Review: Guelzo, Robert E. Lee (2020)

[truepenny]

Robert E. Lee: A Life by Allen C. Guelzo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I like Allen C. Guelzo. He's a bit of an iconoclast,* he writes beautifully, and he has produced what seems to me a very even-handed and fair biography of Robert E. Lee (who himself never went by "Robert E. Lee"). Unlike Pryor in Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, Guelzo is not charmed by Lee, and he does not write hagiography, but he isn't as committed to disassembling Lee as either Nolan (Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History) or Fellman (The Making of Robert E. Lee). He gives a portrait of a flawed human being (with tremendous charisma) who made bad decisions, and he is not shy about saying Lee committed treason.

Lee continues to fascinate me. He, like Stonewall Jackson, remains compelling even though I don't like him and I don't admire him. Guelzo pins Lee's psychology on his father, Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee, who deserted the family when Robert was six, and says that Lee's life was a struggle between the desires for independence and security and the overwhelming need to be perfect. I'm a little skeptical of tidy biographical schemas (and really, aren't all of us struggling to balance the desire for independence with the desire for security?), but Guelzo uses his well to explore Lee's relationship to the U.S. Army, to his Custis in-laws, and especially to Arlington, the house that his wife and children loved passionately, but that seems to have hung around Lee's neck like an albatross. He talks very carefully about Lee's decision to give his service to the Confederacy, and he does a good job of explaining Lee's career as a battlefield general, without either undercutting or overselling his accomplishments. (Yes, Lee achieved amazing results, but he did so at a terrible cost of human life, and really, he looks amazing because he's up against some really terrible generals.) He argues that Lee found the balance he needed at Washington and Lee University (contrary to Pryor, who says he felt trapped there), but was sabotaged by his failing health. This leaves us with Robert E. Lee as a person who was never really happy because nothing was ever perfect enough. (Certainly, no man was perfect enough for his daughters. None of the four ever married, and it's at least in part because Lee (a) froze out their suitors and (b) encouraged them to think that they could never find a man as perfect as their father. Also, of course, the Civil War swinging like a scythe through the men of their generation.) And that's sad, but it's also maybe no more than he deserved.

Overall, I found this biography compellingly readable, and found that it, like Gwynne's Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, left me feeling like I could see clearly the irreducible knot at the center of its subject's personality and life.

Five stars

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* He thinks Gettysburg was bad generalship on Lee's part, not good generalship on Meade's. He thinks Lee's strategy of invading the North was better than the strategy (which the Confederacy failed to follow in any event) of a purely defensive war. He thinks Lincoln was wrong to say that Lee's army had to be the target, not Richmond.



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