Robert E. Lee

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.

Can we recast Lee in terms more edifying in this century?

One problem is that Lee's life didn't fit him. He appears to have been too fine for his childhood, for his education, for his profession, for his marriage, and for the Confederacy. Not according to him. According to him, he was not fine enough. For all his audacity on the battlefield, he accepted rather passively one raw deal after another, bending over backward for everyone from Jefferson Davis to James McNeill Whistler's mother.

By what can we know him? The works of a general are battles, campaigns, and usually memoirs. The engagements of the Civil War shape up more as bloody muddles than as commanders' chess games. For a long time during the war "Old Bobbie Lee," as he was referred to worshipfully by his troops and nervously by the foe, had the greatly superior Union forces spooked, but a century and a third of analysis and counteranalysis has resulted in no core consensus as to the genius or the folly of his generalship. And he wrote no memoir. He wrote personal letters-a discordant mix of flirtation, joshing, lyrical touches, and stern religious adjuration-and he wrote official dispatches that are so impersonal and (generally) unself-serving as to seem above the fray. He also wrote one strange parable, which had come to him in a dream.

Grant finally wore down Lee's ingenious military defenses, but he didn't crack his facade: There at the end stood Lee at Appomattox, too fine to represent defeat. In 1959, two years after citing Lee as a touchstone, Robert Penn Warren-who had written a biography of John Brown and a novel whose central character was inspired by Huey Long-grumbled, "Who cares about Robert E. Lee? Now, there's a man who's smooth as an egg. Turn him around, this primordial perfection: you see, he has no story. You can't just say what a wonderful man he was, and that you know he had some chaotic something inside because he's human but you can't get at it."

Maybe in this century, after monumentalism has given way to chaos theory and obsession with the self, we can at last figure out how to care humanly about the self that Robert E. Lee was at such pains to deny. The only way to get inside him, perhaps, is by edging fractally around the record of his life to find spots where he comes through; by holding up next to him some of the fully realized characters-Grant, Jackson, Stuart, his father (Light-Horse Harry Lee), John Brown-with whom he interacted; and by subjecting to contemporary skepticism certain concepts-honor, "gradual emancipation," divine will-upon which he unreflectively founded his identity.

Then there are minor but provocative matters like his feet, a peculiar instance of misspelling, his pet hen, his enigmatic "Pussyism" joke. For all that he tends to bring out a certain solemnity, even in discussions of his humor, he was capable of larky jocularity in the oddest connections and the darkest of times. If in considering his sad life we strive for too consistent a tone, we miss some of its jangly resonance. As he would say to his children when he was at his most intimate with them, "No tickling, no story."

He wasn't always gray. Until war aged him dramatically his sharp dark brown eyes were complemented by black hair ("ebon and abundant," as his doting biographer Douglas Southall Freeman puts it, "with a wave that a woman might have envied"), a robust black mustache, a strong full mouth and chin unobscured by any beard, and dark mercurial brows. He was not one to hide his looks under a bushel. His heart, on the other hand..."The heart, he kept locked away," as Stephen Vincent BenTt proclaimed in John Brown's Body, "from all the picklocks of biographers." Accounts by people who knew him give the impression that no one knew his whole heart, even before it was broken by the war. Perhaps it broke many years before the war. "You know she is like her papa, always wanting something," he wrote about one of his daughters. The great Southern diarist of his day, Mary Chesnut, tells us that when a lady teased him about his ambitions, "[h]e remonstrated-said his tastes were of the simplest. He only wanted a Virginia farm-no end of cream and fresh butter-and fried chicken. Not one fried chicken or two-but unlimited fried chicken." Just before Lee's surrender at Appomattox, one of his nephews found him in the field, "very grave and tired," carrying around a fried chicken leg wrapped in a piece of bread, which a Virginia countrywoman had pressed upon him but for which he couldn't muster any hunger.

In 1960 Robert Penn Warren was trying, unsuccessfully, to write an essay about Lee's decision to side with the Confederacy. "I do hope you can manage [it]," Warren's friend Cleanth Brooks wrote to him. Brooks was a fellow Southerner and a prime mover along with Warren in the so-called New Criticism, which concentrated on literature's intrinsic texture rather than its political and biographical ramifications, and he seemed to want Lee's texture to be enough. "You are right: that shouldn't fall into the wrong hands," Brooks went on. "I don't want to see a Lee throwing in his lot with the Confederacy because of an Oedipus complex, for instance." Well, why not? What is so fine about Lee that he is exempt from whatever sifter a given age may employ to sort out personality? It is too late for Freud now, but not for psychologizing. Item: A recent study found boys brought up in "mother-only households" to be disproportionately at risk for major depressive disorders. (See Appendix I.)

