Robert E. Lee: A Life
By Allen C. Guelzo
Random House, 2021
If the Civil War was indeed punishment for America’s original sin -- “the woe due to those by whom the offense (slavery) came,” Abraham Lincoln, 1865 -- the inevitability of the conflict was a crushing force that no person, or group of people, were capable of impeding. Allen Guelzo’s engaging, well researched Robert E. Lee: A Life reinforces this argument by presenting the war’s central military figure as one who clearly saw all that was wrong about the sentiments that produced the war, understood through first hand experience the potential consequences of the war for his native South, and yet entered the conflict anyway. Guelzo also focuses on Lee’s short post-war life, examining his contributions to the Lost Cause mythology that continues to defile American culture and politics. Guelzo’s Lee was thus a tragic character, with the even larger tragedy being that even if Lee had turned out differently it probably wouldn’t have mattered, either before the war or after its conclusion.
In a 2021 op-ed piece on Guelzo’s work, George Will characterized Lee a “bore,” writing that “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…“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” (Will)
Well. If Guelzo’s Lee tended toward the stolid, the (especially uninitiated) reader also finds evidence of a clear-eyed realist, the product of his engineering background. This was not some dashing cavalier joyfully heralding the coming of war while racing across Tara on horseback. No fan of Andrew Jackson, he opposed the states rights’ argument, both conceptually and during the war, when southern states continually put their own interests over those of the Confederacy. His family did enslave African-Americans, but he called slavery “a moral and political evil” (145), rejecting the “proslavery argument,” which saw bondage as a positive good. His solution was not abolition, which he thought would lead to civil war, but recolonizing enslaved people to Africa, even offering it to some of his own (145). While by no means a paragon of morality, Lee comes off far more like Lincoln than John C. Calhoun. Even after Fort Sumter, he was not an ardent secessionist, even when accepting a commission in the Confederate army. (197)
Moreover, Lee’s life experiences gave him additional, important insights that could have pushed him away from wanting war. He served in the Army alongside officers and men from all part of the US. His peacetime military career took him all over the nation, even New York. He worked on the “internal improvements” that his fellow southerners objected to, and must have sensed how time and circumstance was not on the side of the South as Manifest Destiny propelled the US’s expansion. He saw the physical impact of (even an arguably victorious) war between an advanced industrial power and a more agrarian adversary (England v. US, 1812), which also informed his wartime strategy, which he wanted to continue even after Gettysburg, of forcing the North into ending the war before the South could be ground into dust. He also witnessed war first hand in Mexico, writing to his children that “you have no idea what a horrible sight a battlefield is (92) and “the papers cannot tell what a horrible sight a field of battle is.” (93)
And yet when the time came, Lee turned down Lincoln’s offer to command the Union army, resigned his commission and joined the rebellion, unable to “raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home.” (192) Home has a dual meaning here. One was Lee’s actual house. Guelzo spends a good deal of time with Lee’s preoccupation, mostly financial, with the Arlington estate, and a humorously ironic moment comes when the federal government seized It for Lee’s failure to pay back taxes. (310) The more important home was Virginia itself; Lee’s bonds to his native state proof that even after the War of 1812, the Era of Good Feelings and nascent communications and transportation revolution, not enough time had passed from 1776 to create, even among rational thinkers like Lee, a truly national consciousness.
Given all this, Guelzo was by no means suggesting that the relatively unknown Lee could have slowed or stopped the rush to war. Yet the reader still finds himself wishing that his rational, objective side could have won out and that his natural leadership ability combined with the Union’s material advantages, could have ended the war more quickly.
Guelzo’s coverage of April 1861-April 1865 takes the reader over familiar ground, some of it covered in his own earlier works. It’s after Appomattox that the reader senses the second, greater tragedy of Lee’s life. His death so soon after the war means one can only speculate what his public role would have been had he survived into his 70s or 80s, but Guelzo’s examination of his private thoughts was not promising. The antebellum pragmatist turned romantic, writing to his former aide that he hoped the “bravery and devotion of the Army of Northern Virginia shall be correctly transmitted into posterity.” (377) His relative sympathy for enslaved people did not extend to free Blacks: “I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find the white man you see everything around him improving.” (377) Tragically Lee helped construct, albeit privately, the twin pillars of the Lost Cause narrative. There’s little to suggest he would have become another Nathan Bedord Forest, and one doubts he would have supported statues of him built in the name of White resistance, but the tone of his musings suggested he wouldn’t have emulated his chief lieutenant James Longstreet, a proponent of national reconciliation either.
In the end, tragically, none of this really mattered. History was it was, the Civil War was going to happen and it would still be glorified 164 years later regardless of what Robert E. Lee thought, did or didn’t do. This in no way minimizes Guelzo’s scholarship and skill in presenting a sad story and somehow making it even sadder.
Additional Sources
Will, George F. This scrupulous biography of Robert E. Lee is exactly what the country needs.
Washington Post, October 13, 2021.