New biography of Robert E. Lee what country needs

In 1935, the year before Margaret Mitchell’s magnoliascented novel “Gone with the Wind” began 21 months on bestseller lists, Douglas Southall Freeman, the son of a veteran of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s legions, published, to critical acclaim and commercial success, the final two volumes of his worshipful four-volume biography of Lee. Freeman called Lee “the Southern Arthur” who “accepted fame without vanity and defeat without repining.”

Today, the nation is wiser and better than when President Franklin D. Roosevelt dispensed rhetorical treacle about Lee having been “one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen.” Or when President Dwight D. Eisenhower hung Lee’s portrait in the Oval Office as one of the four greatest Americans, with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin.

Lee was unambiguously a traitor, guilty of, in the Constitution’s language about treason, “levying war against” the United States. He also was a bore. His life coincided with extraordinarily complex controversies - about the nation’s nature, civic duty, the meaning of patriotism and the demands of honor. Remarkably, there is no record of his expressing a thought (here is a Lee sample: “Never exceed your means”) more interesting than Polonius’s bromides (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”).

Princeton’s Allen C. Guelzo, an eminent Civil War historian, has now published exactly what the nation needs as it reappraises important historical figures who lived in challenging times with assumptions radically unlike today’s. “Robert E. Lee: A Life,” Guelzo’s scrupulously measured assessment, is mercifully free of the grandstanding by which many moralists nowadays celebrate themselves by indignantly deploring the shortcomings of those whose behavior offends current sensibilities. But by casting a cool eye on Lee, Guelzo allows facts to validate today’s removals of Lee’s name and statues from public buildings and places.

Contemporaries gushed about Lee’s gentility, dignity, probity, manners, presence, composure, etc. If mid-19th century America had been a debutante ball, Lee, who graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at 22 without a single demerit, would have been a paragon. Life then was, however, a moral test. Lee flunked.

Lee, Guelzo writes, “raised his hand” against the nation that, as an Army officer, he had sworn to defend. He did so for an agenda that a much greater man, Ulysses S. Grant, called one of “the worst for which a people ever fought.” Lee thought slavery was a “greater evil” to White people than to Black people. He enveloped himself in what Guelzo calls a “cloud of pious wishes” and decided, as Guelzo tartly says, “it was up to the whites to decide when enough was enough.” Guelzo writes that to Lee, slavery’s victims were “invisible, despite their presence all around.” His indifference was “cruelty in self-disguised velvet.” Not well disguised, when he presided at the whipping of three recaptured runaways, ordering a constable to “lay it on well.”

For all Lee’s maunderings about his loyalty to Virginia, he worried intensely about his family’s property if he ignored Virginia’s summons. Lee’s wife later portrayed him as enacting what Guelzo calls “a kind of Gethsemane.” She might, Guelzo says dryly, “have been a little too eager to cast her husband’s decision as a rehearsal of Christian agony.” At least 10 Southern U.S. Army officers chose not to assist treason.

With exquisitely parsimonious praise, Guelzo notes Lee’s “comparative harmlessness” - compared with, say, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who in 1864 oversaw war crimes such as the massacre of many of the 262 soldiers of the U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery after they had surrendered at Tennessee’s Fort Pillow, crimes Lee never punished.

Because the apotheosis of Lee has fed sentimentality about the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause,” Guelzo’s biography is necessary. In 2019, the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Alpharetta, Ga., claimed that their First Amendment expressive rights were violated when the city forbade their carrying the Confederate battle flag in the city’s Old Soldiers Day parade. Last month, a three-judge federal appeals court panel noted astringently that the Sons “did not get the message” of the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling that government speech enjoys First Amendment protections (last year, a district court told the Sons that a government parade amounts to government speech). The appeals court then unlimbered its rhetorical artillery:

Southern governments began displaying the Confederate flag not soon after 1865 but in the 1950s and 1960s in defiance of laws against desegregation. Quoting Alpharetta’s city government, the court said, “The public purpose of the Parade was to celebrate the service of veterans who ‘defended the rights and freedoms enjoyed by everyone.’”

The court italicized the city’s word. The message of Guelzo’s 214,000 words requires no typographical enhancement.