A boy who grows up with no father but one who is absent and discredited may lack certain tones of voice, may develop alternative modes of authority. Of the precious few memories Robert E. Lee can have had of his prodigal father coming home, the most vivid, we may assume, was of a broken, grotesquely swollen figure hobbling up the front walk, head swathed in bandages. A mob of patriots, as they saw themselves, had beaten Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, hero of the Revolution, very nearly to death. They had jabbed him with pocketknives and dripped candle wax into his eyes in attempts to make sure he was dead. They had slashed his face wide open in trying to cut off his nose. He had been defending a newspaper's right to oppose a war.

It was 1812. Robert was five years old.

On his father's side, Lee's family was among Virginia's and therefore the nation's most distinguished. Four of his father's cousins had been prominent members of the Continental Congress-so prominent, indeed, that other first families expressed resentment that the Lees were hogging the Revolution.

Henry, the scion who was to become Light-Horse Harry, was born in 1756. As a young a man he was always cheerful, ever gallant toward the ladies, a hell of a fellow among the fellows, given to flights of wild and biting humor, fiercely opinionated, and able to quote Alexander Pope at length from memory. He graduated from Princeton at nineteen, joined the Continental Army at twenty as a captain of dragoons, and impressed Gen. Charles Lee, no very direct relation, as having "come out of his mother's womb a soldier."

Though physically rather slight and facially rather plump, Harry looked fine on a horse and rode like the cavalier he was by birth. As he rose in rank and independence to command Lee's light cavalry and then Lee's legion of cavalry and infantry, he held the intense loyalty of his troops by combining strict discipline, bold stratagems, constant readiness to ride, and prudent preparation, including attention to hygiene: "I never saw one of his men in the general hospital," said an army surgeon. Every one of his cavalrymen eventually carried a sword taken personally from an enemy. When one of his men went over to the British, Harry captured him, hanged him, beheaded him, and proudly sent the head and neck with the rope still around it to his commander and hero, George Washington, who, however, was appalled.

Primarily Harry was no major-engagement man but a gadfly, a leader of freelance forays against superior forces. Once he and a lieutenant, an ensign, and fifty-nine enlisted men attacked a full battalion of more than two hundred redcoats and killed or captured more than a third of them, while suffering only one slight wound among themselves.

Sometimes eleven Oneida warriors, on their own horses, joined his cavalry troop for the sport of the thing. Harry learned their language and sat them down to dine in the field with him and the other officers, from chinaware and sterling cups. Without the medicines, elixirs, and food Harry Lee's raiders captured from the enemy, Washington's army would not likely have survived the harrowing winter encampment of 1777-78 at Valley Forge, during which men were reduced to eating their boots. Washington became his patron and close friend.

At length Sir William Howe sent a full regiment of cavalry, more than three hundred men, to capture Lee dead or alive. They cornered him in a farmhouse. Harry and a handful of his men took their shots carefully enough to repulse the British three times. Then Harry ran outside, looked into the distance, and whooped, "Here comes our infantry! We'll have them all!" Although these reinforcements were imaginary, the British fled, leaving scores of dead and wounded behind. Again, only one of Harry's men was wounded, and he but slightly.

This was one of several hairbreadth escapes Harry made as he plagued the British in Virginia and North Carolina under Nathanael Greene and in South Carolina alongside Francis Marion, "the Swamp Fox." Then, with the war nearly over, Harry decided he was underappreciated, so he impulsively resigned from the army.

That was a mistake. In 1785, however, Harry was elected to the Second Continental Congress. In 1788 he helped lead the fight in Virginia to ratify the U.S. Constitution. Ironically, in light of later developments, it was Harry who offered the most notable defense of the phrase "We, the people." Patrick Henry insisted that it should be "We, the states," but Harry said, "This system is submitted to the people for their consideration because on them it is to operate, if adopted. It is not binding on the people until it becomes their act."

In 1791 Harry was elected governor of Virginia. In 1794 Washington put him in command of the troops that bloodlessly put down the Whiskey Rebellion (farmers protesting an excise tax) in western Pennsylvania. In 1799 he was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he famously eulogized Washington as "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen."

By that time, however, he had swapped Washington five thousand acres of real estate for a horse named Magnolia. That was just another of his impulsive acts. He had also tried to repay a loan from Washington with property to which he lacked title. That was much worse. It was a betrayal of his hero and a sign of personal disorder that Harry would project onto the common people. Harry's bad head for business, and his growing contempt for the general public, would lead him at last into a trap he couldn't escape.

