Robert E. Lee: The Man, The Soldier, The Myth, by Brandon Marie Miller

There are many paradoxes about the life of Robert E. Lee and the many writings about him. One of them is that so much has been written about Robert E. Lee–over 1000 books to date so far, a fair amount which I have read or at least heard about–while nearly everyone who writes about him is puzzled and often frustrated by the mystery that continues to surround the man. While writers in the past were generally content to let sleeping dogs lie and avoid prodding too much into Lee’s notable reserve and simply praise him for his efforts at rectitude in the face of great provocations, and for his mildness in dealing with difficult people despite his ambitions and frustrations, contemporary writers find it necessary to delve into psychological reasons for why it is that Lee was so subterranean, as if it was a bad thing in a world like his own, or like ours today, to keep one’s feelings close to the heart and not to reveal the full depths of what was going on inside of him. Likewise, one of the constants about Lee is that nearly everyone who writes about him nowadays feels it necessary to attack the large body of myths that have surrounded Lee the way a large bodyguard of lies protects the truth in Churchill’s view. Why it is not enough simply to see the humanity in Lee, and in those people who wrote about Lee and who saw in his stubborn sense of personal honor a worthy example of restraint to follow in the face of provocation, has always been something that has puzzled me, personally.

This book is a relatively short one at just over 250 pages, given the ambitious subject matter. The book begins with some thoughts that tip the reader off about the author’s desire to dispel some myths about Lee as well as some acknowledgements and a family tree of Lee and his wife. The first chapter of the book discusses the scandalous family history that Lee sought to escape (1), which included his bankrupt father and a half-brother who had seduced his younger sister-in-law and apparently robbed from her before fleeing for Europe. This is followed by a discussion of Lee’s time at West Point (2). A chapter about Lee’s courtship of his wife, the step-great-granddaughter of George Washington himself (3), and the little Lees that followed the marriage (4) then follows. Two chapters about Lee’s experience in working hard in obscure places for his country in the army (5, 7) are bookended by a chapter on Lee’s time in Mexico (6), which shows Lee’s slow promotion in the peacetime army as well as his glory in Mexico in learning about topography and tactics. The author talks about his struggles with the slaves of his father-in-law’s estate, which took some time to sort out (8), and his increasing frustration with sectional division (9). The next chapter after this covers Lee’s generally inglorious first year of war where for some reason he was thought best fit as an advisor and kept from active field command, an obvious mistake (10). This is followed by chapters that discuss Lee’s boldness at Seven Days and Second Bull Run (11) and his determination not to be idle at Antietam to try to knock the North out in a single battle along with his successful stand at Fredericksburg (12). This is followed by a chapter on Chancellorsville and Gettysburg (13) as well as another chapter on the frustration he faced in trying to fend off Grant’s Overland campaign to avoid defeat becoming a mere question of time (14). This is followed by a discussion of the siege at Petersburg and his surrender at Appomattox Courthouse (15). A discussion of his immediate postwar experience (16) is then followed by Lee’s efforts to revive Washington College (17), which was posthumously renamed in his honor, as well as chapters about the lack of restoration of peace that Lee felt reconstruction provided (18), and a discussion of the lost cause (19), and the myths that have abounded about it (epilogue). The book then ends with an author’s note, timeline, source notes, bibliography, index, and picture credits.

There are a lot of myths and a lot of falsehoods when it comes to history. Regardless of who is in charge of vetting and encouraging history education, some falsehood and lies are always promoted. For example, the lie that slavery was the foundation of our nation’s wealth is currently being pushed by the 1619 Project, which greatly exaggerates the role of slavery in the United States, both in the United States as a slave destination and the importance of slavery to America’s economic development and wealth. Yet there are not hundreds of books that seek to debunk these lies. Instead, the debunking only goes one direction, to seek to remove the dignity that partisans of a defeated and unsuccessful rebellion sought to give themselves through taking up the pen in defense of their own honor in the bitter aftermath of their defeat in the Civil War. To reduce the complexity in what Confederates fought for both during the war in fighting and afterwards in writing to mere slavery and racism (even if those were definitely present) and then to seek to use the power of government and extralegal violent anarchist destruction to attack those from the past who can no longer defend themselves and their reputations–and who would have defended themselves fiercely, even violently, if they had been given the chance–is particularly unjust. Lee’s own ambivalent relationship with slavery, in that he enjoyed the services provided to him by others while seeking to avoid the unpleasant and burdensome task of handling slave labor forces, was probably not an isolated experience. This ambivalence deserves better treatment than the scorn that contemporary historians often have for the people of the past. It does us no good to dispel the moss-covered myths of the past with ugly graffitied libels. Hopefully at least some writers will learn that lesson.