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truepenny
The Making of Robert E. Lee by Michael FellmanMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book is really great. Fellman uses Robert E. Lee's letters and other writings to prove that he was (a) racist, so you can forget all those heartwarming stories about Lee being anything other than a bigot (b) kind of a jerk, honestly, and (c) not all that great a general. Fellman analyzes Lee's whole career, putting what Fellman calls the annus mirabilis in context, and it shows very clearly that the usual Robert E. Lee was NOT audacious, NOT a risk taker, NOT aggressive. Fellman spends a lot of time talking about the ideal of manhood that Lee was attempting to live up to, both Stoic and Christian, so lots of repression and self-control and passive acceptance of whatever befell you. It's just that for some reason, Lee had this one year where he was on fire.
(He doesn't say, but I think it may be important, that Lee was a brilliant general against McClellan (whose psychology he understood perfectly and also how to leverage it), Pope, and Hooker, all of whom made, objectively, enormous mistakes against him. It's easy to look good when your opponent is tripping over his own shoelaces. There was an enormous Union mistake at Gettysburg, too (his name was Dan Sickles), and Meade only barely kept from capsizing on Day 2, but Day 3 was just bad generalship on Lee's part.
(Grant made mistakes---Cold Harbor, anyone?---it's just that he didn't fall back because of them. Grant used the Union's superior numbers to brute force his ultimate success, not any kind of tactical genius.)
Anyway, this book is well-written and well-argued and gives a vivid portrait of Robert E. Lee.
Four and a half stars, round up to five.
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