death and 19 injuries.

In late October 2017, President Donald Trump 's chief of staff, John Kelly, further fanned the flames of the controversy with his appearance on Fox News. Addressing the topic of a Virginia church's decision to remove plaques that honored both Lee and Washington, Kelly called the Confederate general an "honorable man" and pointed to the "lack of an ability to compromise" as the cause of the Civil War. This analysis drew the ire of opponents.

Robert E. Lee in Movies

Robert E. Lee has been the subject of numerous biographies, documentaries, and novels, including several “alternative history” books depicting the South as winning the Civil War. Among the most popular books featuring Lee is a trilogy of novels . The first, written by Jeffrey Shaara, was the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Killer Angels, which became the basis for the 1993 film Gettysburg , starring Martin Sheen as Lee. After Jeffrey’s death, his son Michael completed the trilogy, publishing Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure , the former of which was adapted into a 2003 film of the same name, starring Robert Duvall—himself a descendant of Robert E. Lee—as the famed general.

• I suppose there is nothing for me to do but go and see General Grant. And I would rather die a thousand deaths.
• Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more; you should never wish to do less.
• I cannot trust a man to control others who cannot control himself.
• Whiskey: I like it, I always did, and that is the reason I never use it.
• Obedience to lawful authority is the foundation of manly character.
• The education of a man is never completed until he dies.
• Never do a wrong thing to make a friend or keep one.
• You cannot be a true man until you learn to obey.
• In this enlightened age, there are few, I believe, but what will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country.
• You see what a poor sinner I am and how unworthy to possess what was given me; for that reason, it has been taken away.
• Everybody kind of perceives me as being angry. It's not anger, it's motivation.
• It is good that war is so horrible, or we might grow to like it.

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Robert E. Lee

By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 29, 2022 | Original: October 29, 2009

Robert E. Lee was a Confederate general who led the South’s attempt at secession during the Civil War . He challenged Union forces during the war’s bloodiest battles, including Antietam and Gettysburg , before surrendering to Union General Ulysses S. Grant in 1865 at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, marking the end of the devastating conflict that nearly split the United States.

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Who Was Robert E. Lee?

Robert Edward Lee was born in Stratford Hall, a plantation in Virginia, on January 19, 1807, to a wealthy and socially prominent family. His mother, Anne Hill Carter, also grew up on a plantation and his father, Colonel Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, was descended from colonists and become a Revolutionary War leader and three-term governor of Virginia.

But the family hit hard times when Lee’s father made a series of bad investments that left him in debtors’ prison. He fled to the West Indies and died in 1818 while trying to return to Virginia when Lee was barely a teen.

With little money for his education, Lee went to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point for a military education. He graduated second in his class in 1829—and the following month he would lose his mother. 

Did you know? Robert E. Lee graduated second in his class from West Point. He did not receive a single demerit during his four years at the academy.

Robert E. Lee's Children

After graduation, Lee’s military career quickly took off as he chose a position with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers .

A year later, he began courting a childhood connection, Mary Custis Washington. Given his father’s diminished reputation, Lee had to propose twice to win approval to wed Mary, the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington and the step-great-granddaughter of President George Washington .

The pair married in 1831; Lee and his wife had seven children, including three sons, George, William and Robert, who followed him into the military to fight for the Confederate States during the Civil War.

As the couple were establishing their family, Lee frequently travelled with the military on engineering projects. He first distinguished himself in battle during the Mexican-American War under General Winfield Scott in the battles of Veracruz , Churubusco and Chapultepec. Scott once declared that Lee was “the very best soldier that I ever saw in the field.”

Was Robert E. Lee a Slave Owner?

Lee did not grow up on a large plantation, but his wife inherited an enslaved worker in 1857 from her father, George Washington Park Custis.

Lee executed his father-in-law's will, which included Arlington House near Washington, D.C., a poorly managed plantation with debts and nearly 200 enslaved people, whom Custis wanted freed within five years of his death.

As a result of his father-in-law, Lee became owner of hundreds of enslaved workers. While historical accounts vary, Lee’s treatment of the enslaved peoples was described as being so combative and harsh that it led to revolts.

Lee at Harpers Ferry

During the 1850s, tensions between the abolitionist movement and slave owners reached a boiling point, and the union of states was near a breaking point. Lee entered the fray by halting a raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859, capturing radical abolitionist John Brown and his followers.

The following year, Abraham Lincoln was elected president, prompting seven Southern states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas — to secede in protest. U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis became the president of the Confederate States of America.

The first attack of the Civil War came on April 12, 1861, when Confederates took control of South Carolina’s Fort Sumter .

Lee’s home state of Virginia seceded less than a week later, creating the defining moment of his career. When he was asked to lead Union forces, he resigned from military service rather than fight against his Virginia friends and neighbors.  

General Robert E. Lee

Lee wasn’t a secessionist, but he immediately joined the Confederates and was named general and commander of the South’s fight for secession.

Lee has been widely criticized for his aggressive strategies that led to mass casualties. In the Battle of Antietam, on September 17, 1862, Lee made his first attempt at invading the North in the bloodiest single day of the war.

Antietam ended with roughly 23,000 casualties and the Union claiming victory for General George McClellan . Less than a week later, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation .

The battles continued through the cold, harsh winter and into the summer of 1863, when Lee’s troops challenged Union forces in Pennsylvania during the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, which claimed 28,000 Confederate soldiers’ lives and 23,000 casualties on the Union side.

The war dragged on for two more years until a victory for Lee became impossible. With a dwindling army, Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, effectively ending the Civil War.

Arlington House

At the start of the war, Lee and his family headed South, leaving Arlington House, but they did not reclaim their property.

The federal government seized the estate (now the site of Arlington National Cemetery ) and used it for military graves for thousands of fallen Union soldiers, possibly to prevent Lee from ever returning home.

The Lee family residence is now managed by the National Park Service as Arlington House: the Robert E. Lee Memorial , and is open to the public for tours.

As a well-educated man with considerable social and military experience, Lee is known for many of his quotes regarding slavery , duty and military service, including:

• In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral and political evil in any country.
• Whiskey — I like it, I always did, and that is the reason I never use it.
• It is well that war is so terrible — lest we should grow too fond of it.
• So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interest of the South.
• I cannot trust a man to control others who cannot control himself.
• The education of a man is never completed until he dies.
• Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more, you should never wish to do less.

Robert E. Lee Day

In August of 1865, soon after the end of the war, Lee was invited to serve as president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University ), where he and his family are buried.

Since his death at age 63 on October 12, 1870, following a stroke, he has retained a place of distinction in most Southern states.

Lee’s January 19 birthday is observed (to varying degrees) on the third Monday in January as Robert E. Lee Day, an official state holiday in Mississippi and Alabama, and on January 19 in Florida and Tennessee.

Robert E. Lee Statues

The Confederate general remains one of the most divisive figures in American history.

Statues and other memorials built in his honor have become flashpoints in cities such as New Orleans , Louisiana, Baltimore, Maryland and Dallas, Texas. Many Robert. E. Lee statues have been removed, but Virginia’s 2017 decision to take one down sparked a violent protest that turned deadly in Charlottesville.

While Lee did not support secession, he never defended the rights of enslaved peoples. Instead, he led the Confederates as they attempted to dissolve the United States that his own father helped create.

Robert E. Lee. PBS American Experience . Arlington House. Arlington National Cemetery . Robert E. Lee. Washington & Lee University . Robert E. Lee. Stratford Hall . The Civil War. American Battlefield Trust . Robert E. Lee Quotes. Son of the South . The Reader’s Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

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Robert E. Lee

Born to Revolutionary War hero Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee in Stratford Hall, Virginia, Robert Edward Lee seemed destined for military greatness.  Despite financial hardship that caused his father to depart to the West Indies, young Robert secured an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he graduated second in the class of 1829.  Two years later, he married Mary Anna Randolph Custis, a descendant of George Washington 's adopted son, John Parke Custis .  Yet with all his military pedigree, Lee had not set foot on a battlefield.  Instead, he served seventeen years as an officer in the Corps of Engineers, supervising and inspecting the construction of the nation's coastal defenses.  Service during the 1846 war with Mexico, however, changed that.  As a member of General Winfield Scott 's staff, Lee distinguished himself, earning three brevets for gallantry, and emerging from the conflict with the rank of colonel.

From 1852 to 1855, Lee served as superintendent of West Point, and was therefore responsible for educating many of the men who would later serve under him - and those who would oppose him - on the battlefields of the Civil War.  In 1855 he left the academy to take a position in the cavalry and in 1859 was called upon to put down abolitionist John Brown ’s raid at Harpers Ferry.

Because of his reputation as one of the finest officers in the United States Army, Abraham Lincoln  offered Lee the command of the Federal forces in April 1861. Lee declined and tendered his resignation from the army when the state of Virginia seceded on April 17, arguing that he could not fight against his own people.  Instead, he accepted a general’s commission in the newly formed Confederate Army. His first military engagement of the Civil War occurred at Cheat Mountain, Virginia (now West Virginia) on September 11, 1861. It was a Union victory but Lee’s reputation withstood the public criticism that followed. He served as military advisor to President Jefferson Davis until June 1862 when he was given command of the wounded General Joseph E. Johnston 's embattled army on the Virginia peninsula. 

Lee renamed his command the Army of Northern Virginia, and under his direction it would become the most famous and successful of the Confederate armies.  This same organization also boasted some of the Confederacy's most inspiring military figures, including James Longstreet , Stonewall Jackson and the flamboyant cavalier J.E.B. Stuart .  With these trusted subordinates, Lee commanded troops that continually manhandled their blue-clad adversaries and embarrassed their generals no matter what the odds. 

Yet despite foiling several attempts to seize the Confederate capital, Lee recognized that the key to ultimate success was a victory on Northern soil.  In September 1862, he launched an invasion into Maryland with the hope of shifting the war's focus away from Virginia.  But when a misplaced dispatch outlining the invasion plan was discovered by Union commander George McClellan the element of surprise was lost, and the two armies faced off at the battle of Antietam .  Though his plans were no longer a secret, Lee nevertheless managed to fight McClellan to a stalemate on September 17, 1862.  Following the bloodiest one-day battle of the war, heavy casualties compelled Lee to withdraw under the cover of darkness.  The remainder of 1862 was spent on the defensive, parrying Union thrusts at Fredericksburg and, in May of the following year, Chancellorsville .  

The masterful victory at Chancellorsville gave Lee great confidence in his army, and the Rebel chief was inspired once again to take the fight to enemy soil.  In late June of 1863, he began another invasion of the North, meeting the Union host at the crossroads town of Gettysburg , Pennsylvania.  For three days Lee assailed the Federal army under George G. Meade in what would become the most famous battle of the entire war.  Accustomed to seeing the Yankees run in the face of his aggressive troops, Lee attacked strong Union positions on high ground.  This time, however, the Federals wouldn't budge.  The Confederate war effort reached its high water mark on July 3, 1863 when Lee ordered a massive frontal assault against Meade's center, spear-headed by Virginians under Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett .  The attack known as Pickett's charge was a failure and Lee, recognizing that the battle was lost, ordered his army to retreat.  Taking full responsibility for the defeat, he wrote Jefferson Davis offering his resignation, which Davis refused to accept.

After the simultaneous Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg , Mississippi, Ulysses S. Grant assumed command of the Federal armies.  Rather than making Richmond the aim of his campaign, Grant chose to focus the myriad resources at his disposal on destroying Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.  In a relentless and bloody campaign, the Federal juggernaut bludgeoned the under-supplied Rebel band.  In spite of his ability to make Grant pay in blood for his aggressive tactics, Lee had been forced to yield the initiative to his adversary, and he recognized that the end of the Confederacy was only a matter of time.  By the summer of 1864, the Confederates had been forced into waging trench warfare outside of Petersburg .  Though President Davis named the Virginian General-in-Chief of all Confederate forces in February 1865, only two months later, on April 9, 1865, Lee was forced to surrender his weary and depleted army to Grant at Appomattox Court House , effectively ending the Civil War.

Lee returned home on parole and eventually became the president of Washington College in Virginia (now known as Washington and Lee University). He remained in this position until his death on October 12, 1870 in Lexington, Virginia.

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Making Sense of Robert E. Lee

“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”— Robert E. Lee, at Fredericksburg

Roy Blount, Jr.

Few figures in American history are more divisive, contradictory or elusive than Robert E. Lee, the reluctant, tragic leader of the Confederate Army, who died in his beloved Virginia at age 63 in 1870, five years after the end of the Civil War. In a new biography, Robert E. Lee , Roy Blount, Jr., treats Lee as a man of competing impulses, a “paragon of manliness” and “one of the greatest military commanders in history,” who was nonetheless “not good at telling men what to do.”

