History

Mary Chestnut with characteristic acuity nibbed the problem for biographers who have sought to know and understand Robert E. Lee. To even this most perceptive of contemporary observers Lee was 'so cold and quiet and grand', long before he became the Marble Man. Instrumental, perhaps decisively so, in fixing Lee as an icon for his own and later times was Douglas Southall Freeman's Pulitzer prize winning four volume biography from the 1930s. Freeman cemented in history the image of Lee already etched in American consciousness by decades of Lost Cause mythology.

He found in Lee no limit to the 'grand'-ness Chestnut saw, either in Lee's character or military ability. He also found in Lee 'no inconsistency to be explained, no enigma to be solved. What he seemed, he was', a truly great 'gentleman'.2 Recent historians have done much to penetrate the iconic Lee and, in finding rather more humanity and less perfection, have breathed life and complexity into our conceptions of Lee. Criticism of the man, his strategic conceptions and his tactical judgments informed revisionist works by Thomas Connelly and Allan Nolan.

Emory Thomas differed from both contentions and brought from the pages of his biography a shy, uncertain and unfulfilled, but still 'great person' whose 'response to his tribulations and to his life in general' rather than his stunning achievements constituted his greatness. These two new studies above seek to fix anew our understanding of Robert E. Lee, to bring him again out of his 'cold and quiet and grand' remoteness, and to probe his relationship to the cause and nation he served.

Michael Fellman and Gary Gallagher approach Lee from very different starting points and from very different ways of proceeding. While there are points of correspondence in the Robert E. Lee we encounter in each, the differences remain compelling. Fellman's approach, distinctly revisionist in nature, Fellman's study is notable for its sustained focus on Lee's inner self, of his unceasing struggle to retain 'mastery' over his emotions and feelings, especially those driven by the key values of his life. Lee's psychological, religious and emotional states, and their interaction with his roles and experiences, provide the story line of the study.

In this struggle, the 'Christian virtue of humility' and the 'older Stoic virtue of pride' contended respectively to temper his expectations and to drive his quest.(p. xv) Young Robert, aware of how the honour and distinguished revolutionary service of his leading Virginia family had been overshadowed by troubled financial circumstance and public scandal, sought to erase these 'scars of his boyhood' through an ethic of 'self-control and duty'.(p. 19)

Their legacy however could be glimpsed in 'Lee's fear of close ties with other men, his enormous reserve, and his desire to live through abstract principle rather than emotional engagement'.(p. 12) With women Lee shed some of his restraint, though Fellman's suggestions of the extent to which he did so seem likely to generate controversy among historians and perhaps even apoplexy among some contemporary admirers of The General. Heroic and familial ...