Review - Robert E. Lee: A Life by Allen C. Guelzo

 

I love the design of the cover of Allen C. Guelzo's recent Lee biography, Robert E. Lee: A Life, and how it gives the impression that maybe we have never seen the complete face of the man - exactly what Guelzo wants to correct with this new Lee biography. In full disclosure, I will say that I have read numerous Lee biographies ranging all the way from the fawning multi-volume bio by Douglas Southall Freeman to the early exposé biography The Marble Man by Thomas L. Connelly. And I have been left believing that the truth is, not al all surprisingly, somewhere in the middle of these two approaches to historical biography. 

Guelzo puts all of his cards on the table right in the first paragraph of his prologue to Robert E. Lee by asking:

"How do you write a biography of someone who commits treason? The question is complicated, because (as Paul Murray Kendall wrote in The Art of Biography) the usual task of the biographer 'is to perpetuate a man as he was in the days he lived...' What my (Guelzo's) question suggests is that there may be some lives that we hesitate to perpetuate, and among the reasons for that hesitation must surely be treason."

Later I read a passage in that same prologue that gave me the confidence that the author, a man who was "catechized at my grandmother's knee in the righteousness of the Union war," was able to put aside his own biases long enough to write a fair representation of the man Robert E. Lee was. He said this:

"But casting Lee in contradiction - as either saint or sinner, as either simple or pathological - is, in the end, less profitable than seeing his anxieties as a counterpoint to his dignity, his impatience and his temper as the match to his composure."

Guelzo begins at the beginning, with the arrival of the first Lee in Virginia from England in roughly 1640. He explores succeeding generations right up to Lee's own birth in 1807, especially focussing on young Robert's relationship with his father Light Horse Harry Lee, one of George Washington's key generals during the Revolutionary War. Guelzo believes that it was Harry's abandonment of the Lee family when Robert was just six years old that made him into the man he became. Ultimately, Robert was so embarrassed by the man his father turned out to be, that he worried for the rest of his life about having enough income to support his own growing family. 

The bulk of Robert E. Lee: A Life is comprised of a concise history of the four years of the American Civil War (a helpful summary of the war for those not already familiar with its details). First, however, readers watch as Lee agonizes over his final decision as to what he will do if war becomes imminent: take command of the Union Army, stay home as a neutral, or take command of the newly constructed Confederate States of America Army. Then they get to stay by Lee's side during all of his, and his new army's, ups and downs for the war's duration.

The final section of the book explores Lee's surprise postwar decision to accept presidency of the tiny Washington College in Lexington, Virginia. Guelzo makes it clear that this decision was almost entirely an economic one made by a man who had no other way to feed and house his family. One even has to wonder if economics was behind Lee's decision - a decision made, after all, by a man deeply scarred and embarrassed by family poverty in his youth - to stay home and personally protect his and his wife's Virginia property rather than leave it all to be destroyed during the coming war. 

Robert E. Lee: A Life is an honest, evenhanded approach to the life of a complicated man, a man whose many virtues are offset by his many flaws and imperfections. My biggest surprise after having read the book is that my original assessment of Lee, along with my net  admiration of the man, has not changed all that much. Robert E. Lee was a man of his times, as were all of the people who lived in his day, and those who want to condemn Lee by using today's standards and sensitivities in order to do it, are both misguided and overzealous in their (often) trumped up sudden, new anger.