Lee, Robert E.

Lee, Robert E. 1807-1870

TRADITIONALIST AND REVISIONIST HISTORY ON LEE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Robert Edward Lee was the most famous general of the Confederate forces during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Lee served as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia and eventually general-in-chief of the entire Confederate Army until the war’s completion in 1865.

Lee was born January 19, 1807, in Westmoreland County, Virginia. His father, whom he barely knew, was the famous Revolutionary War hero, Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee (1756–1818). In 1829 Robert E. Lee graduated second in his class without a single demerit at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. In 1831 Lee married Mary Custis (1808–1873), a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington (1731–1802). Together they had seven children.

During the Mexican War (1846–1848), Lee served on the staff of General Winfield Scott (1786–1866). As an engineer, Lee directed the placement and transport of heavy artillery in the Veracruz landing and subsequent march to Mexico City in 1847. In 1852 he became superintendent of West Point. In 1859 he commanded a force of marines that together with local militia put down John Brown’s (1800–1859) raid of the Harpers Ferry armory.

Lee headed the Department of Texas from 1860 until March 1861. In April, in Washington, D.C., he was offered and then declined the command of the Union (North) Army. Within the month, he had joined the Confederate Army. In 1862 he assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia, leading Confederate forces to decisive victories at such battles as Second Bull Run (August 1862), Fredericksburg (December 1862), and Chancellorsville (May 1863). He and his army suffered a crushing defeat at the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, arguably the turning point of the American Civil War. Shortly after the defeat at Petersburg, Lee surrendered the Confederate forces to Union general Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Courthouse in rural Virginia.

Following the war, Lee served as president of Washington College (later renamed Washington and Lee College) in Lexington, Virginia. He died of pneumonia on October 12, 1870, and was buried underneath the chapel at Washington College.

TRADITIONALIST AND REVISIONIST HISTORY ON LEE

Much of the literature on Robert E. Lee can be categorized by two historical perspectives. The traditionalist perspective interprets Lee as noble and full of virtue, fighting for the South out of a sense of duty to protect his Virginia homeland and confronted by forces beyond his control that compelled him to serve and fight against the Union. This perspective originated in the 1870s, was reinforced and consolidated over the following decades, and culminated with the publication of Douglas Freeman’s four-volume biography, Lee (1934). In contrast, Thomas Connelly’s Marble Man (1977) exemplifies the revisionist perspective, which took a more critical view of Lee as a southerner and as a soldier.

Proponents of these perspectives contest much about Lee’s life, but three debates remain especially salient. The first surrounds Lee’s views on slavery (Fellman 2000, esp. chap. 4). Traditionalists resurrected a Lee that was antislavery, and fought for the Confederacy despite this. They cite as evidence Lee’s letters where he referred to slavery as a “moral and political evil” and that Lee manumitted slaves held by his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis (1781–1857), after the latter’s death. Nevertheless, this did not mean Lee supported abolition; although Lee spoke of slavery as a moral and political evil, in the same correspondence he also claimed that slavery was God’s will, that “blacks are immeasurably better off here [enslaved] than in Africa … the painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race.… Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influence of Christianity, than the storms and tempests of fiery Controversy” (Freeman 1934, p. 372).

The second debate focuses on Lee’s responsibility for the Confederate defeat at the crucial Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. Many traditionalists, such as Confederate general Jubal Early (1816–1894), generally blamed General James Longstreet (1821–1904) for his slow execution of Lee’s plan to attack Union forces at Cemetery Ridge on July 2, 1863. Revisionist critics, including historical novelist Michael Shaara, author of The Killer Angels (1974), attribute the Confederate loss to Lee’s poor judgment in attacking a Union force that possessed superior ground and material and a greater quantity of troops.

A third debate centers on Lee’s involvement with the secessionist movement and his subsequent decision to serve in the Confederate forces in 1861. Proponents of both perspectives agree on two facts regarding this issue: (1) that Lee viewed secession as illegal, and (2) that he was offered, and declined, the position of commander of Union forces by the U.S. government. Traditionalists argue that Lee tortured over the decision to fight for the Confederacy, ultimately deciding to fight out of a sense of “duty” to Virginia: “If secession destroyed the Union, Lee intended to resign from the army and to fight neither for the South nor for the North, unless he had to act one way or the other in defense of Virginia” (Freeman 1934, p. 423). Revisionist Connelly, while conceding that Lee equated secession as “nothing but revolution,” questions the traditionalist interpretation, asking: “One wonders why Lee did not endeavor to use his influence within Virginia to squelch the secession movement? He certainly might have been able to do it” (1977 p. 198). In addition, “almost instantaneously the secession movement which he supposedly abhorred was a holy cause, and the Union he loved had become a deadly enemy” (p. 201). In contrast with the “tragic hero” of Freeman’s Lee, Connelly’s is “a child of the seventeenth-century New England mind, and not of the later Enlightenment,” one whose “belief implied an unquestioning spirit which submitted to unseen forces … and a denial of the reasoning process” (p. 199). Yet no evidence exists that Lee was active in the secessionist movement. His service in Texas immediately prior to Virginia’s secession makes it difficult to suggest that Lee was a secessionist conspirator.

Scholars and students of history and the social sciences should take special note of Robert E. Lee as a model of historiography—an example of how interpretations of the past may serve the interests of those living in the present.

SEE ALSO Confederate States of America; Davis, Jefferson; Mexican-American War; Secession; U.S. Civil War

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Connelly, Thomas. 1977. The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society. New York: Knopf.

Fellman, Michael. 2000. The Making of Robert E. Lee. New York: Random House.

Freeman, Douglas. 1934. R. E. Lee: A Biography. New York: Scribner’s.

Shaara, Michael. 1974. The Killer Angels: A Novel. New York: Ballantine.

Brent J. Steele