Blount, a noted humorist, journalist, playwright and raconteur, is the author or coauthor of 15 previous books and the editor of Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor . A resident of New York City and western Massachusetts, he traces his interest in Lee to his boyhood in Georgia. Though Blount was never a Civil War buff, he says “every Southerner has to make his peace with that War. I plunged back into it for this book, and am relieved to have emerged alive.”

“Also,” he says, “Lee reminds me in some ways of my father.”

At the heart of Lee’s story is one of the monumental choices in American history: revered for his honor, Lee resigned his U.S. Army commission to defend Virginia and fight for the Confederacy, on the side of slavery. “The decision was honorable by his standards of honor—which, whatever we may think of them, were neither self-serving nor complicated,” Blount says. Lee “thought it was a bad idea for Virginia to secede, and God knows he was right, but secession had been more or less democratically decided upon.” Lee’s family held slaves, and he himself was at best ambiguous on the subject, leading some of his defenders over the years to discount slavery’s significance in assessments of his character. Blount argues that the issue does matter: “To me it’s slavery, much more than secession as such, that casts a shadow over Lee’s honorableness.”

In the excerpt that follows, the general masses his troops for a battle over three humid July days in a Pennsylvania town. Its name would thereafter resound with courage, casualties and miscalculation: Gettysburg.

In his dashing (if sometimes depressive) antebellum prime, he may have been the most beautiful person in America, a sort of precursorcross between Cary Grant and Randolph Scott. He was in his element gossiping with belles about their beaux at balls. In theaters of grinding, hellish human carnage he kept a pet hen for company. He had tiny feet that he loved his children to tickle None of these things seems to fit, for if ever there was a grave American icon, it is Robert Edward Lee—hero of the Confederacy in the Civil War and a symbol of nobility to some, of slavery to others.

After Lee’s death in 1870, Frederick Douglass, the former fugitive slave who had become the nation’s most prominent African-American, wrote, “We can scarcely take up a newspaper . . . that is not filled with nauseating flatteries” of Lee, from which “it would seem . . . that the soldier who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven.” Two years later one of Lee’s ex-generals, Jubal A. Early, apotheosized his late commander as follows: “Our beloved Chief stands, like some lofty column which rears its head among the highest, in grandeur, simple, pure and sublime.”

In 1907, on the 100th anniversary of Lee’s birth, President Theodore Roosevelt expressed mainstream American sentiment, praising Lee’s “extraordinary skill as a General, his dauntless courage and high leadership,” adding, “He stood that hardest of all strains, the strain of bearing himself well through the gray evening of failure; and therefore out of what seemed failure he helped to build the wonderful and mighty triumph of our national life, in which all his countrymen, north and south, share.”

We may think we know Lee because we have a mental image: gray. Not only the uniform, the mythic horse, the hair and beard, but the resignation with which he accepted dreary burdens that offered “neither pleasure nor advantage”: in particular, the Confederacy, a cause of which he took a dim view until he went to war for it. He did not see right and wrong in tones of gray, and yet his moralizing could generate a fog, as in a letter from the front to his invalid wife: “You must endeavour to enjoy the pleasure of doing good. That is all that makes life valuable.” All right. But then he adds: “When I measure my own by that standard I am filled with confusion and despair.”

His own hand probably never drew human blood nor fired a shot in anger, and his only Civil War wound was a faint scratch on the cheek from a sharpshooter’s bullet, but many thousands of men died quite horribly in battles where he was the dominant spirit, and most of the casualties were on the other side. If we take as a given Lee’s granitic conviction that everything is God’s will, however, he was born to lose.

As battlefield generals go, he could be extremely fiery, and could go out of his way to be kind. But in even the most sympathetic versions of his life story he comes across as a bit of a stick—certainly compared with his scruffy nemesis, Ulysses S. Grant; his zany, ferocious “right arm,” Stonewall Jackson; and the dashing “eyes” of his army, J.E.B. “Jeb” Stuart. For these men, the Civil War was just the ticket. Lee, however, has come down in history as too fine for the bloodbath of 1861-65. To efface the squalor and horror of the war, we have the image of Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves, and we have the image of Robert E. Lee’s gracious surrender. Still, for many contemporary Americans, Lee is at best the moral equivalent of Hitler’s brilliant field marshal Erwin Rommel (who, however, turned against Hitler, as Lee never did against Jefferson Davis, who, to be sure, was no Hitler).

On his father’s side, Lee’s family was among Virginia’s and therefore the nation’s most distinguished. Henry, the scion who was to become known in the Revolutionary War as Light-Horse Harry, was born in 1756. He graduated from Princeton at 19 and joined the Continental Army at 20 as a captain of dragoons, and he rose in rank and independence to command Lee’s light cavalry and then Lee’s legion of cavalry and infantry. Without the medicines, elixirs, and food Harry Lee’s raiders captured from the enemy, George Washington’s army would not likely have survived the harrowing winter encampment of 1777-78 at Valley Forge. Washington became his patron and close friend. With the war nearly over, however, Harry decided he was underappreciated, so he impulsively resigned from the army. In 1785, he was elected to the Continental Congress, and in 1791 he was elected governor of Virginia. In 1794 Washington put him in command of the troops that bloodlessly put down the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. In 1799 he was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he famously eulogized Washington as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

Meanwhile, though, Harry’s fast and loose speculation in hundreds of thousands of the new nation’s acres went sour, and in 1808 he was reduced to chicanery. He and his second wife, Ann Hill Carter Lee, and their children departed the Lee ancestral home, where Robert was born, for a smaller rented house in Alexandria. Under the conditions of bankruptcy that obtained in those days, Harry was still liable for his debts. He jumped a personal appearance bail—to the dismay of his brother, Edmund, who had posted a sizable bond—and wangled passage, with pitying help from President James Monroe, to the West Indies. In 1818, after five years away, Harry headed home to die, but got only as far as Cumberland Island, Georgia, where he was buried. Robert was 11.

Robert appears to have been too fine for his childhood, for his education, for his profession, for his marriage, and for the Confederacy. Not according to him. According to him, he was not fine enough. For all his audacity on the battlefield, he accepted rather passively one raw deal after another, bending over backward for everyone from Jefferson Davis to James McNeill Whistler’s mother. (When he was superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy, Lee acquiesced to Mrs. Whistler’s request on behalf of her cadet son, who was eventually dismissed in 1854.)

By what can we know of him? The works of a general are battles, campaigns and usually memoirs. The engagements of the Civil War shape up more as bloody muddles than as commanders’ chess games. For a long time during the war, “Old Bobbie Lee,” as he was referred to worshipfully by his troops and nervously by the foe, had the greatly superior Union forces spooked, but a century and a third of analysis and counteranalysis has resulted in no core consensus as to the genius or the folly of his generalship. And he wrote no memoir. He wrote personal letters—a discordant mix of flirtation, joshing, lyrical touches, and stern religious adjuration—and he wrote official dispatches that are so impersonal and (generally) unselfserving as to seem above the fray.

During the postbellum century, when Americans North and South decided to embrace R. E. Lee as a national as well as a Southern hero, he was generally described as antislavery. This assumption rests not on any public position he took but on a passage in an 1856 letter to his wife. The passage begins: “In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages.” But he goes on: “I think it however a greater evil to the white than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.”

The only way to get inside Lee, perhaps, is by edging fractally around the record of his life to find spots where he comes through; by holding up next to him some of the fully realized characters—Grant, Jackson, Stuart, Light-Horse Harry Lee, John Brown—with whom he interacted; and by subjecting to contemporary skepticism certain concepts—honor, “gradual emancipation,” divine will—upon which he unreflectively founded his identity.

He wasn’t always gray. Until war aged him dramatically, his sharp dark brown eyes were complemented by black hair (“ebon and abundant,” as his doting biographer Douglas Southall Freeman puts it, “with a wave that a woman might have envied”), a robust black mustache, a strong full mouth and chin unobscured by any beard, and dark mercurial brows. He was not one to hide his looks under a bushel. His heart, on the other hand . . . “The heart, he kept locked away,” as Stephen Vincent Benét proclaimed in “John Brown’s Body,” “from all the picklocks of biographers.” Accounts by people who knew him give the impression that no one knew his whole heart, even before it was broken by the war. Perhaps it broke many years before the war. “You know she is like her papa, always wanting something,” he wrote about one of his daughters. The great Southern diarist of his day, Mary Chesnut, tells us that when a lady teased him about his ambitions, he “remonstrated—said his tastes were of the simplest. He only wanted a Virginia farm—no end of cream and fresh butter—and fried chicken. Not one fried chicken or two—but unlimited fried chicken.” Just before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, one of his nephews found him in the field, “very grave and tired,” carrying around a fried chicken leg wrapped in a piece of bread, which a Virginia countrywoman had pressed upon him but for which he couldn’t muster any hunger.

One thing that clearly drove him was devotion to his home state. “If Virginia stands by the old Union,” Lee told a friend, “so will I. But if she secedes (though I do not believe in secession as a constitutional right, nor that there is sufficient cause for revolution), then I will follow my native State with my sword, and, if need be, with my life.”

The North took secession as an act of aggression, to be countered accordingly. When Lincoln called on the loyal states for troops to invade the South, Southerners could see the issue as defense not of slavery but of homeland. A Virginia convention that had voted 2 to 1 against secession, now voted 2 to 1 in favor.

When Lee read the news that Virginia had joined the Confederacy, he said to his wife, “Well, Mary, the question is settled,” and resigned the U.S. Army commission he had held for 32 years.

The days of July 1-3, 1863, still stand among the most horrific and formative in American history. Lincoln had given up on Joe Hooker, put Maj. Gen. George G. Meade in command of the Army of the Potomac, and sent him to stop Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania. Since Jeb Stuart’s scouting operation had been uncharacteristically out of touch, Lee wasn’t sure where Meade’s army was. Lee had actually advanced farther north than the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when he learned that Meade was south of him, threatening his supply lines. So Lee swung back in that direction. On June 30 a Confederate brigade, pursuing the report that there were shoes to be had in Gettysburg, ran into Federal cavalry west of town, and withdrew. On July 1 a larger Confederate force returned, engaged Meade’s advance force, and pushed it back through the town—to the fishhook-shaped heights comprising Cemetery Hill, Cemetery Ridge, Little Round Top, and Round Top. It was almost a rout, until Maj. Gen. O. O. Howard, to whom Lee as West Point superintendent had been kind when Howard was an unpopular cadet, and Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock rallied the Federals and held the high ground. Excellent ground to defend from. That evening Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, who commanded the First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, urged Lee not to attack, but to swing around to the south, get between Meade and Washington, and find a strategically even better defensive position, against which the Federals might feel obliged to mount one of those frontal assaults that virtually always lost in this war. Still not having heard from Stuart, Lee felt he might have numerical superiority for once. “No,” he said, “the enemy is there, and I am going to attack him there.”

The next morning, Lee set in motion a two-part offensive: Lt. Gen. Richard Ewell’s corps was to pin down the enemy’s right flank, on Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill, while Longstreet’s, with a couple of extra divisions, would hit the left flank—believed to be exposed—on Cemetery Ridge. To get there Longstreet would have to make a long march under cover. Longstreet mounted a sulky objection, but Lee was adamant. And wrong.

Lee didn’t know that in the night Meade had managed by forced marches to concentrate nearly his entire army at Lee’s front, and had deployed it skillfully—his left flank was now extended to Little Round Top, nearly three-quarters of a mile south of where Lee thought it was. The disgruntled Longstreet, never one to rush into anything, and confused to find the left flank farther left than expected, didn’t begin his assault until 3:30 that afternoon. It nearly prevailed anyway, but at last was beaten gorily back. Although the two-pronged offensive was ill-coordinated, and the Federal artillery had knocked out the Confederate guns to the north before Ewell attacked, Ewell’s infantry came tantalizingly close to taking Cemetery Hill, but a counterattack forced them to retreat.

On the third morning, July 3, Lee’s plan was roughly the same, but Meade seized the initiative by pushing forward on his right and seizing Culp’s Hill, which the Confederates held. So Lee was forced to improvise. He decided to strike straight ahead, at Meade’s heavily fortified midsection. Confederate artillery would soften it up, and Longstreet would direct a frontal assault across a mile of open ground against the center of Missionary Ridge. Again Longstreet objected; again Lee wouldn’t listen. The Confederate artillery exhausted all its shells ineffectively, so was unable to support the assault—which has gone down in history as Pickett’s charge because Maj. Gen. George Pickett’s division absorbed the worst of the horrible bloodbath it turned into.

