Robert E. Lee: A Biography, by Brian C. Melton

This book is part of an eclectic ABC-CLIO series of biographies that seeks to provide its young readers with accessible but challenging works on people of cultural and historical interest. If this book is any indication, the work is done at a pretty high standard. This is the sort of book that any student (the intended audience of the book) would be able to cite with confidence that the arguments and positions raised in the book are reasonable and sensible and likely to be viewed approvingly by one’s teachers. That is perhaps the most that can be asked for when dealing with the massive amount of books that have been written about the book’s subject. It is a considerable challenge for someone to write sensibly and tolerably completely under the strict guidelines of this volume, and the fact that the author manages not only to give an intelligible and reasonably complete account of the subject’s life while also talking some about the immense and varied historiography about the subject is worthy of considerable praise. There are books that are a lot longer about Robert E. Lee, some of them extending to multiple volumes, but if one is a student reader, this is a good place to begin, to get a sense of Lee’s career and the mysterious and complex nature of his life that has made getting the facts about that life in mind a struggle for many.

This book is 150 pages, and divided into ten chapters. As might be expected, five of the book’s eight chapters focus on Lee’s experience in the Civil War, and fully half of the book’s chapters cover Lee’s time as Commanding General of the Army of Northern Virginia. That leaves, however, plenty of space for a reasonable discussion of other important elements of Lee’s life. After a series foreword and introduction, the first chapter of the book explores Lee’s traumatic early life (which included spending most of that childhood apart from his father, and seeing his father near death after a political lynch mob brutally attacked him), education, and his early time in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (1). This is followed by an account of Lee in Mexico, Texas, and his cameo in the John Brown raid (2). A single chapter describes his frustrations early in the Civil War as the paper leader of Virginia’s troops before they were consolidated into the Confederacy’s armies and his efforts to protect the Confederates in Savannah and Charleston (3). This is followed by four chapters that detail Lee’s main claim to historical memory as a Civil War general, his leadership during the Seven Days Battle, Second Bull Run, and Antietam campaigns (4), his generalship at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and up to the third day at Gettysburg (5), the troubled period from Picket’s charge through the desultory Mine Run Campaign and the Overland Campaign up to the beginning of the siege of Petersburg (6), and the brutal and seemingly inevitable end of the war that closed for Lee with his surrender at Appomattox (7). A closing chapter discusses Lee’s time as President of Washington & Lee College (renamed after his time in his honor) as well as the complex legacy of Robert E. Lee in history.

As is a relatively common feature in many of the books about Robert E. Lee that I have read–at least those written in the last ten to fifteen years or so–this book straddles the line where praise is given of Lee, but it is tempered by some criticism of his conduct and especially by criticism of the mythology of Lee as a man of superhuman character and nobility and near perfection as a general, who was failed by the lesser mortals that failed to follow his orders. Instead of hagiography, the author offers a reasonable if somewhat speculative explanation of how Lee’s personal and family background, including his nurturing role for his mother during her many years of frailty, led him to have trouble being the sort of decisive leader in terms of telling people what to do, that the incompetent leaders of Confederacy apparently needed. While there is little doubt that Lee’s ambiguity as a reluctant writer of commands had some major drawbacks when dealing with less than seasoned and competent commanders, but short of leading his corps and divisions and brigades the way he did Scott’s troops in Mexico, it is hard to imagine how he could have gotten some of them to get a move on during key moments.