The Enigma of Robert E. Lee By Mackubin Thomas Owens
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/10/04/the-enigma-of-robert-e-lee/#slide-1
“ In a short review, it is impossible to do justice to Guelzo’s splendid work. He has done what we ask biographers to do: provide an incisive look at a complex man, neither secular saint nor moral monster. Of course, complexity is the human condition. Thanks to Allen Guelzo for providing the definitive look at the life of a complex man who mostly deserves our respect.”
Robert E. Lee: A Life, by Allen C. Guelzo (Knopf, 608 pp., $35)
Of all the American icons that have been pushed off their pedestals lately, none has fallen farther and harder than Robert E. Lee. Over the years, Lee was admired by even those who certainly had no sympathy for the cause for which he fought. Long viewed as an exemplar of soldierly virtue, integrity, magnanimity, and humanity, Lee has recently come under relentless attack and his alleged virtues have been called into question.
He was once regarded as not only a regional but even a national hero, a Christian gentleman as well as a magnificent commander who eventually succumbed only to an army with superior resources. Now we are treated to essays such as “The Myth of the Kindly Robert E. Lee,” accusing him of being a racist slave-beater, as well as to denunciations by Army officers such as David Petraeus who, having once lauded him, now dismiss him as a traitor.
Fortunately, Lee is the subject of a new biography by the prolific Allen C. Guelzo, one of our most accomplished Civil War historians and a foremost Lincoln scholar. Guelzo, the senior research scholar at the Council of the Humanities and the director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in Princeton’s James Madison Program, is the first three-time winner of the Lincoln Prize, for, among other works, his Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2005), which remains the definitive treatment of that document.
As a staunch Lincoln man, Guelzo might be expected to join in the Lee-bashing. But that is not his style. He has instead provided a fair treatment, placing Lee’s remarkable life in its proper context. He praises what should be praised and criticizes what should be criticized.
Guelzo seeks to address the “mystery” of Robert E. Lee: How did a man whose character, dignity, rectitude, and composure created a sense of awe in most of those who observed him also exhibit characteristics such as insecurity, petulance, impatience, contempt, and, on at least one occasion, violent anger? Also, how did a man of honor commit the crime of treason?
As Guelzo notes, since the publication of Thomas Connelly’s critique of Lee as a “marble man,” critics of Lee have argued that the reality is at odds with the image created by his admirers. But by treating the image of Lee as simply false, they have missed the man’s complexity. Guelzo contends that “casting Lee in contradiction — as either saint or sinner, as either simple or pathological — is, in the end, less profitable than seeing his anxieties as a counterpoint to his dignity, his impatience and his temper as the match to his composure.”
The key to unlocking the mystery of Lee is to understand three factors that shaped his personality: his pursuit of “redemptive perfection,” his yearning for independence, and his quest for security. Guelzo contends that all of these arose from the trauma of his father’s abandonment of the family when Robert was only six years old. His father, Henry Lee, was a hero of the Revolution and one of Washington’s favorite officers.
“Light Horse Harry” Lee served as governor of Virginia, but his ardent Federalism alienated the Jeffersonians who dominated Virginia politics. It wasn’t politics, however, that did him in; it was a series of financial scandals after the war. Indeed, he sought to ensnare Washington in one of his investment schemes. After a stint in debtors’ prison, he decamped for the West Indies. Guelzo, like others before him, believes that Lee’s famous rectitude was an attempt to atone for Harry’s sins, to “perfect the imperfections that Light Horse Harry had visited on the family.”
Throughout his life, Lee’s pursuit of redemptive perfection shaped his character. This pursuit, and the tensions that it created, is a dominant theme of Guelzo’s biography. Lee was pulled between his duty to his family on the one hand and the demands of Army service on the other. After he married the daughter of Washington’s adopted son, George Washington Parke Custis, both she and his father-in-law pressured him to leave the Army and assume responsibility for Arlington, the Custis home overlooking the Potomac. As it was, Lee was forced to carve out an inordinate amount of time from his U.S. Army duties to attend to the affairs of his father-in-law, whose fecklessness regarding the management of money was a constant problem for Lee.