Lee’s idolaters strained after the war to shift the blame, but the consensus today is that Lee managed the battle badly. Each supposed major blunder of his subordinates—Ewell’s failure to take the high ground of Cemetery Hill on July 1, Stuart’s getting out of touch and leaving Lee unapprised of what force he was facing, and the lateness of Longstreet’s attack on the second day—either wasn’t a blunder at all (if Longstreet had attacked earlier he would have encountered an even stronger Union position) or was caused by a lack of forcefulness and specificity in Lee’s orders.

Before Gettysburg, Lee had seemed not only to read the minds of Union generals but almost to expect his subordinates to read his. He was not in fact good at telling men what to do. That no doubt suited the Confederate fighting man, who didn’t take kindly to being told what to do—but Lee’s only weakness as a commander, his otherwise reverent nephew Fitzhugh Lee would write, was his “reluctance to oppose the wishes of others, or to order them to do anything that would be disagreeable and to which they would not consent.” With men as well as with women, his authority derived from his sightliness, politeness, and unimpeachability. His usually cheerful detachment patently covered solemn depths, depths faintly lit by glints of previous and potential rejection of self and others. It all seemed Olympian, in a Christian cavalier sort of way. Officers’ hearts went out to him across the latitude he granted them to be willingly, creatively honorable. Longstreet speaks of responding to Lee at another critical moment by “receiving his anxious expressions really as appeals for reinforcement of his unexpressed wish.” When people obey you because they think you enable them to follow their own instincts, you need a keen instinct yourself for when they’re getting out of touch, as Stuart did, and when they are balking for good reason, as Longstreet did. As a father Lee was fond but fretful, as a husband devoted but distant. As an attacking general he was inspiring but not necessarily cogent.

At Gettysburg he was jittery, snappish. He was 56 and bone weary. He may have had dysentery, though a scholar’s widely publicized assertion to that effect rests on tenuous evidence. He did have rheumatism and heart trouble. He kept fretfully wondering why Stuart was out of touch, worrying that something bad had happened to him. He had given Stuart broad discretion as usual, and Stuart had overextended himself. Stuart wasn’t frolicking. He had done his best to act on Lee’s written instructions: “You will . . . be able to judge whether you can pass around their army without hindrance, doing them all the damage you can, and cross the [Potomac] east of the mountains. In either case, after crossing the river, you must move on and feel the right of Ewell’s troops, collecting information, provisions, etc.” But he had not, in fact, been able to judge: he met several hindrances in the form of Union troops, a swollen river that he and his men managed only heroically to cross, and 150 Federal wagons that he captured before he crossed the river. And he had not sent word of what he was up to.

When on the afternoon of the second day Stuart did show up at Gettysburg, after pushing himself nearly to exhaustion, Lee’s only greeting to him is said to have been, “Well, General Stuart, you are here at last.” A coolly devastating cut: Lee’s way of chewing out someone who he felt had let him down. In the months after Gettysburg, as Lee stewed over his defeat, he repeatedly criticized the laxness of Stuart’s command, deeply hurting a man who prided himself on the sort of dashing freelance effectiveness by which Lee’s father, Maj. Gen. Light-Horse Harry, had defined himself. A bond of implicit trust had been broken. Loving-son figure had failed loving-father figure and vice versa.

In the past Lee had also granted Ewell and Longstreet wide discretion, and it had paid off. Maybe his magic in Virginia didn’t travel. “The whole affair was disjointed,” Taylor the aide said of Gettysburg. “There was an utter absence of accord in the movements of the several commands.”

Why did Lee stake everything, finally, on an ill-considered thrust straight up the middle? Lee’s critics have never come up with a logical explanation. Evidently he just got his blood up, as the expression goes. When the usually repressed Lee felt an overpowering need for emotional release, and had an army at his disposal and another one in front of him, he couldn’t hold back. And why should Lee expect his imprudence to be any less unsettling to Meade than it had been to the other Union commanders?

The spot against which he hurled Pickett was right in front of Meade’s headquarters. (Once, Dwight Eisenhower, who admired Lee’s generalship, took Field Marshal Montgomery to visit the Gettysburg battlefield. They looked at the site of Pickett’s charge and were baffled. Eisenhower said, “The man [Lee] must have got so mad that he wanted to hit that guy [Meade] with a brick.”)

Pickett’s troops advanced with precision, closed up the gaps that withering fire tore into their smartly dressed ranks, and at close quarters fought tooth and nail. Acouple of hundred Confederates did break the Union line, but only briefly. Someone counted 15 bodies on a patch of ground less than five feet wide and three feet long. It has been estimated that 10,500 Johnny Rebs made the charge and 5,675—roughly 54 percent—fell dead or wounded. As a Captain Spessard charged, he saw his son shot dead. He laid him out gently on the ground, kissed him, and got back to advancing.

As the minority who hadn’t been cut to ribbons streamed back to the Confederate lines, Lee rode in splendid calm among them, apologizing. “It’s all my fault,” he assured stunned privates and corporals. He took the time to admonish, mildly, an officer who was beating his horse: “Don’t whip him, captain; it does no good. I had a foolish horse, once, and kind treatment is the best.” Then he resumed his apologies: “I am very sorry—the task was too great for you—but we mustn’t despond.” Shelby Foote has called this Lee’s finest moment. But generals don’t want apologies from those beneath them, and that goes both ways. After midnight, he told a cavalry officer, “I never saw troops behave more magnificently than Pickett’s division of Virginians. . . . ” Then he fell silent, and it was then that he exclaimed, as the officer later wrote it down, “Too bad! Too bad! OH! TOO BAD!”

Pickett’s charge wasn’t the half of it. Altogether at Gettysburg as many as 28,000 Confederates were killed, wounded, captured, or missing: more than a third of Lee’s whole army. Perhaps it was because Meade and his troops were so stunned by their own losses—about 23,000—that they failed to pursue Lee on his withdrawal south, trap him against the flooded Potomac, and wipe his army out. Lincoln and the Northern press were furious that this didn’t happen.

For months Lee had been traveling with a pet hen. Meant for the stewpot, she had won his heart by entering his tent first thing every morning and laying his breakfast egg under his Spartan cot. As the Army of Northern Virginia was breaking camp in all deliberate speed for the withdrawal, Lee’s staff ran around anxiously crying, “ Where is the hen? ” Lee himself found her nestled in her accustomed spot on the wagon that transported his personal matériel. Life goes on.

After Gettysburg, Lee never mounted another murderous head-on assault. He went on the defensive. Grant took over command of the eastern front and 118,700 men. He set out to grind Lee’s 64,000 down. Lee had his men well dug in. Grant resolved to turn his flank, force him into a weaker position, and crush him.

On April 9, 1865, Lee finally had to admit that he was trapped. At the beginning of Lee’s long, combative retreat by stages from Grant’s overpowering numbers, he had 64,000 men. By the end they had inflicted 63,000 Union casualties but had been reduced themselves to fewer than 10,000.

To be sure, there were those in Lee’s army who proposed continuing the struggle as guerrillas or by reorganizing under the governors of the various Confederate states. Lee cut off any such talk. He was a professional soldier. He had seen more than enough of governors who would be commanders, and he had no respect for ragtag guerrilladom. He told Col. Edward Porter Alexander, his artillery commander, . . . the men would become mere bands of marauders, and the enemy’s cavalry would pursue them and overrun many wide sections they may never have occasion to visit. We would bring on a state of affairs it would take the country years to recover from.”

“And, as for myself, you young fellows might go to bushwhacking, but the only dignified course for me would be, to go to Gen. Grant and surrender myself and take the consequences.” That is what he did on April 9, 1865, at a farmhouse in the village of Appomattox Court House, wearing a fulldress uniform and carrying a borrowed ceremonial sword which he did not surrender.

Thomas Morris Chester, the only black correspondent for a major daily newspaper (the Philadelphia Press ) during the war, had nothing but scorn for the Confederacy, and referred to Lee as a “notorious rebel.” But when Chester witnessed Lee’s arrival in shattered, burned-out Richmond after the surrender, his dispatch sounded a more sympathetic note. After Lee “alighted from his horse, he immediately uncovered his head, thinly covered with silver hairs, as he had done in acknowledgment of the veneration of the people along the streets,” Chester wrote. “There was a general rush of the small crowd to shake hands with him. During these manifestations not a word was spoken, and when the ceremony was through, the General bowed and ascended his steps. The silence was then broken by a few voices calling for a speech, to which he paid no attention. The General then passed into his house, and the crowd dispersed.”

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The Making and the Breaking of the Legend of Robert E. Lee

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By Eric Foner

• Aug. 28, 2017

In the Band’s popular song “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” an ex-Confederate soldier refers to Robert E. Lee as “the very best.” It is difficult to think of another song that mentions a general by name. But Lee has always occupied a unique place in the national imagination. The ups and downs of his reputation reflect changes in key elements of Americans’ historical consciousness — how we understand race relations, the causes and consequences of the Civil War and the nature of the good society.

Born in 1807, Lee was a product of the Virginia gentry — his father a Revolutionary War hero and governor of the state, his wife the daughter of George Washington’s adopted son. Lee always prided himself on following the strict moral code of a gentleman. He managed to graduate from West Point with no disciplinary demerits, an almost impossible feat considering the complex maze of rules that governed the conduct of cadets.

While opposed to disunion, when the Civil War broke out and Virginia seceded, Lee went with his state. He won military renown for defeating (until Gettysburg) a succession of larger Union forces. Eventually, he met his match in Ulysses S. Grant and was forced to surrender his army in April 1865. At Appomattox he urged his soldiers to accept the war’s outcome and return to their homes, rejecting talk of carrying on the struggle in guerrilla fashion. He died in 1870, at the height of Reconstruction, when biracial governments had come to power throughout the South.

But, of course, what interests people who debate Lee today is his connection with slavery and his views about race. During his lifetime, Lee owned a small number of slaves. He considered himself a paternalistic master but could also impose severe punishments, especially on those who attempted to run away. Lee said almost nothing in public about the institution. His most extended comment, quoted by all biographers, came in a letter to his wife in 1856. Here he described slavery as an evil, but one that had more deleterious effects on whites than blacks. He felt that the “painful discipline” to which they were subjected benefited blacks by elevating them from barbarism to civilization and introducing them to Christianity. The end of slavery would come in God’s good time, but this might take quite a while, since to God a thousand years was just a moment. Meanwhile, the greatest danger to the “liberty” of white Southerners was the “evil course” pursued by the abolitionists, who stirred up sectional hatred. In 1860, Lee voted for John C. Breckinridge, the extreme pro-slavery candidate. (A more moderate Southerner, John Bell, carried Virginia that year.)

Lee’s code of gentlemanly conduct did not seem to apply to blacks. During the Gettysburg campaign, he did nothing to stop soldiers in his army from kidnapping free black farmers for sale into slavery. In Reconstruction, Lee made it clear that he opposed political rights for the former slaves. Referring to blacks (30 percent of Virginia’s population), he told a Congressional committee that he hoped the state could be “rid of them.” Urged to condemn the Ku Klux Klan’s terrorist violence, Lee remained silent.

By the time the Civil War ended, with the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, deeply unpopular, Lee had become the embodiment of the Southern cause. A generation later, he was a national hero. The 1890s and early 20th century witnessed the consolidation of white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction South and widespread acceptance in the North of Southern racial attitudes. A revised view of history accompanied these developments, including the triumph of what David Blight, in his influential book “Race and Reunion” (2001), calls a “reconciliationist” memory of the Civil War. The war came to be seen as a conflict in which both sides consisted of brave men fighting for noble principles — union in the case of the North, self-determination on the part of the South. This vision was reinforced by the “cult of Lincoln and Lee,” each representing the noblest features of his society, each a figure Americans of all regions could look back on with pride. The memory of Lee, this newspaper wrote in 1890, was “the possession of the American people.”

Reconciliation excised slavery from a central role in the story, and the struggle for emancipation was now seen as a minor feature of the war. The Lost Cause, a romanticized vision of the Old South and Confederacy, gained adherents throughout the country. And who symbolized the Lost Cause more fully than Lee?

This outlook was also taken up by the Southern Agrarians, a group of writers who idealized the slave South as a bastion of manly virtue in contrast to the commercialism and individualism of the industrial North. At a time when traditional values appeared to be in retreat, character trumped political outlook, and character Lee had in spades. Frank Owsley, the most prominent historian among the Agrarians, called Lee “the soldier who walked with God.” (Many early biographies directly compared Lee and Christ.) Moreover, with the influx of millions of Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe alarming many Americans, Lee seemed to stand for a society where people of Anglo-Saxon stock controlled affairs.