In 1819 Harry's defense of "We, the people" would serve as the touchstone for Chief Justice John Marshall's ruling that "[t]he government proceeds directly from the people...and is declared to be ordained 'in order to form a more perfect union.'...The assent of the States...is implied....But the people were at perfect liberty to accept or reject it; and their act was final....The government of the Union, then,...is emphatically and truly a government of the people." As the concept of "the people" has evolved over the years-to include people without property, freed slaves, women, black people denied civil rights-the Constitution has remained flexible enough, over more than two centuries, to support the gradually strengthening notion of American liberty and inclusiveness.

In the nineteenth century, however, Harry lost his own flexibility, which had so dazzled the redcoats. His fast and loose speculation in hundreds of thousands of the new nation's acres went sour. One of his creditors defaulted on a huge loan. Harry was reduced to chicanery. He withheld his married daughter's dowry, gave a bad check to a friend. When in 1808 he wrote to his old college chum James Madison, now secretary of state, asking to be sent abroad, Madison did not respond. Mortified, in ill health, with all his stratagems exhausted, Harry spent a year in debtors' prison, where he wrote his war memoirs, which are energetic.

In the memoirs Harry proclaimed a determination to revive the Federalist glory, symbolized by the iconic Washington, which he felt had been obliterated by Jeffersonian democracy. He accused the Republicans, as the relatively populist Jeffersonians were known, of vitiating the central government and the military, of falsely linking Federalism with monarchism (Republicans had been known to express suspicions that the Federalists wanted to make Washington king), and of destroying what should have been a boom economy. Harry extolled Washington, exaggerated his own role-considerable though it had been-in defending the southern colonies, and strongly implied that Thomas Jefferson, as wartime governor of Virginia, had shown cowardice by briefly withdrawing from Richmond under British invasion. The memoir vexed Jefferson until his dying days, but it did not sell. In 1809 Harry was out of prison, but deep in a financial and psychological hole.

When Harry was a young bachelor, his father had asked him why he never visited brothels. He had replied, "I am ever sensible of the good name this family enjoys in the county, sir." Now the disorder of his own affairs and his gift for making prominent enemies had sullied that name. Harry turned his shame and anxiety outward: Indulgence of the masses was leading to anarchy, which would undo the Revolution and give way to monarchy. When he'd defended "We, the people," he'd actually meant "We, the gentlemen." He was no longer a gentleman himself, for all intents and purposes, and someone had to be blamed.

Jefferson and Madison, Harry argued, were forcing the nation into a disastrous war with Great Britain. Alexander Hanson of Baltimore, publisher of a Federalist newspaper, was of the same opinion, and after what is now known as the (as it turned out, quite nearly disastrous) War of 1812 was declared, Hanson attacked the Republicans' war inflammatorily. Baltimore was a Republican town, not a pacifist one. A mob stormed the newspaper plant and tore the whole building down. Hanson left town but returned with a defense force of armed Federalist partisans. Harry, who had been a friend of Hanson's father, came to Baltimore and took command.

A mob surrounded the newspaper's new office, so threateningly that Lee, over Hanson's protests, persuaded the Federalists to let themselves be locked up in jail-with pistols-for their safety. Then the mob stormed the jail. Loath to die at the hands of people such as these, Lee suggested that the Federalists shoot each other, honorably. He was voted down. When the rabble burst in, Harry denounced them as "base villains" until they clubbed and strangled him insensible. The mob killed one of the Federalists (the mob called them Tories) and were content in the belief that they had killed eight others-including Lee.

He wasn't dead (and the war was indeed ill advised), but he was defaced. A man who saw him the next day said, "Lee was black as a negro." He would spend the rest of his days in physical misery from injuries, external and internal, inflicted by the mob.

He was fifty-eight when Robert saw him return home broken. Harry had lost his fortune and lots of other people's money, as well as all of his horses. He and his household-his second wife, Ann Carter Lee, and their five surviving children, of whom Robert was the next to last-had departed the Lee ancestral home, the mansion called Stratford, where Robert was born, for a smaller rented house in Alexandria. Ann had always preferred her ancestral home at Shirley, Virginia, where she and the children spent so much time that Robert probably had not seen much of his father even when he wasn't in jail. Harry's self-dramatizing ways were still engaging enough, apparently, that his family continued to find him dashing, or encouraged him to believe that they did, but now that sentiment was limited-and tenuously-to that household.

Under the conditions of bankruptcy that obtained in those days, Harry was still liable for his debts. Some months after being brought back home, he jumped a personal-appearance bail-to the dismay of his brother, Edmund, who had posted a sizable bond-and wangled passage, with pitying help from President James Monroe, to the West Indies.

--from Robert E. Lee: A Penguin Life by Roy Blount Jr., Copyright © 2003 by Roy Blount Jr., Published by Viking Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted with permission from the publisher."