Given the recent charges against Lee, the most important parts of the book are Guelzo’s discussions of Lee and slavery, especially his relationship to the slaves at Arlington, his decision to follow Virginia out of the Union, and the charge of treason.
Lee has often been described as an opponent of slavery, but Guelzo shows that his views mirrored those of many other Southern whites: Slavery was particularly regrettable as a burden on whites rather than as an injustice to blacks. He recognized the evils of slavery but concluded that there was little that could be done to dismantle the institution.
His dislike of the institution was exacerbated by his efforts to execute his father-in-law’s will, which manumitted his father-in-law’s slaves. Because of legal issues arising from that will, Lee was unable to free them before January 1, 1863, the day that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect.
Although he accepted the outcome of the war, he continued to believe that blacks were incapable of self-government. He opposed granting the franchise to the freedmen and came to criticize democracy itself. He was certainly no advocate of black equality, as some have suggested.
Did Lee commit treason? According to its definition in the Constitution, the answer would seem to be yes. Guelzo agrees, but he also provides facts that might absolve Lee. Although Guelzo is critical of Lee’s decision to turn against the Union, he makes it clear why Lee did. Lee may have served in a nationalizing institution, the U.S. Army, but he was also bound to his state by virtue of his old Virginia family.
For Lee, as for many others at the time, the United States as a unified entity was at best an abstraction. The patriot’s true loyalty was to one’s place: where one was born, where the family hearth was to be found. For Lee, that was Virginia.
The issue for Lee and others who followed their states out of the Union was its dual nature. As James Madison observed in Federalist No. 39, “the proposed Constitution . . . is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both.” At a time when the states have become little more than administrative units and tax collectors for the national government, it is hard for us to realize the degree of sovereignty that was reserved to the states before the Civil War. For instance, John Brown was convicted and executed for the crime of treason against not the United States but Virginia.
The wording of the oath that Lee took also suggests that the officer’s loyalty was to the United States not in a singular but in a collective sense: “I . . . do solemnly swear or affirm (as the case may be) to bear true allegiance to the United States of America, and to faithfully serve them honestly and faithfully, against all their enemies or opposers whatever” (emphasis added). One could infer, and many did, that loyalty to one’s state was at least equal to one’s loyalty to the national government, if not paramount. Because of this ambiguity, the oath was changed in 1862.
What of Lee’s military prowess? Although some military historians, such as the British writer J. F. C. Fuller in the 1930s and more recently Connelly and Alan Nolan, have criticized his generalship, his martial reputation has remained fairly high. Guelzo concurs, observing that Lee managed Confederate military affairs with “extraordinary skill.”
Lee has been both the beneficiary of the “Lost Cause” school of Civil War historiography and its victim. Clearly his elevation to the status of a nationally honored secular saint owes much to the triumph of that school for a century after the war. But as the school came under attack, so did Lee’s reputation. There are two components of the Lost Cause school. The political component — the notion that the cause of the war was not slavery but the central government’s oppressive power, against which the South wished only to exercise its constitutional right to secede — is clearly false. But there is a great deal of truth to the military component. The South did fight at a material disadvantage, and Lee overcame immense odds on battlefield after battlefield.
There is one great irony of Lee’s life that Guelzo does not address, one I have pointed out in the past. In June 1862, when Lee assumed command of what would soon be called the Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederacy was on the brink of defeat. Union forces had advanced deep into western Tennessee and the Mississippi Valley, and a Union army was at the gates of Richmond. Had Richmond fallen in the spring or summer of 1862 — had Lee not changed the character of the war by inflicting defeat after defeat on Union forces — the rebellion might well have ended then, with the seceded states returning to the Union, possibly leaving slavery intact. The irony is that Lee’s choice to turn against the Union and his subsequent prowess forestalled this outcome. And so by ending slavery, the war made the Union, in Lincoln’s phrase, “worthy of saving.” It is the sort of occurrence that summons up the idea of Providence.
In a short review, it is impossible to do justice to Guelzo’s splendid work. He has done what we ask biographers to do: provide an incisive look at a complex man, neither secular saint nor moral monster. Of course, complexity is the human condition. Thanks to Allen Guelzo for providing the definitive look at the life of a complex man who mostly deserves our respect.
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