Historians in the first decades of the 20th century offered scholarly legitimacy to this interpretation of the past, which justified the abrogation of the constitutional rights of Southern black citizens. At Columbia University, William A. Dunning and his students portrayed the granting of black suffrage during Reconstruction as a tragic mistake. The Progressive historians — Charles Beard and his disciples — taught that politics reflected the clash of class interests, not ideological differences. The Civil War, Beard wrote, should be understood as a transfer of national power from an agricultural ruling class in the South to the industrial bourgeoisie of the North; he could tell the entire story without mentioning slavery except in a footnote. In the 1920s and 1930s, a group of mostly Southern historians known as the revisionists went further, insisting that slavery was a benign institution that would have died out peacefully. A “blundering generation” of politicians had stumbled into a needless war. But the true villains, as in Lee’s 1856 letter, were the abolitionists, whose reckless agitation poisoned sectional relations. This interpretation dominated teaching throughout the country, and reached a mass audience through films like “The Birth of a Nation,” which glorified the Klan, and “Gone With the Wind,” with its romantic depiction of slavery. The South, observers quipped, had lost the war but won the battle over its history.

As far as Lee was concerned, the culmination of these trends came in the publication in the 1930s of a four-volume biography by Douglas Southall Freeman, a Virginia-born journalist and historian. For decades, Freeman’s hagiography would be considered the definitive account of Lee’s life. Freeman warned readers that they should not search for ambiguity, complexity or inconsistency in Lee, for there was none — he was simply a paragon of virtue. Freeman displayed little interest in Lee’s relationship to slavery. The index to his four volumes contained 22 entries for “devotion to duty,” 19 for “kindness,” 53 for Lee’s celebrated horse, Traveller. But “slavery,” “slave emancipation” and “slave insurrection” together received five. Freeman observed, without offering details, that slavery in Virginia represented the system “at its best.” He ignored the postwar testimony of Lee’s former slave Wesley Norris about the brutal treatment to which he had been subjected. In 1935 Freeman was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in biography.

That same year, however, W. E. B. Du Bois published “Black Reconstruction in America,” a powerful challenge to the mythologies about slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction that historians had been purveying. Du Bois identified slavery as the fundamental cause of the war and emancipation as its most profound outcome. He portrayed the abolitionists as idealistic precursors of the 20th-century struggle for racial justice, and Reconstruction as a remarkable democratic experiment — the tragedy was not that it was attempted but that it failed. Most of all, Du Bois made clear that blacks were active participants in the era’s history, not simply a problem confronting white society. Ignored at the time by mainstream scholars, “Black Reconstruction” pointed the way to an enormous change in historical interpretation, rooted in the egalitarianism of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and underpinned by the documentary record of the black experience ignored by earlier scholars. Today, Du Bois’s insights are taken for granted by most historians, although they have not fully penetrated the national culture.

Inevitably, this revised view of the Civil War era led to a reassessment of Lee, who, Du Bois wrote elsewhere, possessed physical courage but not “the moral courage to stand up for justice to the Negro.” Even Lee’s military career, previously viewed as nearly flawless, underwent critical scrutiny. In “The Marble Man” (1977), Thomas Connelly charged that “a cult of Virginia authors” had disparaged other Confederate commanders in an effort to hide Lee’s errors on the battlefield. James M. McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom,” since its publication in 1988 the standard history of the Civil War, compared Lee’s single-minded focus on the war in Virginia unfavorably with Grant’s strategic grasp of the interconnections between the eastern and western theaters.

Lee’s most recent biographer , Michael Korda, does not deny his subject’s admirable qualities. But he makes clear that when it came to black Americans, Lee never changed. Lee was well informed enough to know that, as the Confederate vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, declared, slavery and “the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man” formed the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy; he chose to take up arms in defense of a slaveholders’ republic. After the war, he could not envision an alternative to white supremacy.

What Korda calls Lee’s “legend” needs to be retired. And whatever the fate of his statues and memorials, so long as the legacy of slavery continues to bedevil American society, it seems unlikely that historians will return Lee, metaphorically speaking, to his pedestal.

Eric Foner is the author of “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery,” winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history. His most recent book is “Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History. Essays From The Nation.”

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Author allen c. guelzo joins us to share his latest biography, a character study of a complicated civil war figure..

Photos via Penguin Random House/Allen C. Guelzo

Robert E. Lee: A Life is a new biography that examines one of the most well-known and controversial Civil War figures. Author ALLEN C. GUELZO , professor and historian at Princeton University, covers Lee’s life starting with his traumatic childhood that involved the disappearance of his father, to the ultimate betrayal of his country. When General Lee violated his oath to the US Army and commanded Confederate soldiers, his treason was accompanied by praise and admiration, and while he claimed to believe slavery was immoral, he vigorously and strategically fought to defend it. This hour, as our nation grapples with removing statues of confederate leaders and changing school buildings that bear Lee’s name, Guelzo joins us to share his character study of a complicated figure.

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Workers remove the monument of Confederate General Robert E. Lee on Saturday, July 10, 2021 in Charlottesville, Va. The removal of the Lee statue follows years of contention, community anguish and legal fights. (AP Photo/John C. Clark)

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A new Robert E. Lee biography and why it’s relevant today

Historian Allen Guelzo has written a biography: Robert E. Lee – A Life , that has a new relevancy today. A racial reckoning over the past two years and a nation that is re-examining its past has put Lee back in the news.

Lee was looked upon as an icon in the south and respected as a military leader after commanding the Confederate army in the Civil War. But Lee has come under scrutiny for leading an army that was fighting to maintain slavery and was a slaveholder himself.

Guelzo’s book addresses the question of whether Robert E. Lee committed treason against the United States when he resigned from the U.S. Army to join the Confederacy and take up arms against a country he had sworn to defend. The history books most often say Lee said he “couldn’t raise his sword against Virginia” his home state. Guelzo writes there may have been more personal thinking to Lee’s decision.

Dr. Allen Guelzo was featured in a virtual Midtown Scholar Bookstore event recently and is on today’s Smart Talk .

See video of the interview here.

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Robert E. Lee: A Life Hardcover – Deckle Edge, September 28, 2021

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• Print length 608 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Knopf
• Publication date September 28, 2021
• Dimensions 6.66 x 1.53 x 9.57 inches
• ISBN-10 1101946229
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; First Edition (September 28, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 608 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1101946229
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1101946220
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.11 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.66 x 1.53 x 9.57 inches
• #137 in U.S. Civil War Confederacy History
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• #3,256 in U.S. State & Local History

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Robert Edward Lee

January 19, 1807–October 12, 1870

Robert E. Lee was a prominent Confederate army officer who commanded the Army of Northern Virginia throughout most of the Civil War. He also served as General-in-Chief of Confederate forces near the end of the war.

Robert E. Lee was a prominent U.S. Army officer before the Civil War. When Virginia seceded from the Union, he resigned from his position and accepted the leadership of the Army of Northern Virginia. Near the end of the Civil War, he was named General-in-Chief of Confederate forces. Image Source: Wikipedia.

Early Life and Career of Robert E. Lee

Robert Edward Lee was born on January 19, 1807, at Stratford, a family plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia. He was the fifth child of Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee and Ann Hill Carter Lee. Lee’s father was a Revolutionary War hero, a delegate to the Continental Congress, the Governor of Virginia from 1791 to 1794, and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Despite his military and political renown, the Panic of 1796-1797 financially ruined the elder Lee and by 1809 he spent a year in debtor’s prison. After his release, Lee moved his family to Alexandria, Virginia. While living there, Robert attended local schools. In 1812, Lee’s father traveled to the West Indies and never returned, dying there in 1818. Lee’s mother had to raise her children with the help of relatives.

U.S. Military Academy Cadet

In 1824, Lee’s uncle, William Henry Fitzhugh, secured an appointment for Lee to the United States Military Academy. Lee entered the academy in 1825, graduating second in his class in 1829.

U.S. Army Officer

After graduation, Lee received a brevet commission as a second lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers. When Lee returned home while awaiting assignment, his mother died on July 26, 1829.

While at home, Lee also began courting Mary Custis, great-granddaughter of Martha Washington. In August, the army stationed Lee in Georgia. When he was home on leave a year later, Mary accepted Lee’s second marriage proposal, and the two wed on June 30, 1831. Later that year, the army transferred Lee to Fort Monroe in Virginia. For the next fifteen years, Lee was away from his family, performing various engineering duties for the army, including helping to establish the state line between Ohio and Michigan in 1835. During the period, Lee received promotions to second lieutenant in 1832, to first lieutenant in 1836, and to captain in 1838.

Mexican-American War

During the Mexican-American War (1846 to 1848) , Lee first served as an engineer under General John Wool, primarily laying out transportation routes. In 1847, he transferred to the staff of General Winfield Scott , who later stated that Lee was “the greatest soldier I ever saw in the field.” Lee served with distinction at the battles of Veracruz (March 1847) , Cerro Gordo (April 1847) , and Chapultepec (September 1847) , where he was wounded. Lee received a brevet promotion to major after the Battle of Cerro Gordo on April 18, 1847.

Superintendent of the United States Military Academy

After the Mexican-American War, Lee resumed his peacetime engineering duties with the army. In 1852, U.S. Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis appointed him superintendent of the United States Military Academy, where he served until 1855. In March 1855, the army promoted Lee to lieutenant colonel and gave him command of the recently formed 2nd U.S. Cavalry in Texas. His unit’s primary task was to subdue the Comanche Indians.

Slaveholder

While serving in Texas, Lee’s father-in-law, George Washington Custis, died in 1857, and Lee returned to Alexandria, Virginia to serve as executor of the estate. Custis’s will stipulated that his slaves receive their freedom within five years of his death. The slaves erroneously believed that they became free at the time of Custis’s death. Lee disagreed, and when some slaves attempted to escape, Lee began hiring them out, sometimes breaking up their families. Lee also filed legal petitions to keep Custis’s chattel enslaved indefinitely. Only when the courts denied his petitions did Lee consent to his father-in-law’s wishes and free his slaves.

John Brown’s Raid

In October 1859, President James Buchanan ordered Lee to lead a detachment of U.S. Marines to Harpers Ferry, Virginia to suppress a raid on the federal arsenal led by Ohioan and abolitionist John Brown . On October 18, after failed negotiations with Brown, Lee ordered his marines to storm the building housing the insurrectionists. In a matter of minutes, Lee’s men crushed the foray and captured Brown. Later that year, Lee stood guard at Brown’s execution on December 2, 1859.

Robert E. Lee During the Civil War

Confederate officer.

When the session crisis escalated after Abraham Lincoln’s election to the U.S. Presidency in 1860, Lee struggled with performing his sworn duty as a soldier and preserving his allegiance to his home state of Virginia. Serving as the acting head of the Department of Texas during the winter of 1860, Lee refused to cede federal property to local secessionists. In March of the following year, the War Department recalled Lee to Washington and promoted him to full colonel. On April 17, 1861, Virginia seceded from the Union. The next day, Lee declined a promotion to major general in the army being assembled to suppress the Southern insurrection. On April 20, he resigned from his commission in the U.S. Army. Three days later Lee accepted the command of Virginia’s forces.

Rocky Beginning

The first year of the Civil War was not kind to Lee or his reputation. In an uncoordinated attack hampered by rain, fog, and mountainous terrain, Lee’s forces were defeated at the Battle of Cheat Mountain (September 12 to 15) in western Virginia. Confederate President Jefferson Davis relieved Lee of his field command and sent him east to supervise the construction of coastal defenses in Georgia and the Carolinas. Davis then recalled Lee to Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, where he served as a military adviser to the Confederate president. While acting in that capacity, Lee ordered his men to dig a network of defensive trenches around the Confederate capital. That operation earned him the derogatory sobriquet, “King of Spades.”

Army of Northern Virginia

The spring of 1862 marked a change in Lee’s military fortunes. By late May, Major General George McClellan had advanced the Federal Army of the Potomac to the outskirts of Richmond during his Peninsula Campaign . On June 1, General Joseph E. Johnston was severely wounded at the Battle of Seven Pines , and Lee assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia .

Seven Days Battles

As McClellan planned for a siege of Richmond, Lee prepared to take the initiative. On June 25, he launched the first of six assaults on Federal troops in seven days, collectively known as the Seven Days Battles (June 25 to July 1, 1862) . Although the Battle of Gaines Mills was the only engagement in the series that produced a tactical Confederate victory, the offensive achieved Lee’s strategic objective of driving McClellan away from Richmond.

