Reading the Man, A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters

By Elizabeth Brown Pryor
Notes, bibliography, illustrations, index, 658 pp., 2007. Viking, Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014, $29.95 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:

This is a massive book about a general who figured significantly in the Civil War and has been the beneficiary of countless books and articles ever since, most of which place him on a pedestal high above mortal men.

During the war, Robert E. Lee came to represent the Confederacy and in the few years given to him after the war, he continued this ideological dominance. After his death, he grew to mythic proportions, some writers citing him as Christ-like in his sacrifice for the Confederacy.

Even today, Lee remains a core figure in neo-Confederate thought, and even most non-ideological Civil War buffs unquestioningly accept the mythology about him.

His modern image among professional historians, once reflective of this adulation, is now much less one-sided. Battle historians and biographers give him his just due, but they are much more objectively critical of his performance in the war.

Civil War historiography has come a long way from the days of Douglas Southall Freeman who concluded that, in Lee, “there is no inconsistency to be explained, no enigma to be solved.” Lee was what he seemed to be — an individual of unblemished perfection, worthy of total emulation.

The book under review, while maintaining Lee’s aura, exemplifies the new more critical tone toward him. The author demonstrates in great detail that Lee was hardly uncomplicated and perfect, that, in fact, to argue that way is not only to do harm to history but also to Lee.

Elizabeth Brown Pryor is a foreign service officer who has done prodigious research on Lee’s life. The resulting book is a combination of elegantly written biographical style with the presentation, at the beginning of each chapter, of one of the Lee letters recently discovered in a Richmond bank. [See July 2007 news story]

Pryor argues that she wants the reader to understand Lee through a personal reading of these letters, but she utilizes them and many other sources to tell the reader just how complicated a human being she believes Lee really was.

This is not a book of military history or even a book primarily about the Civil War. Pryor delves deeply into issues that affected Lee throughout his entire life, using them to provide insight into his person.

Devotees of Lee will not always appreciate her puncturing of many cherished myths about Lee, but they will appreciate the mild tone she uses to explain Lee’s human foibles.

To cite only a few examples, Pryor points out that Lee’s long-trumpeted religious zeal did not cause him to join a church until later in his life and only at the same time that his daughters were taking that step.

His sexually explicit letters to young women went beyond what most other men would dare express. His decision to support Virginia rather than remain with the Union was hardly his only choice. Many Virginians, including members of his own family, fought on the federal side.

Lee’s views about slavery and African Americans were hardly those of someone who opposed the institution and respected black people. Lee did not see slaves as human beings, rather as workers to do, without question, what white masters told them to do. Lee was a hard slave taskmaster, and, when he had the chance to emancipate the slaves of his dead father-in-law, he took the full five years permitted in that relative’s will.

Elizabeth Pryor has not presented new material in this massive work, but she has provided important insight into Lee in such an effective manner that both historians and Civil War buffs will want to read this book.

This is a publication that will have wide influence and continue the movement toward a more objective and critical view of an individual, who, for so long, was uncritically considered beyond criticism.