Review: Pryor, Reading the Man (2007)

Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters by Elizabeth Brown Pryor

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I have very conflicting feelings about this book.

On the one hand, I love the concept. It's a biography of Robert E. Lee where each chapter's starting point is a letter or letters (mostly written by Lee, some written to him, and a few written about him). And Pryor does a great job of using the letters as launching points to talk about the different phases and aspects of Lee's life. It doesn't feel gimmicky at all. Pryor is an excellent writer and a thorough historian, so the book is a pleasure to read.

On the other hand, while I support and admire her determination to talk about Robert E. Lee as he was, not as he was hagiographied, and while she is persistent in pointing out his flaws, I find some of her philosophy, like the idea that Lee's decision to fight for the Confederacy was a noble decision because he "followed his heart," highly questionable. A bad decision is still a bad decision, even if it's made sincerely, and as some of her other chapters make clear, Lee made that bad decision because he fully bought into his culture's beliefs about the superiority of the white race and the utter inferiority of Black people. She also thinks Lee should get big kudos for surrendering at Appomattox (rather than perpetuating a guerilla war) and persuading his soldiers to follow his example, and I'm like, yes, that was the right decision, but couldn't he have made it six months earlier? HOW many men died because Lee couldn't admit the defeat staring him in the face? And she makes statements in discussing Appomattox and the end of the war like "The dignified relinquishment of command is among the most ennobling of American traditions" (441) which I think blurs the line between relinquishment of command, like a president stepping down after his term is up (and she uses John Quincy Adams and Harry Truman as examples, so she really is thinking of presidents), and the surrender of an army. Lee's not relinquishing command; he's accepting defeat. Totally different.

Basically, I think she rejects hagiography and then circles back around to it anyway.

I think Lee is a fascinating figure. I think he had a year where he (and Stonewall Jackson) was a great general. I think Pryor does a really excellent job of showing why he made the decisions he did. I also think he was wrong, wrong, wrong, and I DON'T think you can ignore the ideology he supported when you are deciding whether he is a heroic figure or not.

So this is an excellent book, but I disagree with it a lot.




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Review: Hirshon, The White Tecumseh (1997)

The White Tecumseh: A Biography of General William T. Sherman by Stanley P. Hirshson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a mediocre biography of William Tecumseh Sherman. I was hoping (expecting?) that the title was being used ironically, or at least with self-awareness or at LEAST quoting something said about Sherman during his lifetime, and nope. So that's cringeworthy. Otherwise, Hirshson seems to be an honest biographer, not trying to cover over any of the giant flaws in Sherman's character, and following his subject faithfully through pre-Civil War, Civil War, and post-Civil War life. He's just not a very interesting writer (it's possible he comes off particularly badly against Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, which is the book I finished immediately prior). This book plodded along from birth to death.

It's a pity, because Sherman himself was such a firecracker of a person, exploding here in a nervous breakdown, there in a fantastically ill-advised attempt to dictate terms, not just to Johnston and the Confederates, but to the Union government in Washington D.C. And of course burning Atlanta and marching through Georgia. "War is cruelty," he said at one point (also "War is hell"), and for someone who does not seem to have been particularly self-aware, he understood war in a searingly honest way that few generals on either side did. (Grant did. Jackson did.) Sherman was also appallingly racist (although not more racist than a lot of other white Americans in the second half of the nineteenth century), and is one of the many white men who should not be forgiven for their treatment of Native Americans. (When your opinion is, "Yes, well, it's a pity we're committing genocide but (a) it has to happen and (b) they asked for it," you really need to sit down and think about your choices, which of course Sherman never did.) He was also a petty bitch (egged on by his wife, whom I disliked immensely) and a father of a rather selfish stripe. (When his elder surviving son decided to become a Jesuit instead of a lawyer, Sherman took it as a personal, devastating insult and swore enmity to the Catholic Church. He seemed to feel that Tom OWED it to him to become a lawyer and it just unhinged him that Tom was determined to do something else.)

So a rather boring biography about an interesting person.



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