Northern Virginia Campaign

The Army of the Potomac retreated down the peninsula until U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and General-in-Chief-of-the-Army Henry Halleck recalled it on August 3, to support Major General Pope’s Army of Virginia operating near Washington. With McClellan’s army off of the peninsula, Lee turned his attention to Pope and scored a major victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run (August 28 to 30, 1862) , opening the way for a Confederate invasion of the North.

Maryland Campaign

In September 1862, Lee moved the Army of Northern Virginia into Maryland. His Maryland Offensive had three major goals: relieve Virginia from the ravages of war, resupply his army through foraging in the North, and erode Northern morale enough to influence upcoming midterm elections in the North. McClellan dispatched the Army of the Potomac to Maryland to check Lee’s advance. The two armies met at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland. During the bloodiest day of fighting in the Civil War , the armies fought to a standoff. With his advance stalled and supplies running low, Lee withdrew to Virginia.

Fredericksburg Campaign

Disappointed with McClellan’s failure to pursue Lee’s retreating army, President Lincoln placed Ambrose Burnside in command of the Army of the Potomac on November 7, 1862, and urged him to mount an offensive. A reluctant Burnside crossed the Rappahannock River on December 12. The next day he ordered a disastrous series of frontal attacks against Lee’s well-positioned army near Fredericksburg, Virginia. After suffering more than 12,000 casualties , Burnside called off the offensive and re-crossed the river. Lee’s reputation and his army’s morale soared with the decisive Confederate victory at the Battle of Fredericksburg .

Chancellorsville Campaign

On January 26, 1863, Lincoln replaced Burnside with Major General Joseph (“Fighting Joe”) Hooker in his quest to find a Union officer who could out-general Lee. On April 27, Hooker led the Army of the Potomac back across the Rappahannock and Rapidan Rivers. He soon found one near Chancellorsville, Virginia on May 1. Outnumbering Lee’s army by a ratio of two to one , Hooker planned to use his numerical superiority to flank and entrap Lee’s army. However, Lee expected Hooker’s plan and split his outnumbered army to check the Federal flanking movements. After five days of intense fighting, Hooker withdrew his army from the field. Many consider the Battle of Chancellorsville to be the highlight of Lee’s military career. Once again he had fended off an advance by a much larger force, raising the already high morale of his army and prompting him to lobby for another invasion of the North.

Gettysburg Campaign

While Lee was defeating Hooker at Chancellorsville, Major General Ulysses S. Grant was besieging the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, Mississippi on the Mississippi River. With Hooker’s army in retreat, many Confederate officials proposed sending some of Lee’s army west to relieve Vicksburg. Reluctant to reduce the number of troops protecting Virginia, Lee instead proposed another invasion of the North. With his stature at an all-time high, Lee’s views prevailed, and Jefferson Davis authorized him to launch another offensive.

On June 3, 1863, Lee began moving portions of his army northwest toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Rebels crossed the mountains and moved north through the Shenandoah Valley, capturing the Union garrison at Winchester, Virginia, in the Second Battle of Winchester (June 13 to 15, 1863) . Lee’s army then began moving into Maryland and Pennsylvania.

By that time, Hooker realized Lee’s movements and dispatched the Army of the Potomac to stop Lee’s advance. As the Federals sought to locate Lee’s forces, Hooker engaged in a heated dispute with his superiors and rashly offered to resign as commander of the Army of the Potomac. President Lincoln quickly accepted the resignation, and on June 28, he replaced Hooker with Major General George Meade. Three days later, Meade’s army engaged Lee at the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg.

Battle of Gettysburg

From July 1 through July 3, the two armies clashed in the Battle of Gettysburg, the largest battle of the Civil War. Meade’s army arrived at Gettysburg ahead of the Rebels and secured the high ground on the first day of battle. Seeing that the Federals held the better ground, some of Lee’s lieutenant commanders, particularly James Longstreet , advised Lee to move the Confederate army around Gettysburg and face Meade’s army on another day at a place of the Rebels’ choosing. Fearing the effect that withdrawing might have on his army’s morale and, perhaps, placing too much stock in the illusory invincibility of the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee instead ordered ill-advised attacks against the Federal lines on the second and third days of the battle.

The results were catastrophic, particularly the assault on the Union center on July 3, later known as Pickett’s Charge . As Lee watched the remnants of his army return from the failed assault on Cemetery Ridge, he acknowledged, “It is all my fault.” That evening, the shattered Army of Northern Virginia began an arduous ten-day march back to Virginia, bringing Lee’s offensive to an ignominious end. Meade did not pursue Lee as he withdrew, and for the rest of the season, both armies were content to recuperate from the battle.

A Formidable Opponent

Meade’s failure to pursue Lee immediately after Gettysburg, coupled with his subsequent inaction in 1863, again prompted President Lincoln to find a general who would use the Union’s dominant resources to defeat the Confederacy. On February 29, 1864, President Lincoln signed legislation restoring the rank of lieutenant general in the United States Army. On March 2, the president nominated Ulysses S. Grant, conqueror of Vicksburg and champion of Chattanooga, for the post. Congress confirmed the nomination on the same day. On March 3, Lincoln summoned Grant to Washington. A week later, on March 10, the president issued an executive order appointing Grant as General-in-Chief of the Armies of the United States. On March 17, 1864, Grant issued General Orders, Number 12, taking command of the armies.

Overland Campaign

Grant immediately devised a plan to have all Union armies act in concert and then set his sights on defeating Lee. Making his headquarters with Meade’s Army of the Potomac, Grant launched his Overland Campaign in the spring, determined to go where Lee went. Although it took nearly a year, Grant’s strategy eventually prevailed. Against the better-equipped and much larger Union army , Lee held his own at the bloody Battles of the Wilderness (May 5-7, 1864) , Spotsylvania Court House (May 8-21, 1864) , and Cold Harbor (May 31 – June 12, 1864) , endured a prolonged Siege at Petersburg (June 9, 1864 – March 25, 1865).

General-in-Chief of Confederate Forces

By the end of 1864, the Confederacy’s military plight had become dire. Grant had Lee’s army bottled up in Petersburg and William T. Sherman captured Savannah on December 21 after making Georgia howl during his notorious March to the Sea . As the situation worsened, Southerners began questioning President Jefferson Davis’s effectiveness as commander-in-chief. Opposition to Davis reached a crescendo on January 23, 1865, when the Confederation Congress enacted legislation creating the post of General-in-Chief of Confederate forces. A week later, the bedeviled president appointed Robert E. Lee to the post. On February 6, the Confederate War Department issued General Orders, No. 3 announcing Lee’s appointment. On February 9, Lee issued his first general order as General-in-Chief announcing that he had assumed the post.

Surrender at Appomattox Court House

The change in leadership had little effect on the outcome of the war. In March 1865, Lee led his beleaguered forces in a desperate escape attempt that ended at Appomattox Court House. On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Grant.

Robert E. Lee’s Life After the Civil War

The Civil War lingered on for several weeks after the surrender at Appomattox Court House, but it was over for Lee. He returned to Richmond to reunite with his family. On October 2, 1865, Lee became president of Washington University in Lexington, Virginia. On the same day, Lee signed an amnesty oath, swearing his allegiance to the Constitution and to the United States. On December 25, 1868, President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation that unconditionally pardoned those who “directly or indirectly” rebelled against the United States. Johnson’s pardon ensured that Lee would not face charges of treason. Still, the federal government did not restore Lee’s citizenship during his lifetime. On August 5, 1975, over 100 years after Lee’s death, President Gerald R. Ford signed legislation restoring Lee’s citizenship.

Lee served as president of Washington College for five years. During that time, he supported President Johnson’s Reconstruction plan and opposed the policies of so-called Radicals in Congress. He counseled compliance with federal authority but remained opposed to extending voting and civil rights to freed blacks.

Death of Robert E. Lee

On September 28, 1870, Lee suffered a stroke at his home in Lexington, Virginia. He died two weeks later on October 12. Lee’s remains were buried beneath the Lee Chapel on the campus of Washington University (now Washington and Lee University) in Lexington.

• Written by Harry Searles

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NEW BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT E. LEE [Notes]

From the 16 November 1907 issue of The New York Times.

NEW BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT E. LEE

South Honors, Above All, Man Who Never believed in Secession and Prayed Daily for Yankees. *

By Prof. WILLIAM E. DODD.

THE people of the United States have much to learn about the greatest Confederate General, and as much to be grateful for to him. Lee was a remarkable character, one of the rare men of earth: a Puritan and a Cavalier, fighter and a peacemaker at the same time. No American would make a mistake in placing a good “Life” of this greatest of all Virginians in the hands of his boy.

The histories of the civil war and the myriad biographies and memoirs of that period pay due attention to the military leader who failed at Gettysburg and surrendered a heroic army at Appomattox; but from none of these do we get the essential value of the man to the South, together with his significance to the North—as yet hardly ready, with Charles Francis Adams, to erect in the National capital a statue in his honor.

Lee was never genuinely Southern; his father’s brother once wrote to John Adams that he could not endure the aristocratic ways of Virginia and that he contemplated laying his bones in the soil of Massachussetts; his father was no friend of Thomas Jefferson, the architect of modern Virgina; and Lee himself declared the oncoming war of 1861 an unnecessary revolution. But the blood of a resolute race flowed in his veins; he was by the necessities of his early training a Puritan in Cavalier environment. He learned self-control and absolute reliance upon God from his mother; at West Point and during his ante-bellum career in the United States Army he manifested a will to ascertain and do his duty that would have graced Cromwell himself. When he once decided on which side his allegiance lay in 1861 a great point had been won for the South.

The South that brought on the war was not of a religious frame of mind; Western Marylanders were astonished at the mighty oaths of Lee’s men in 1862. Here and there the pietist Methodist and Baptist had gained a foothold among the well-to-do classes, and stern but intellectual Presbyterianism had a small aristocratic following. But as the terrible stress and grief of 1862 came home to nearly every Southern plantation, when the great outside world seemed to turn its back upon this resolute people, men began to take counsel of the Invisible and to steel themselves for whatever fate might decree. It was now that Lee and Jackson, their successful Generals, came to be known to them. Davis became a devout Christian; Lee and Jackson were known in the army as “praying men”; the Bible, being precious to the heroes, won a place on the fashionable table; men who had never darkened the doors of evangelical churches began to take heed as to what the preachers said; overflow prayer meeting were common in Richmond after 1862, and in 1863 and 1864 great “revivals” spread through the armies. The South became actively Christian and Puritan in spirit as the war wore on; and since 1865 this great section of unmixed English stock has steadily become more like the Puritan and Calvinist of the seventeenth century. There is hardly a regionof the world more profoundly religious than the South to-day. The examples of Lee and Jackson—embodiments as they were of Southern ideals in other things—did much, perhaps most, to work this remarkable revolution. The life of Lee, then, true every day as it was to the strictest religious regime, can but impress for good the mind of any child or adult.

Lee was never quite a disunionist, even during the war; he declared in 1864, when he heard of the death of Gen. Scott, that a great and good man had gone; he was willing at any time, if his people could be brought to agree with him, to abolish slavery and reconstruct the Union; and once he almost reprimanded President Davis for saying that reconstruction was impossible. He seldom spoke of the Union Army as “the enemy,” and never as “the Yankees”; he seemed to feel that both sections would one day come to live under the same roof, and it was not in his heart to speak harshly of any one. “Those people” or “our opponents” were his terms for designating the hostile Norht; and he says in one of his characteristic letters that there was never a day during the long struggle in which he did not pray for the Northern people and the soldiers of the opposing army! Such generosity, such breadth of soul, was as rare then as now, and to know more of such a character, I take it, is the duty of every Amrican. Such a man, at least, the South honors beyond all others to-day; old men wear their beards and trim their hair “like Gen. Lee,” and the children of every household look upon those familiar and benignant features from their very cradles.

The South thus honors most, strange as it may seem, the great war leader who daily prayed for the “Yankees,” who never believed in secession, and who was first to counsel a genuine reunion of his disjointed and bleeding country.

This is the character which Mr. Bruce, the foremost historian and scholar of the Old Dominion, presents to the reader in his all too brief biography. Mr. Bruce is too well known to require any introduction to the American public; his economic history of Virginia has given him enduring fame. His “Life of Lee” will not detract from his established reputation, though the book is not what can be called critical or “final.” The great phases of Lee’s career are well told with due emphasis upon the historical setting; the remarkable oligarchy from which Lee sprang, the precocious years and the early army life; the struggle which it cost Lee to leave the “old army” the long and almost unbearable responsibility of leading his people through the crises of the war; and the poetic retirement to Washington College in 1865 are the main topics. A chapter on the “Character of Lee” and another on “Military Genius” fitting close the little book. The story is well told; the author’s style is straightforward and sometimes eloquent. Mr. Bruce believes in the grandeur of his hero.

