Review: Nolan, Lee Considered (1991)

[truepenny]

Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History by Alan T. Nolan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Nolan has a very specific project, which is to take apart the myth of Robert E. Lee, piece by piece, using evidence from Lee's own writings and actions to show that the myth is not the truth. This is rather stiffly written, but Nolan does a great job both of disassembling the mythic Robert E. Lee and of showing why the myth became necessary to mainstream (white) America in the years after the Civil War.

In particular, I liked Nolan's emphasis on not taking what Lee himself said about his actions at face value, as most Lee biographers up to 1991 had done. Nolan demonstrates that Lee was extremely gifted at self-justification, and particularly at the bit of circular reasoning that goes "the thing I want to do is honorable because I want to do it" (which is very different from "I want to do the honorable thing"). I also liked Nolan sorting out the different levels of strategy it's possible to look at, from the general's strategy of campaign to his government's strategy of the war (subdivided into the official strategy and the true strategy). The CSA had no official strategy, which is arguably part of their problem, but their true strategy was---had to be---to outlast the North, not to defeat them. So every time Lee won a brilliant but costly victory, he was working at cross-purposes to the best strategy the CSA had. He may have been a brilliant tactical general, but his much-vaunted audacity and aggression were great only so long as the CSA had the manpower to support them. Which was not really very long.



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