The Lees of Virginia, Seven Generations of an American Family

Edited by Paul C. Nagel
Illustrated, new introduction, index, softcover,352 pp., 2007 reprint. Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Ave., New York, NY, 10016, $17.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: John F. Marszalek

John F. Marszalek is Giles Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Mississippi State University and author of numerous books including Sherman, A Soldier’s Passion for Order (1993), republished in a new paperback edition by Southern Illinois University Press in the fall of 2007.

Review:

Paul C. Nagel, the well-known family historian, first wrote this book in 1990. It now appears in softcover, the title of a new introduction explaining the justification for the new printing: “Commemorating the Bicentennial of General Robert E. Lee’s Birth.”

Less praise of the Confederacy’s greatest general, this new introduction is more a discussion of how proponents of modern conservatism, in their use of the term “family values,” “seriously misunderstand or misrepresent how families have generally developed across the generations.” Nagel argues that “family values” are not “immutable” verities, but “have often been subject to change.”

The seven generations of the Lee family could not have been more different. The differences in attitude and personality between Light Horse Harry Lee and his son Robert E. Lee demonstrate this phenomenon.

The father was a hero of the Union-forming American Revolution and then a disaster as husband, father and provider. The son was a hero of the Confederacy’s threat to the Union and a doting son, husband and father. Could two men have been any more different?

This book is no study in military history, rather a tracing of the Lee family from its founder Richard Lee in 17th century Virginia, through the generations, to Robert E. Lee and his status as the idol of the post-Civil War Lost Cause.

As earlier reviewers have noted, this is well-written prose but short on the kind of analysis evident in insightful family history such as Nagel’s own book on the Adams family.