And perhaps this very devotion to the fame of Lee leads him to do Longstreet, as the reviewer, who is no champion of the latter General, feels, some injustice. Longstreet was slow and self-willed, but he would have obeyed his superior at any crisis. The trouble lay probably in Lee’s leaving too much to the discretion of his lieutenants.

Possibly some complaint might be brought against Mr. Bruce for not bringing out more clearly the weakness of Lee’s strategy after Cold Harbor and before the siege of Petersburg. And possibly, too, there is too much blame laid at the door of President Davis for the long defense of Richmond when yielding the capital might have saved the Confederacy. It is not, I believe, generally known that a strong movement was started in 1861 to make Huntsville, Ala., the Southern capital.

Mr. Bruce’s excellent “Life of Lee” is one of the American Crisis Series of Biographies, and, like most of the others thus far published, it is well worth the few hours required for its perusal. It presents in brief outline one of the great and tragic figures of world history.

* THE LIFE OF ROBERT E. LEE. By Philip Alexander Bruce. George W. Jacobs & Company. Philadelphia.

• – – Lee
• A Committee of the Rockbridge Bible Society Recipient: (William Nelson Pendleton, J. T. L. Preston, and William White)
• a Friend in London
• A Gentleman in London
• A Gentleman of Influence, In England
• A. C. Niven
• A. H. Gardner
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• A. J. Foard
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• Abby L. Cook
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• Arthur Lee, Last Will and Testament
• Augustus Robin
• B Gildersleeve
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• Benjamin Dunn
• Benjamin Franklin
• Benjamin Franklin1
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• Benjamin Rush
• Beverley Randolph
• Board of War
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• J. W. Lapsley
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• James Carey
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• James Gordon, Jr.
• James K Edmondson
• James K. Caskie
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• Jefferson Davis
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• Jerome N. Bonaparte
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• John Bradford
• John Bradford Recipient: Leonard Jarvis
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• John F. Lee
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• John Fitzgerald
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• John W. Truslow
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• Jonathan B. Lafitte
• Jonathan M. Taylor
• Jonathan O. Sullivan
• Jonathan Potts
• Jonathan R. Thompson
• Jonathan S. LaFever
• Jonathan Trumbull
• Jonathan Trumbull, Sr.
• Jones Brothers & Co.
• Joseph Desha
• Joseph E. Johnston
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• Joseph G. Steele
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• Joseph Henry
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• Joseph Nourse
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• Josiah Warren
• Jubal A. Early
• Julia A. M. Lee
• Julia Gratiot
• Julius Stronse
• Kenner Garrard
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• Lancaster & Co.
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• Leon Nicely
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• little Mildred
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• Lord Camden
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• Lucinda Lee
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• Mary Anne Mackay Stiles
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• Mary E. McCormick McDonald
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• Mary Lee Fitzhugh Custis
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• Mary McDonald
• Mary Randolph Custis Lee
• Mary Tabb Bolling Lee
• Maryland Delegates
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• Meriwether Smith, Recipient: Richard Henry Lee, Recipient: Cyrus Griffin, Recipient: William Fleming
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• Messrs. Mason, Fenwick & Lawrence
• Messrs. Tappey, Luvisden & Co.
• Miers W. Fisher
• Mildred Childe Lee
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• Mildred Lee
• Mildred Lee Harness
• Milton Barlow
• Miss A. H. Nichols
• Miss Annie Glenn
• Miss Cora C. Peters
• Miss Custis
• Miss Len Campbell
• Miss M. Norwell Caskie
• Miss Maggie Smith
• Miss Neilia Cave
• Miss Sidney Lee
• Moravians of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
• Mr. Bonaparte
• Mr. Campbell
• Mr. John D. Sterrett
• Mr. John W. Truslord
• Mr. L. R. Spilman
• Mr. Lossing
• Mr. R. B. Richardson
• Mr. Rutherford
• Mr. S. Root
• Mr. Warfield
• Mr. Woodward
• Mrs. Benjamin Edward Stiles
• Mrs. E. E. Stanley
• Mrs. E. E. Starkey
• Mrs. E. J. Fishburne
• Mrs. F. S. Cater
• Mrs. Frank Henderson
• Mrs. H. R. Glenn
• Mrs. J. M. Wyche
• Mrs. J. S. Heiskell
• Mrs. Johnston
• Mrs. M. B. Brown
• Mrs. M. B. Smith
• Mrs. M. Mcdonald
• Mrs. S. A. Rees
• Mrs. S. P. Myrick
• Mrs. S. R. Alexander
• Mrs. T. J. Jackson
• Mrs. Thomas J. Jackson
• Mrs. W. H. Polk
• Mrs. Warren Newcomb
• Mrs. William Brown
• Mrs. William C. Rives
• my dear brother Carter
• my dear Caroline
• My Dear Charlie
• My dear Colonel
• my dear cousin Philip
• My Dear Dr.
• my dear Ella
• My dear Emily
• My Dear General
• my dear Henry Custis
• My Dear Lucretia
• My Dear Madam
• My dear Miss Sella
• My dear Mr. Glenn
• my dear Mr. Tucker
• my dear Mrs. Glenn
• my dear Mrs. Stribling
• my dear Nat
• my dear Rosa
• My Dear Sir
• My Dear Squire
• My Dear Sue
• My dear Whitice
• My Dear Young Friend
• my dearest Mary
• N. G. Evans
• N. W. Hibbard
• Nahum Capen
• Nat Burwell, Jr.
• Nat Burwell, Jr.?
• Nathanael Greene
• Nathaniel Gorham
• Nathaniel Peabody
• Nathaniel Scudder
• Nicholas Biddle
• North Carolina Delegates
• Northampton Committee
• Otho Williams
• P. A. Morse
• P. C. Lutphin
• P. J. Burns
• P. S. Bowdoin
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• Patirick Henry
• Patrick Henry
• Peregrine Wroth
• Peter Van Berckel
• Philip Fendall, Jr.
• Philip Ludwell Lee
• Philip Mazzei
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• Philip Slaughter
• Pieter Johan Van Berckel
• Postmaster of New York
• Printer of the Pennsylvania General Advertiser
• Prof. Campbell
• Proprietor of the Arlington House Hotel
• R. B. Richardson
• R. E. Lee, Jr.
• R. G. Mayo & Co.
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• R. L. Dabney
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• Rhode Island Council of War
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• Richard Henry Lee Sender: William Grayson
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• Richard Henry Lee, Description of the New Great Seal of Virginia
• Richard Henry Lee, for the Committee of Congress
• Richard Henry Lee, for the Committee of Five
• Richard Henry Lee, for the Committee of Foreign Affairs
• Richard Henry Lee, for the Committee of Secret Correspondence
• Richard Henry Lee, for the Continental Congress
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• Richard Henry Lee, for the Marine Committee
• Richard Henry Lee, for the Virginia Delegates in Congress
• Richard Henry Lee, for the Virginia Delegates to Congress
• Richard Henry Lee, for Virginia Delegates in Congress
• Richard Henry Lee, Henry Laurens,and Thomas Burke1
• Richard Henry Lee, Memorandum Respecting Arthur Lee
• Richard Henry Lee, on behalf of the Marine Committee
• Richard Henry Lee, Proposed Amendments to the Federal Constitution
• Richard Henry Lee, Resolutions
• Richard Henry Lee, Subscription for Portrait of Lord Camden
• Richard L. Page
• Richard Lee
• Richard Parker
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• Richard S. Ewell
• Robert and Samuel Purviance, Jr.
• Robert Beverly
• Robert Carter
• Robert Carter Nicholas
• Robert E. Launitz
• Robert E. Lee
• Robert E. Lee III
• Robert E. Lee Sender: Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee
• Robert E. Lee telegram
• Robert E. Lee to
• Robert E. Lee, Account with the U.S.
• Robert E. Lee, Cadet Form
• Robert E. Lee, Farewell to the Army
• Robert E. Lee, Jr.
• Robert E. Lee, Note on a Report of the New Bern, North Carolina, Expedition of 1 February 1864
• Robert E. Lee, Orders No. 35
• Robert E. Lee, Receipt
• Robert E. Lee, Special Orders No 96
• Robert E. Lee, Special Orders No. 191
• Robert E.Lee
• Robert F. Patterson
• Robert Morris
• Robert Morris, Recipient: Richard Henry Lee, Recipient: William Whipple, Recipient: Philip Livingston
• Robert P. Taylor
• Robert Parker
• Robert Purviance Recipient: Samuel Purviance, Jr.
• Robert S. Clark Sender: George Paul Turner Sender: W. V. Davis Sender: W. Ellert Sender: P. G. Sallis Sender: Sam Grossing
• Robert W. Carter
• Robert W. Lewis, Jr.
• Rodman M. Price
• Rodney A. Mercer
• Roger Alden
• Roger Sherman
• Rudolph Kleberg
• S. B. Buckner
• S. Bassett French
• S. D. Rosan
• S. D. Stuart
• S. G. Davis
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• Sam Houston
• Samel Barrett
• Samuel Adams
• Samuel Chase
• Samuel Cooper
• Samuel H. Anderson
• Samuel Holten
• Samuel Huntington
• Samuel Kennerly, Jr.
• Samuel M. Duncan
• Samuel M. Mullen
• Samuel M. Mullin
• Samuel P. Conner
• Samuel Purviance, Jr.
• Samuel Richards Johnston
• Samuel Rothchild
• Samuel Taylor
• Samuel W. Adams
• Samuel Ward
• Samuel Washington
• Scranton and Burr Publishers
• Second Peace Commission
• Secret Committee
• Sidney Smith Lee
• Silas Deane
• Sir James Jay
• Sister Mary Baptista Linton
• Sisters of the Visitation, Circular Appeal
• Sisters of the Visitation, Letter of Solicitation
• Speaker of the House of Representatives of Virginia
• Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates
• Speaker of the Virginia Senate
• St. George Tucker
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• Susan Preston Hepburn
• Sydney Smith Lee
• T. A. Bartlette
• T. F. Carter
• T. Hewitt Key
• T. L. Rosser
• T. M. Niven
• T. P. Branch
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• T. U. St. John
• Tardy, Williams & Co.
• the Carlisle Commissioners
• the Commissioners at Paris
• the Conde de Floridablanca
• the Earl of Shelburne
• the Editor of the Virginia Gazette
• the Lord Mayor of London
• the Marquis de Lafayette
• the Massachusetts Board of War
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• the New York Convention
• the Pennsylvania Council of Safety
• the People of Great Britain
• the People of Great Britain and Ireland
• Theoderic Lee
• Theodoric Bland
• Theodorick Bland
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• Thomas J. Hardin
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• Thomas Jefferson
• Thomas Johnson
• Thomas Johnson Recipient: Thomas Sim Lee
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• Thomas Lee Shippen
• Thomas Ludwell Lee
• Thomas McKean
• Thomas Mifflin
• Thomas Miller
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• Thomas Sim Lee
• Thomas Sim Lee Recipient: Richard Caswell
• Thomas Sim Lee1
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• William N. Ward
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• William Preston Johnston
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• William Whipple
• Wilmer McLean
• Winfield Scott
• Z. H. Whiteman

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Best Books About Robert E. Lee

Robert E. Lee is an iconic and controversial figure which countless books have been written about since days of the Civil War .

Some of these books are a full account of Lee’s life while others focus solely on specific aspects of his life such as his personal thoughts and opinion’s as expressed in his private papers or his public image and how it came to be what is today.

To help you figure out which books to read, I’ve created this list of the best books about Robert E. Lee.

These books all have great reviews on sites like Amazon and Goodreads and many of them are best-sellers and have great reviews from critics.

I’ve also used many of these books in my research for this website so I can personally say they are some of the best on the topic.

The following is a list of the best books about Robert E. Lee:

(Disclaimer: This article contains Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

1. R.E. Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman

Published in 1934, this four-volume book by Douglas Southall Freeman chronicles all of the major events and highlights of Robert E. Lee’s military career.

The book discusses everything from Lee’s experiences in the Mexican-War to his surrender at Appomattox. Freeman depicts Lee as an honest, straightforward man who is “one of the small company of great men in whom there is no inconsistency to be explained, no enigma to be solved.”

