that the soldier who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven.” Two years later one of Lee’s ex-generals, Jubal A. that is not filled with nauseating flatteries” of Lee, from which “it would seem. He had tiny feet that he loved his children to tickle None of these things seems to fit, for if ever there was a grave American icon, it is Robert Edward Lee-hero of the Confederacy in the Civil War and a symbol of nobility to some, of slavery to others.Īfter Lee’s death in 1870, Frederick Douglass, the former fugitive slave who had become the nation’s most prominent African-American, wrote, “We can scarcely take up a newspaper. In theaters of grinding, hellish human carnage he kept a pet hen for company. He was in his element gossiping with belles about their beaux at balls. In his dashing (if sometimes depressive) antebellum prime, he may have been the most beautiful person in America, a sort of precursorcross between Cary Grant and Randolph Scott. Its name would thereafter resound with courage, casualties and miscalculation: Gettysburg. In the excerpt that follows, the general masses his troops for a battle over three humid July days in a Pennsylvania town. Blount argues that the issue does matter: “To me it’s slavery, much more than secession as such, that casts a shadow over Lee’s honorableness.”

Lee “thought it was a bad idea for Virginia to secede, and God knows he was right, but secession had been more or less democratically decided upon.” Lee’s family held slaves, and he himself was at best ambiguous on the subject, leading some of his defenders over the years to discount slavery’s significance in assessments of his character. “The decision was honorable by his standards of honor-which, whatever we may think of them, were neither self-serving nor complicated,” Blount says. Army commission to defend Virginia and fight for the Confederacy, on the side of slavery. “Also,” he says, “Lee reminds me in some ways of my father.”Īt the heart of Lee’s story is one of the monumental choices in American history: revered for his honor, Lee resigned his U.S.

I plunged back into it for this book, and am relieved to have emerged alive.” Though Blount was never a Civil War buff, he says “every Southerner has to make his peace with that War. A resident of New York City and western Massachusetts, he traces his interest in Lee to his boyhood in Georgia. Lee, Roy Blount, Jr., treats Lee as a man of competing impulses, a “paragon of manliness” and “one of the greatest military commanders in history,” who was nonetheless “not good at telling men what to do.”īlount, a noted humorist, journalist, playwright and raconteur, is the author or coauthor of 15 previous books and the editor of Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor. Lee, the reluctant, tragic leader of the Confederate Army, who died in his beloved Virginia at age 63 in 1870, five years after the end of the Civil War. Few figures in American history are more divisive, contradictory or elusive than Robert E.

The war of the gods respect feeling