Robert E. Lee occupies a remarkable place in
the pantheon of American history, combining in the minds of many, Michael Korda
writes in this admiring and briskly written biography, “a strange combination of
martyr, secular saint, Southern gentleman and perfect warrior.” Indeed, Korda
aptly adds, “It is hard to think of any other general who had fought against his
own country being so completely reintegrated into national life.”
Lee has been a popular subject of biography
virtually from his death in 1870, at the age of 63, through the four magisterial
volumes of Douglas Southall Freeman in the 1930s to Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s
intimate 2007 study of Lee and his letters, “Reading the Man.” Korda, the author
of earlier biographies of Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower, aspires to
pry the marble lid off the Lee legend to reveal the human being beneath.
He draws a generally sympathetic portrait of a
master strategist who was as physically fearless on the battlefield as he was
reserved in personal relations. He was, Korda writes, “a perfectionist, obsessed
by duty,” but also “charming, funny and flirtatious,” an animal lover, a
talented cartographer and a devoted parent, as well as “a noble, tragic figure,
indeed one whose bearing and dignity conferred nobility on the cause for which
he fought and still does confer it in the minds of many people.”
Graduating second in his class at West Point,
Lee was commissioned into the engineers, then the most prestigious branch of the
Army. He spent several unremarkable decades directing the construction of
coastal fortifications, including Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, and somewhat more
memorably, diverting the course of the Mississippi River at St. Louis. The Lee
legend was born during the Mexican War, when he won the highest praise from the
commander of the invading American army, Winfield Scott, for his bold
reconnaissance behind enemy lines, during which he participated in three battles
and crossed enemy territory three separate times in 36 hours — “the greatest
feat of physical and moral courage” of the campaign, in Scott’s words. In 1859,
when Scott was the overall commander of the United States Army, Lee was tapped
to lead the company of Marines that captured John Brown at Harpers Ferry. Two
years later, as state after state seceded from the Union, Lincoln offered Lee
the command of the federal forces. He of course declined, and took his talents
south.
Korda portrays the Lee of 1861 as a man
tragically torn between loyalty to his nation and his native state. That Lee
agonized over his decision is certainly true. However, Korda does not consider
the fact that Lee was also heir to an antifederalist tradition embedded deep in
the political circuitry of the Virginia elite, and of his own family: 70 years
earlier, in 1790, Robert’s father, the Revolutionary War hero Henry Lee,
declared in response to what he considered a slighting of Southern interests, “I
had rather myself submit to all the hazards of war and risk the loss of
everything dear to me in life, than to live under the rule of a fixed insolent
Northern majority.” Many other Southern-born officers remained unshaken in their
loyalty to the Union.
Korda provides crisp and concise, if
conventional, accounts of Lee’s major engagements. We rarely hear from ordinary
soldiers or feel the terror of battle amid the fog of war, but Korda is good at
explaining Lee’s strategic thinking, the maneuvering of armies and the sometimes
crippling limitations imposed by logistics, bad maps and worse roads.
Lee was not infallible. Although Korda
generally gives him the benefit of the doubt, he admits that Lee was “not always
an effective commander,” too often leaving it to his subordinates to guess at
what he intended. He is too generous in his assessment of Lee’s disastrous
frontal attacks at the Battle of Malvern Hill that capped the Seven Days
campaign, and his equally futile assault — now famous as Pickett’s Charge — on
another impregnable federal position at Gettysburg, in 1863. To Lee’s credit, as
Pickett’s shattered survivors straggled back to their lines, Lee leaned from his
horse to shake their hands, telling them, “All this has been my fault.”
Yet without Lee, the Army of Northern Virginia would most likely have been
defeated long before Appomattox.
Korda acknowledges that it is impossible to
consider Lee without facing the problem of slavery. Lee owned slaves himself,
and he arguably did more than any other man to try to create a country founded
on slavery. Korda asserts that Lee was at least “moderate” on slavery, writing
that he “was never, by any stretch of the imagination, an enthusiast for
slavery.” That said, Lee did nothing to bring slavery to an end, and regarded
abolitionists as troublemakers and revolutionaries. Korda quotes a revealing
letter that Lee wrote to his wife, Mary, in which he described slavery as “a
moral and political evil,” but went on to say, “I think it however a greater
evil to the white man than to the black race. . . . The blacks are immeasurably
better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically. The painful
discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race.”
How long their “subjugation” would be necessary, Lee complacently concluded, “is
known and ordered by a wise and Merciful Providence.” As Allen Guelzo noted in
“Gettysburg: The Last Invasion,” Lee’s army systematically kidnapped both former
fugitive slaves and free blacks in Pennsylvania, dragging scores, perhaps
hundreds, of them back to slavery in Virginia. Lee may not have approved of this
atrocity, but he did little or nothing to stop it.
“Clouds of Glory” is unfortunately marred by
more than a few annoying errors of fact. Northern politicians with Southern
leanings were called “doughfaces,” not “doughboys” — a 20th-century term for
American soldiers in World War I. At the time of the Nat Turner rebellion in
1831, the enslaved population of the United States was about two million, not
four million. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854, not 1845.
More troubling is a footnote in which Korda
likens the burning of Atlanta in “1865” (actually 1864) and William T. Sherman’s
March to the Sea to the firebombing of Dresden in 1945. “Britain’s bomber
command . . . simply had more sophisticated technology than Sherman did, but the
intention was the same,” Korda writes. He uncritically asserts that “Sherman
introduced what a later generation would call total war, involving the burning
of cities, homes and farms on a wide scale.” Although Sherman’s march was
destructive of property, it was far less extensive than Lost Cause mythology
claims, and was carried out with remarkably little loss of life: Perhaps fewer
than 2,500 Confederate soldiers were killed in open battle, and very few
civilians died. The bombing of Dresden took tens of thousands of lives,
virtually all civilians. The worst war crimes of the Civil War were perpetrated
by Confederates, in the savage massacres of black federal soldiers at Fort
Pillow, Tenn., and by Lee’s own troops at the Crater at Petersburg, in 1864.
“Clouds of Glory” will satisfy readers who
wish to be reassured that Lee was a splendid and courageous soldier, as well as
the fine-mannered epitome of antebellum aristocracy. Those who might regard him
as a reactionary who betrayed his country, and whose skillful generalship
prolonged an unwinnable war on behalf of a cause that Grant called “one of the
worst for which a people ever fought,” may find Korda’s enthusiasm less
persuasive.
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