The book received positive reviews when it was published. The New York Times referred to the entire work as “Lee Complete for All Time” while Stephen Vincent Benet’s review in the New York Herald Tribune referred to it as a “a complete portrait – solid, vivid, authoritative, and compelling.”

The book is now considered the definitive biography of Robert E. Lee.

Douglas Southall Freeman, who died in 1953, was a newspaper editor, military analyst, and a pioneering radio broadcaster.

In addition to his biography about Lee, Freeman also wrote a highly acclaimed six-volume biography of George Washington.

Freeman won two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 1935 for his biography of Robert E. Lee and one in 1958 (posthumously) for his biography of George Washington.

2. Robert E. Lee: A Biography by Emory M. Thomas

Published in 1995, this book by Emory M. Thomas explores the real Robert E. Lee, not the legend that he became.

Thomas argues that Lee’s image has been distorted over the years partly due to his own hidden nature and partly due to the myths and legends that surround him.

In the book’s foreward, Thomas goes on to say that Lee was a complex, mysterious man and to truly understand him you need to look into his inner character:

“Lee, the enigma, seldom if ever revealed himself while he lived. To understand him, it is necessary to look behind his words and see, for example, the true nature of the lighthouse keeper Lee encountered during his surveying mission in 1835. It is also important to peer beyond Lee’s words and recall what he did as well as what he said. Sometimes the existential Lee contradicted the verbal Lee.”

Thomas also points out that the real Robert E. Lee has been overshadowed by the legend that he later became:

“In addition to looking behind and beyond his words, it is well to remember that Lee once possessed of flesh and blood. This is important because so many have made so much of Lee during the years since he lived that legend, image and myth have supplanted reality. Lee has become a hero essentially smaller than life.”

The book received positive reviews when it was published. A review in Publisher’s Weekly “highly recommended” the book due to its unique take on this iconic figure:

“Synthesizing printed and manuscript sources, he presents Lee as neither the icon of Douglas Southall Freeman nor the flawed figure presented by Thomas Connolly. Lee emerges instead as a man of paradoxes, whose frustrations and tribulations were the basis for his heroism. Lee’s work was his play, according to the author, and throughout his life he made the best of his lot…Highly recommended.”

A review by Kirkus Reviews praised the book for presenting a fair and balanced view of this controversial figure:

“A comprehensive new biography that seeks to give a balanced portrait of the famed Confederate general. Thomas undertakes a daunting task here, seeking to recover the real, living human from the mythology surrounding Lee since his death in 1870. In this effort he hews a middle ground between early 20th century hagiographies and revisionist contemporary interpretations…Well written and based largely on primary documentation, a good effort at understanding a complex personality.”

A review by Patrick T. Reardon in the Chicago Tribune called the book an “interesting, readable examination of Lee’s life” but states that it “leaves the general still very much a mystery.”

A review in the New York Review of Books called it “The best and most balanced of the Lee biographies.”

Emory M. Thomas is Regents Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Georgia.

Thomas is also the author of eight books about the Civil War era, which include The Confederate Nation: 1861-1865; The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience; Travels to Hallowed Ground: A Historian’s Journey to the American Civil War; Bold Dragoon: The Life of J.E.B. Stuart; The Confederate State of Richmond: A Biography of the Capital; The Dogs of War: 1861; The American War and Peace: 1860-1877.

3. Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee by Captain Robert Edward Lee

Published in 1904, this book is a collection of documents compiled by Captain Robert Edward Lee, the son of General Robert E. Lee.

The book covers Lee’s service in the U.S. Army prior to the Civil War, his service in the Confederate States Army, his letters to his family, his life after the war as a private citizen and his opinions on the war and reconstruction as well as his last days before his death in 1870.

Captain Robert E. Lee was the youngest of General Lee’s three sons. In 1862, Lee served as a private in the Rockbridge Artillery before he was promoted to the rank of Captain, after the Battle of Sharpsburg, and then promoted to major general and aide-de-camp to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

4. Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee by Michael Korda

Published in 2014, this book by Michael Korda is a full-scale biography of Lee’s life and military career.

The book attempts to dispel the myths surrounding Lee to reveal the true human being underneath. In the book, Korda describes Lee as a serious, hard-working military man with a surprisingly fun side:

“A perfectionist, obsessed by duty and by the value of obedience, he might have been a grim figure, except for the fact that he had another side, charming, funny, and flirtatious. The animal lover, the gifted watercolorist, the talented cartographer – the topographic maps he drew for the Corps of Engineers are works of art, as are the cartoons he drew for his children in Mexico. The father who adored having his children get into bed with him in the morning, and telling them stories, or having them tickle his feet; the adoring husband; the devoted friend – these are all facets of the same man. He was the product of a rationalist education and at the same time a romantic, who sought for a spiritual answer to the problems of life – a man of contradictions, whose natural good manners and courtly bearing disguised his lifelong soul-searching.”

The book received positive reviews when it was published. A review by David Shribman in the Boston Globe described it as “Lively, approachable, and captivating…Like Lee himself, everything about Clouds of Glory is on a grand scale” while Publisher’s Weekly referred to it as “superbly engaging.”

Kirkus Reviews called it “A masterful biography of the beloved Civil War general…Lee is a man for the ages, and Korda delivers the goods with this heart-wrenching story of the man and his state” and a review by David Holahan in the Christian Science Monitor stated “Korda clearly has command of his subject…[Clouds of Glory] is well-considered and amply documented. Military buffs will find much to feast on.”

Yet, other reviewers were a little more reserved in their praise. Historian Eric Foner reviewed the book for the Washington Post and took issue with Korda’s grasp of the broader issues of the Civil War and Lee’s attitude towards them:

“When it comes to the broader historical context, Korda sometimes falters. He does not display familiarity with recent literature on the Civil War era. For example, the one book he cites on desertion from the Confederate armies, a subject of considerable recent scholarship, was written in 1924. Korda notes that Lee’s views on slavery and race have too often been ‘swept under the rug,’ but his own discussion is scattered and incomplete…Although Korda describes him as a political moderate, there was nothing moderate in Lee’s stance during the 1860 presidential campaign… Toward the end of the Civil War, Lee came to accept the necessity of enlisting black soldiers in the Confederate armies; a handful were enrolled a month before the surrender at Appomattox. Yet, Korda notes, his racial views ‘never changed.’ Unfortunately, the book fails to devote sufficient attention to Lee’s appearance in 1866 before the congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which showed him at his worst.”

A review by historian Fergus M. Bordewich in the New York Times also points out these inconsistencies as well as a number of glaring factual errors, yet still referred to the book as an ”admiring and briskly written biography…”

Michael Korda is a British author and former editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster. Korda has written a number of history books, including Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia; Alone: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat Into Victory; With Wings Like Eagles: The Untold Story of the Battle of Britain; Ike: An American Hero; Journey to a Revolution: A Personal Memoir and History of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

5. The Man Who Would Not Be Washington by Jonathan Horn

Published in 2015, this book by Jonathan Horn is about Lee’s complicated connection to George Washington.

In the prologue, Horn argues that although Lee is often compared to his famous great-grandfather-in-law, George Washington, Lee’s decision to fight against the United States negates this comparison:

“The connections between Washington and Lee are neither mystic nor manufactured. Lee was not the second coming of Washington, but he might have been had he chosen differently. As Washington was the man who would not be king, Lee was the man who would not be Washington. The story that emerges when viewed in this light is more complicated, more tragic, and more illuminating.”

The book received positive reviews when it was published. A review by USA Today called it compelling:

“Compelling….a modern and readable perspective on Lee’s enigmatic character” while the Pittsburg Post Gazette declared “The resulting work is well-written, fair-minded and short.”

A review by Publisher’s Weekly called the book captivating:

“Horn, a former White House speechwriter, puts a captivating spin on Lee’s story by comparing and contrasting the two great men. Detailed yet accessible descriptions of battles are coupled with stories of Lee’s personal life, revealing a man as complex as the war he reluctantly joined…Horn takes a fair and equitable approach to Lee, his life, and his struggle over participation in a war that tore apart the nation.”

A review by Kirkus Reviews praised the book for its compelling research but criticized its presentation:

“A romantic, rueful portrait of the Confederate general and the fatal decision that shut him out of history. Former White House speechwriter Horn finds Robert E. Lee (1807-1870) a deeply sympathetic American hero whom fortune seemed to have favored as heir to George Washington, if only Lee had thrown his lot with the Union rather than the South…Compelling research within an overwrought presentation.”

A review in the Kent State University Press also praised the book’s research:

“By design, Horn’s book is a limited biography of Lee. Whole chapters of Lee’s life, for example his engineering work on the Mississippi, receive only a sentence or two. But his central point, the Washington-Lee dynamic, is well researched and thoroughly developed. Whether Horn has made his case convincingly is for each reader to decide.”

Jonathan Horn is a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and journalist whose writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times and the Weekly Standard. The Man Who Would Not Be Washington is Horn’s first book.

6. Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee – The War They Fought, the Peace They Forgot by William C. Davis

Published in 2014, this book by William C. Davis is about how Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee became the famous commanders that they were.

Davis explains in the book’s preface that the work is not a traditional biography that chronicles the timeline of their lives but instead follows their personal development as military leaders:

“This is not a conventional biography. It is, rather, an exploration of the origins and development of Grant’s and Lee’s personalities and characters, their ethical and moral compasses, and their thinking processes and approaches to decision making – in short, the things that made them the kind of commanders they became.”

Yet, Davis goes on to explain that the book still has new information and insight from newly discovered and previously ignored sources, especially on Lee and Grant’s youth.

The book received positive reviews when it was published. A Review by Russell S. Bonds in the Wall Street Journal called the book “Brilliant…smoothly written and…scrupulously even handed” while Publisher’s Weekly declared “This meticulously researched, well-written book greatly enriches our understanding of each of these extraordinary figures.”

A review by Kirkus Reviews called it “A fresh look at the sources and a careful eye to leadership and character places this book high atop the list of recent Civil War histories.”

A review by Joseph C. Goulden in the Washington Times stated “The most avid of Civil War buffs will relish the revealing details in a book rich in authenticity and readability.”

William C. Davis is a retired Virginia Tech history professor and the author of numerous books about the Civil War, including The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy; Look Away: A History of the Confederate States of America; Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour: Civil War Cookbook; as well as other history books.

7. Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters by Elizabeth Brown Pryor

Published in 2007, this book by Elizabeth Brown Pryor takes a closer look at Robert E. Lee through his unpublished private letters.

In the book’s preface, Pryor explains that the book is not meant to be a full-scale biography but is instead a behind the scenes glimpse at Lee through his own words;

“Although this book is filled with new material, it is not meant to be a sensationalist biography. Nor is it a cradle-to-grave chronology, a detailed description of military movements, or an exhaustive analysis of the Civil War. Those books have already been written. Debunking the Lee mythology is also not the point of this book. Rather, it is to amplify our understanding of what constitutes heroism, and how as an ordinary person Lee faced the vagaries of the human condition. These letters help us to understand his prominence and to move out of our own moment to connect with a larger collective experience.”

The book received positive reviews when it was published. Historian David Blight reviewed it for the Boston Globe and praised its unique take on this controversial figure:

“An unorthodox, critical, and engaging biography. . . . [Pryor] impressively captures Lee’s character and personality.”

A review by Fergus M. Bordewich in the Wall Street Journal also praised the book for capturing Lee’s complexity:

“Pryor has taken an icon and given us the soul of a complex man and his turbulent age.”

Fellow Lee biographer, William C. Davis, wrote in the preface to his own book, Crucible of Command , that Pryor’s book is well-researched although he faulted her for occasionally making unwarranted assumptions:

“Elizabeth Pryor’s 2007 Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters is exhaustively researched and in the main an outstanding exploration of the inner Lee, often through writings not previously available, though she sometimes makes unwarranted leaps of interpretation from her sources.”

Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who died unexpectedly in an accident in 2015, was a former U.S. Diplomat who worked for the Department of State. Pryor is also the author of Clara Barton: Professional Angel and Six Encounters With Lincoln:  A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons, which was published posthumously in 2017.

In 2007, Pryor won the 2007 Jefferson Davis Award and the Richard S. Slatten Award for Excellence in Virginia Biography for Reading the Man and, in 2008, also won the Lincoln Prize and the Richard B. Harwell Book Award.

8. General Lee: A Biography of Robert E. Lee by Fitzhugh Lee

Published in 1894, this book by Fitzhugh Lee, Robert’s E. Lee’s nephew, chronicles Lee’s life using his unpublished private letters.

