Part 1

Robert E. Lee
by Roy Blount

The quintessential Southern commentator examines the great Confederate hope and Civil War hero.

Iconic Virginian, brilliant general, and complex human being it is this last facet of Robert E. Lee that is rarely seen. But now Roy Blount, Jr. combines acute character insight with lively storytelling and a full-hearted Southern directness to craft this unique, personal portrait.

Fascinated by what made Lee into such a great, though reluctant, leader, Blount delves into his family history and his personality. He illustrates how, descended from two illustrious families, Lee embodied the best of all their traits and became Lincoln's first choice to lead the Union troops in 1861. But Lee's Virginia roots drew him, instead, to the Confederate command. Blount vividly conveys not only his ambition and courage but also his humility and humor, and his sorrowful sense of responsibility for his outnumbered, outgunned, half-starved army. Robert E. Lee, the first succinct biography of this American legend, will appeal to history and military buffs, proud Southerners, and every reader curious to discover the man behind the military leader.

Chapter 1

It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.

° Robert E. Lee, at Fredericksburg

Shut up, Bobby Lee. It's no real pleasure in life.

— The Misfit, in Flannery O'Connor's
"A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

In his dashing (if sometimes depressive) antebellum prime, he may have been the most beautiful person in America, a sort of precursor-cross between England's Cary Grant and Virginia's Randolph Scott. He was in his element gossiping with belles about their beaux at balls. In theaters of grinding, hellish human carnage he kept a pet hen for company. He had tiny feet that he loved his children to tickle. None of these things seems to fit, for if ever there was a grave American icon, it is Robert Edward Lee-hero of the Confederacy in the American Civil War, a unifying national figure for a century or so thereafter, and currently a symbol of nobility to some, of slavery to others.

After Lee's death in 1870, Frederick Douglass, the former fugitive slave who had become the nation's most prominent African American, wrote, "We can scarcely take up a newspaper...that is not filled with nauseating flatteries" of Lee, from which "it would seem...that the soldier who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven." Two years later one of Lee's ex-generals, Jubal A. Early, apotheosized his late commander as follows: "Our beloved Chief stands, like some lofty column which rears its head among the highest, in grandeur, simple, pure and sublime."

In 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt expressed mainstream American sentiment in a letter to the Committee of Arrangement for the Celebration of the Hundredth Anniversary of Lee's birth:

General Lee has left us the memory, not merely of his extraordinary skill as a General, his dauntless courage and high leadership... but also of that serene greatness of soul characteristic of those who most readily recognize the obligations of civic duty....He stood that hardest of all strains, the strain of bearing himself well through the gray evening of failure; and therefore out of what seemed failure he helped to build the wonderful and mighty triumph of our national life, in which all his countrymen, north and south, share.

Teddy Roosevelt, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and President Harry S. Truman had at least three things in common with Lee: They were all brave soldiers, staunch leaders of men, and, in no pejorative sense, mama's boys. Both Truman and MacArthur were adjured by their strong-minded mothers to grow up just like Robert E. Lee, and they never stopped taking that charge to heart.

When a white mob tried to prevent the integration of public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, Robert Penn Warren wrote, "Can the man howling in the mob imagine General R. E. Lee, CSA, shaking hands with Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas?" Certainly not-Lee was too fine. But at the turn of the twenty-first century, a portrait of Lee on the James River floodwall in Richmond, Virginia, was defaced, restored, denounced by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and defended by white supremacist David Duke. U.S. Attorney General-designate John Ashcroft was widely disparaged for having called Lee a "patriot." "We've got to stand up and speak in this respect," Ashcroft had written, "or else we'll be taught that [Lee and other Confederate leaders] were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."

One thing that can be said for Lee is that he would have welcomed none of these pronouncements. If the self-effacing patrician could have known that his face would live on for so long as a quasi-religious, recurrently divisive symbol, it might have made him moan, as he did after sending thousands of men to be cut to ribbons at Gettysburg, "Too bad! Too bad! OH! TOO BAD!" He was one of the few great men of whom it can be said that his sense of honor was rooted in genuine-if in fact far from simple or serene-humility. The most sublime word, Lee said, was "duty." In 1860 he wrote to Robert E. Lee Jr., who was starting college:

You must be frank in the world, frankness is the child of honesty and courage. Say just what you mean to do on every occasion, and take it for granted you mean to do right....Never do anything wrong to make a friend or keep one; the man who requires you to do so, is dearly purchased at a sacrifice. Deal kindly, but firmly with all your classmates; you will find it the policy which wears best. Above all do not appear to others what you are not.

Did he speak in such tones to himself? He was the last avatar, wrote Edmund Wilson approvingly, of "classical antique virtue, at once aristocratic and republican." But he was also a man. And isn't it true, as Montgomery Clift said in the role of Robert E. Lee Prewitt in From Here to Eternity, "Ain't nothin the matter with a soldier that ain't the matter with everybody else"?

We may think we know Lee because we have a mental image: gray. Not only the uniform, the mythic horse, the hair and beard, but the resignation with which he accepted dreary burdens that offered "neither pleasure nor advantage": in particular, the Confederacy, a cause of which he took a dim view until he went to war for it. He did not see right and wrong in tones of gray, and yet his moralizing could generate a fog, as in a letter from the front to his invalid wife: "You must endeavour to enjoy the pleasure of doing good. That is all that makes life valuable." All right. But then he adds: "When I measure my own by that standard I am filled with confusion and despair."

His own hand probably never drew human blood nor fired a shot in anger, and his only Civil War wound was a faint scratch on the cheek from a sharpshooter's bullet, but many thousands of men died quite horribly in battles where he was the dominant-fiery-spirit, and most of the casualties were on the other side. If we take as a given Lee's granitic conviction that everything is God's will, however, he was born to lose.

He was usually kinder than most great men. But in even the most sympathetic versions of his life story he comes across as a bit of a stick-certainly compared with his scruffy nemesis, Ulysses S. Grant; his zany, ferocious "right arm," Stonewall Jackson; and the dashing "eyes" of his army, Jeb Stuart. For these men, the Civil War was just the ticket. Lee, however, has come down in history as too fine for the bloodbath of 1861-65. As an icon he has enabled Americans of the South and also of the North to feel that somehow the American family was too decent to have brought upon itself four years of domestic carnage. To efface the squalor and horror of the war we have the image of Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves, and we have the image of Robert E. Lee nobly putting down his sword and standing selflessly for reconciliation. Both of those images have undergone reassessment-for many contemporary Americans, Lee is at best the moral equivalent of Hitler's brilliant field marshal Erwin Rommel (who, however, turned against Hitler, as Lee never did against Jefferson Davis, who, to be sure, was no Hitler)-but they haven't gone away.

© 2003 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Roy Blount, Jr., grew up in Georgia and served in the army before becoming a celebrated humorist and cultural journalist. He has written for magazines as diverse as Sports Illustrated and The New York Review of Books and is the author of numerous books that include his recent memoir Be Sweet.