Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History

National Review, Oct 21, 1991 by Doug Bandow

ROBERT E. LEE has been perhaps America's premier secular icon, with an "heroic, almost superhuman, national stature," writes Alan Nolan. Indeed, the "Mythic Lee," as Nolan puts it, has been largely immune from the normal questioning of historians. Which led Nolan, an Indianapolis attorney, to write Lee Considered. Getting people to reconsider their idols is a painful process, and Nolan assures his readers that he considers Lee a great man worthy of respect. But that will offer scant comfort to the Lee admirer as Nolan wields his sledgehammer against "the marble man."

The fundamental problem with Lee Considered is that it reads like a legal brief. Nolan rightly challenges Lee's relative immunity from serious historical scrutiny, and the evidence suggests a man far more complex--and human--than the marble image. But Nolan himself ignores this subtlety, going beyond his evidence in an attempt to substitute the Revised Lee for the Mythic Lee.

Nolan's strongest challenge to the Lee tradition comes in his discussion of Lee's attitude toward slavery. Although Lee called the institution a "moral & political evil," he indicated his willingness to leave abolition up to God, "who sees the end; who Chooses to work by slow influences." Lee also approved of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed the question of slavery in the territories to be settled by popular vote. Moreover, Nolan cites an 1865 letter, which several Lee biographers have omitted, terming slavery "the best" relationship between the races and worrying about the "evil consequences" of emancipation. Over all, argues Nolan, Lee's opinions differed little from those of other members of the planter class.

In fact, however, many Southerners defended the morality of slavery, which Lee did not. And most Northerners who opposed slavery did not accept blacks as equals: Abraham Lincoln, among others, was a gradual emancipationist who advocated colonization of former slaves in Africa. The context of Lee's comment on the Kansas-Nebraska Act suggest that he may have seen the law as a means of avoiding "Civil & Servile war." And his 1865 letter relates his opinion of the way "the white and black races" were "intermingled as at present," something that presumably also bothered Northerners who endorsed abolition but forbade free blacks to move into their communities. Lee's views on this subject were obviously more complex than have previously more complex than have previously been attributed to him, but Nolan assumes more than his evidence shows.

The desire to stretch the facts to back his conclusions is apparent elsewhere. Nolan's material on Lee's decision to resign his Federal commission and accept a Confederate command suggests a person under intense pressure and subject to conflicting emotions. Nolan, however, is dedicated to showing that Lee "was essentially committed to the Southern cause before Virginia seceded by virtue of his feelings about slavery and its expansion and by his sense of sectional loyalty." Nolan even questions Lee's veracity, puzzling, for instance, over how Lee could have indicated he hoped to go home and farm. But neither Lee's choices nor ongoing events were as simple as Nolan seems to assume. What if Virginia had remained in the Union but Federal forces were used against Confederate states? What if Virginia had seceded but no war ensued? Lee might then have resigned without entering Southern service. His seemingly unrealistic statements may also have reflected a desperate hope that he could avoid deciding. Although Nolan again demonstrates that the traditional view of Lee is too simplistic, his conclusion again suffers from the same flaw.

Two of Nolan's chapters are particularly unpersuasive. First, he argues that Lee was not a magnanimous adversary--and could not have been truthful in stating that he had felt no "bitterness and resentment" toward the North--because he referred to the "enemy" who committed "ruin & pillage," etc. Yet there is a difference between making essentially factual statements, such as that enemy forces are burning down homes and destroying crops--or even erupting angrily (Lee did have a temper)--and feeling bitter toward Northerners. Although Nolan is right to criticize fawning biographers who have suggested that Lee never uttered an ill word about the forces that were, in fact, ravaging his "country," Virginia, Lee's censure of their conduct does not mean that he was not forgiving, especially given his postwar role in attempting to heal the sectional divisions.

Which leads to Nolan's even more curious criticism of Lee's image as what Douglas Southall Freeman called "the conciliator." Writes Nolan, "in spite of some conciliatory statements," Lee "embraced the conventional claims of the defeated South." But the Lee statements that Nolan cites consistently encourage national harmony. That Lee emerged after four years of war as a stronger partisan of Southern rights is neither a surprise nor relevant to assessing his magnanimity in defeat.