The book briefly discusses Lee’s family history before delving deep into the events of his military career. Fitzhugh Lee explains, in the book’s preface, that since General Lee never wrote a memoir, this book is an attempt to tell Lee’s story through his own words:

“In this volume the attempt has been made to imperfectly supply the great desire to have something from Robert E. Lee’s pen, by introducing, at the periods referred to, such extracts from his private letters as would be of general interest. He is thus made, for the first time, to give his impressions and opinions on most of the great events with which he was so closely connected.”

Despite being published over 100 years ago, the book is still a big seller and is highly recommended by fans of Robert E. Lee.

Fitzhugh Lee was a general in the U.S. army during the Spanish-American war and a cavalry general for the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War.

In addition to General Lee: A Biography, Fitzhugh Lee also wrote another book, titled Cuba’s Struggle Against Spain, as well as an article about General Lee.

9. Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History by Alan T. Nolan

Published in 1991, this book by Alan T. Nolan debunks the myths and legends about Lee to set the record straight about this iconic figure.

As Nolan explains in the preface, the book does not give a full account of Lee’s life and instead examines the legend of Robert E. Lee and uses evidence to prove or disprove specific claims about him:

“This book is not, therefore, a biography and offers no full account of Robert E. Lee’s life. It is, instead, an examination of major aspects of the tradition that identifies Lee in American history. In raising questions and drawing conclusions about this tradition, I have attempted to set fort the evidence. The reader who thinks I am asking the wrong questions or disagrees with my conclusions may, in evaluating my thesis, consider the evidence on which it is based. This evidence does not include any new or sensational facts or new primary materials. On the contrary, my inquiry concerns what the familiar and long-available evidence actually establishes about Robert E. Lee. The results of my inquiry are not so much an expose as simply an attempt to set the record straight.”

The book received positive reviews when it was published. A review by Peter Andrews in the Washington Post stated that although he believed the book wouldn’t appeal to a wide audience, it is a must-read for Lee historians:

“However, any future author dealing with Lee will have to face up to Nolan’s material and we will all be the better for it. A man struggling with his times, his prejudices and his sense of honor makes a more arresting subject than a public figure who forever seems to be speaking in copybook maxims.”

Yet, historian James McPherson reviewed the book for the New York Review of Books and accused Nolan of being disingenuous in his claim that the book was not intended to defame Lee:

“But this disclaimer of bias is a bit disingenuous. Nolan is a lawyer by profession. The book has something of the tone of an indictment of Lee in the court of history, with the author as prosecuting attorney. He wants the jury—his readers—to convict Lee of entering willingly into a war to destroy the American nation.”

McPherson goes on to say though that despite this the book presents a more realistic view of Lee than the legends do:

“There is truth in some of these charges; it is not the whole truth, however. Nolan’s portrait of Lee may be closer to the real Lee than the flawless marble image promoted by tradition. But the prosecutorial style of his book produces some new distortions.”

Alan T. Nolan is a former lawyer and author of numerous books about the Civil War, including The Iron Brigade: A Military History; Giants in Their Tall Hats: Essays on the Iron Brigade; Rally, Once Again!: Selected Civil War Writings.

10. Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society by Thomas Lawrence Connelly

Published in 1977, this book by Thomas Lawrence Connelly explores how the image of Robert E. Lee has changed since the Civil War.

As Connelly explains in the preface, the book is not a biography of Lee’s life but an analysis of how and why his public image changed:

“This book is an attempt to probe the image of Robert E. Lee in the American mind, from its origins among Lost Cause writers in the Reconstruction years to the era of the 1961-65 Civil War Centennial, when Lee became a hero to white middle class America. I am also endeavoring to test the Lee image for possible distortion and to rep-praise Lee himself as well. While there have been many biographies of Robert E. Lee, no one has seriously explored the process by which his image has developed since the Civil War.”

Connelly goes on to explain that Lee’s image has become distorted over the years and as a result the real Lee has been obscured:

“In truth, Lee was an extremely complex individual. Lee the man has become so intermingled with Lee the hero symbol that the real person has been obscured. Efforts to understand him, and to appraise his capabilities fairly, have been hindered by his image as a folk hero.”

The book was the first to deconstruct the myth of Robert E. Lee and was considered groundbreaking and controversial when it was published.

The book received positive reviews from critics. A review in the Washington Post called the it “An engaging, provocative book. . . . As a study of symbol-making [it] is first-rate.”

A review by the now defunct Saturday Review of Literature called it fascinating:

“Connelly provides a fascinating insight into the historical press-agentry through which Lee was enshrined as…an exemplar of American virtues.”

A review by Kirkus Reviews praised the book for its professionalism and insight:

“Connelly conveys these themes with a professionalism that will enable readers to discriminate among his views of Lee, earlier commentators’, and his view of the latter; what could have been a merely useful compilation of propaganda is transformed by Connelly’s own evaluations into a highly substantive and challenging work.”

A review by Julie K. Wilkinson in the The Annals of Iowa journal praised the book for its research yet stated it was a little lacking when it came to analysis:

“Through exhaustive research, Connelly effectively illustrates the Lee image which emerged from newspaper, popular and scholarly magazine, manuscript, fictional, oral, radio, and poetic accounts of the General. Shortcomings of The Marble Man are the attempts to discover why the image developed and then to compare it with the real person, Robert E. Lee.”

Thomas Lawrence Connelly, who died in 1991, was a professor of history at the University of South Carolina. Connelly wrote numerous books about the Civil War, including The Politics of Command: Factions and Ideas in Confederate Strategy; Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862-1865; Army of Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861-1862; Civil War Tennessee: Battles and Leaders; God and General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind.

Sources: Wilkinson, Julie. “The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society.” The Annals of Iowa, State Historical Society of Iowa, vol. 44, no. 5, summer 1978, pps. 408-408, ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=8568&context=annals-of-iowa Carmichael, Peter S. “CWT Book Review: Lee Considered.” History.net, 16 March. 2018, www.historynet.com/cwt-book-review-lee-considered.htm Andrews, Peter. “Book World – Lee Considered.” Washington Post, 8 July. 1991, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1991/07/08/book-world/7e9be165-279d-4973-81e6-4643d21b16cb/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f56cb4917a8e McPherson, James. “How Noble Was Robert E. Lee.” New York Review of Books, 7 Nov. 1991, www.nybooks.com/articles/1991/11/07/how-noble-was-robert-e-lee/ Faust, Drew Gilpin. “Lee Without Tears.” New York Times, 7 July. 1991, www.nytimes.com/1991/07/07/books/lee-without-tears.html Bordewich, Fergus M. “Discovering the Real Robert E. Lee.” Wall Street Journal, 15 May. 2007, www.wsj.com/articles/SB117918601842902577 Blight, David. “In a Celebrated Life, Shades of Gray.” Boston Globe, 29 July. 2007, archive.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/07/29/in_a_celebrated_life_shades_of_gray/ Barney, William L.”Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee—The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged by William C. Davis (review).” Journal of Southern History , vol. 82 no. 1, 2016, pp. 176-177. Project MUSE , muse.jhu.edu/article/611092/pdf Wert, Jeffry D. “Davis: Crucible of Command (2015).” Civil War Monitor, 12 Aug. 2015, www.civilwarmonitor.com/book-shelf/davis-crucible-of-command-2015 “Review: Crucible of Command.” Bob On Books, 25 May. 2015, bobonbooks.com/2015/05/25/review-crucible-of-command/ Barra, Allen. “Book Review: Crucible of Command – Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee.” Historynet.com, 9 Dec. 2014, www.historynet.com/book-review-crucible-of-command-ulysses-s-grant-and-robert-e-lee.htm “Crucible of Command by William C. Davis.” Kirkus Reviews, 21 Dec. 2014, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/william-c-davis/crucible-of-command/ Goulden, Joseph C. “The Civil War and the Generals Who Fought It.” Washington Times, 20 April. 2015, www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/20/book-review-crucible-of-command-ulysses-s-grand-an/ Bonds, Russell S. “The Odd Couple.” Wall Street Journal, 6 March. 2015, www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-crucible-of-command-by-william-c-davis-1425677492 Carrigan, Henry L., Jr. “The Man Who Would Not Be Washington by Jonathan Horn.” BookPage, bookpage.com/reviews/17608-jonathan-horn-man-who-would-not-be-washington-history Dotinga, Randy. “Robert E. Lee and George Washington Do Not Equate, Says Lee Biographer Jonathan Horn.” Christian Science Monitor, 7 Sept. 2017, www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2017/0907/Robert-E.-Lee-and-George-Washington-do-not-equate-says-Lee-biographer-Jonathan-Horn Barcousky, Len. “’The Man Who Would Not Be Washington’: Robert E. Lee embraces Virginia at the expense of the country he loved.” Pittsburg Post-Gazette, 1 March. 2015, www.post-gazette.com/ae/books/2015/03/01/The-Man-Who-Would-Not-Be-Washington-Robert-E-Lee-embraces-Virginia-at-the-expense-of-the-country-he-loved/stories/201503010062 “Nonfiction Book Review: The Man Who Would Not Be Washington by Jonathan Hom.” Publisher’s Weekly, www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-4767-4856-6 “The Man Who Would Not Be Washington by Jonathan Hom.” Kirkus Reviews, 2 Nov. 2014, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jonathan-horn/the-man-who-would-not-be-washington/ Bailey, Greg. “ The Man Who Would Not Be Washington: Robert E. Lee’s Civil War and His Decision That Changed American History by Jonathan Horn (review).” Civil War History , vol. 61 no. 4, 2015, pp. 455-456. Project MUSE , muse.jhu.edu/article/597689 Holahan, David. “Clouds of Glory.” Christian Science Monitor, 12 May. 2014, www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2014/0512/Clouds-of-Glory “Clouds of Glory by Michael Korda.” Kirkus Reviews, 30 March. 2014, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/michael-korda/clouds-of-glory-life/ “Nonfiction Book Review: Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee by Michael Korda.” Publisher’s Weekly, www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-06-211629-1 Shribman, David. “’Clouds of Glory’ by Michael Korda.” Boston Globe, 17 May. 2014, www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2014/05/17/review-clouds-glory-michael-korda/hs2q7pt1kaZSBBEoXs212K/story.html Foner, Eric. “Book Review: ‘Clouds of Glory: the Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee’ by Michael Korda.” Washington Post, 30 May. 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-clouds-of-glory-the-life-and-legend-of-robert-e-lee-by-michael-korda/2014/05/30/cba1d004-c973-11e3-95f7-7ecdde72d2ea_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.20ee0c7f1ea7 Bordewiche, Fergus M. “Ghost of the Confederacy.” New York Times, 27 June. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/books/review/clouds-of-glory-michael-kordas-robert-e-lee-biography.html Rable, George C. “The Journal of Southern History.” The Journal of Southern History , vol. 62, no. 4, 1996, pp. 809–811. JSTOR , www.jstor.org/stable/2211160. Reardon, Patrick. “Emory Thomas Paints a 3 rd View of Enigmatic Robert E. Lee.” Chicago Tribune, 10 Sept. 1995, www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-09-10-9509100037-story.html “Robert E. Lee by Emory M. Thomas.” Kirkus Review, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/emory-m-thomas/robert-e-lee/ “Nonfiction Book Review: Robert E. Lee: A Biography.” Publisher’s Weekly, www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-393-03730-2 Thompson, Charles Willis. “Robert E. Lee: A Final Portrait.” New York Times Book Review, 14 Oct. 1934. Thompson, Charles Willis. “Dr. Freeman Concludes his Monumental Life of Lee.” New York Times Book Review, 10 Feb. 1935. Benet, Stephen Vincent. “Great General, Greater Man: Robert E. Lee.” New York Herald Tribune, 10 Feb. 1935. Tate, Allen. “The Definitive Lee.” The New Republic, 19 Dec. 1934. Commager, Henry Steele. “New Books in Review: The Life of Lee.” The Yale Review, vol. XXIV, no. 3 (March 1935), 594. Malone, Dumas. “Review of R.E. Lee.” American Historical Review, vol. XL, no. 3, (April 1935), 534. Malone, Dumas. “Review of R.E. Lee.” American Historical Review, vol. XLI, no. 1, (October 1935), 164. Johnson, David E. Douglas Southall Freeman. Pelican Publishing Company, 2002. “30 Great Books About Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee.” About Great Books, www.aboutgreatbooks.com/topics/history/ulysses-s-grant-robert-e-lee/ Reeves, John. “7 Essential Books on Robert E. Lee.” Medium, 15 Aug. 2017, medium.com/@reevesjw/7-essential-books-on-robert-e-lee-dae455bc7bcf

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