Robert E Lee, 150 years later

A visibly exhausted Robert E Lee poses for Matthew Brady with one of his sons and a member of his staff just after the end of the Civil War

This has been a big week for my historical passions. Yesterday was the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, and Monday was the sesquicentennial of the death of Robert E Lee, who died October 12, 1870 in his home on the campus of Washington College in Lexington, in the mountains of his native Virginia. He was 63.

I originally had a much longer post on the topic prepared for Monday, the anniversary proper, but it proved much, much too long and self-indulgent. So, with apologies to the General for my tardiness, let me recommend the handful of items I had originally intended to share and let them speak for themselves.

Three good essays and a bonus

This month historian Allen Guelzo, author of Gettysburg: The Last Invasion and Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President among many other books, published “The Mystery of Robert E Lee” in National Review. Guelzo’s article attempts to get at the real man beneath the oceans of criticism and vitriol directed toward the strawman version of Lee that was the object of one of this year’s Two Minutes Hates. I don’t agree with all of Guelzo’s conclusions, but it’s a more measured and scholarly primer on some key aspects of Lee’s life, personality, and historical context than has become the norm.

To travel backward in time a bit—to July, as the fury of the early summer’s iconoclasm peaked—Helen Andrews published a really gutsy and thought-provoking piece in The American Conservative entitled “A Lesson from Robert E Lee.” This essay includes a strikingly drawn comparison of the characters of Lee and one of his contemporaries, a creature of pure politics and pragmatism, and goes on to suggest that the accusations flung at Lee say more about we moderns than him. It’s excellent.

As a bonus, you can read the text of the exchange Dwight Eisenhower had regarding the portrait of Lee he kept in the Oval Office—an exchange which Andrews quotes above—here. You can also watch a fun short clip of Ike talking about Lee at a 1957 Washington press conference here.

(And what’s this? A president deeply informed by history, with respect for tradition and the virtues that founded the Republic, and able to communicate civilly and coherently with those who question him? A vision of a lost world.)

For the last of the three essays I want to recommend, let me leap even further back in time to an old favorite, a classic essay I have briefly written about it here before—Richard Weaver’s 1948 essay “Lee the Philosopher.” Weaver takes Lee’s handful of almost gnomic dicta from during the war and mines them for what they can reveal about Lee’s worldview. An apropos sample:

I would not represent Lee as a prophet, but as a man who stood close enough to the eternal verities to utter prophecy sometimes when he spoke. He was brought up in the old school, which places responsibility upon the individual, and not upon some abstract social agency. Sentimental humanitarianism manifestly does not speak to language of duty, but of indulgence. The notion that obligations are tyrannies, and that wants, not deserts, should be the measure of what one gets has by now shown its destructive power. We have tended to ignore the inexorable truth that rights must be earned. Fully interpreted, Lee’s “duty” is the means whereby freedom preserves itself by acknowledging responsibility. Man, then, perfects himself by discipline, and at the heart of discipline lies self-denial. When the young mother brought an infant for Lee to bless, and was told, “teach him he must deny himself,” she was receiving perhaps the deepest insight of his life.

This essay is anthologized in the out-of-print collection The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver but you can read it at the link provided above (caveat lector: that version has a number of typos resulting, it seems, from a scan with faulty text recognition software). You can also find a longish excerpt here.

For a deeper dive

Finally, I want to recommend a slightly different way to learn about Lee if you are interested in a detailed account. There have been a number of good biographies of Lee, among them that of Douglas Southall Freeman (often dismissed as hagiography now but a monumental four-volume feat of scholarship and more measured than Freeman gets credit for), a more recent one by Emory Thomas, and an interesting study of Lee’s life in light of his religious views by R David Cox. I’d recommend both of those, but perhaps my favorite is that published a few years ago by historian William C Davis. Davis is a prolific author of history and biography and a careful and thorough scholar, and his dual biography Crucible of Command pairs Lee with the man who became his opposite number in the final year of the war, Ulysses S Grant.

For some reason we have had a glut of worshipful Grant biographies in the last few years, but this dual biography excels them all. By presenting these two strikingly different men together, Davis compellingly contrasts their virtues, their flaws, and the careers that led them to opposite sides of the bloodiest war in American history. Well-researched and written and scrupulously evenhanded, allowing the reader to get to know both men on their own terms, Crucible of Command is the kind of measured, thoughtful, and thorough account we need more of today.