Biography calls out Lee for his treason

In 1935, the year before Margaret Mitchell’s magnolia-scented 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.

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.”

Lee was unambiguously a traitor, guilty of, in the Constitution’s language about treason, “levying war against” the United States.

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. 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. Guelzo writes that to Lee, slavery’s victims were “invisible, despite their presence all around.” His indifference was “cruelty in self-disguised velvet.”

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, 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 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 threejudge 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. 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.