Re lee a biography about abraham
Home / Historical Figures / Re lee a biography about abraham
Lee was an utter fool on the battlefield, whose feckless leadership very nearly single-handedly destroyed the Confederate Army at Gettysburg. I know of no better source for information of the engagements of Lee's Army. He was 56 and bone weary. For instance, the author's assertion that because Lee spent very little time in Virginia after going off to West Point, he saw only the "good" side of slavery is a hollow argument in my opinion.
Freeman's work is exhaustively researched and is very well written, but reads more like idolatry than biography.
It is not unbiased. . Though Blount was never a Civil War buff, he says “every Southerner has to make his peace with that War. I plunged back into it for this book, and am relieved to have emerged alive.”
“Also,” he says, “Lee reminds me in some ways of my father.”
At the heart of Lee’s story is one of the monumental choices in American history: revered for his honor, Lee resigned his U.S.
Army commission to defend Virginia and fight for the Confederacy, on the side of slavery. Surely Lee is not quite the imperfect person that later biographers set out to prove, nor was he the perfect person that Freeman wrote about. On July 1 a larger Confederate force returned, engaged Meade’s advance force, and pushed it back through the town—to the fishhook-shaped heights comprising Cemetery Hill, Cemetery Ridge, Little Round Top, and Round Top.
It was almost a rout, until Maj. Gen. O. O. Howard, to whom Lee as West Point superintendent had been kind when Howard was an unpopular cadet, and Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock rallied the Federals and held the high ground.
Pickett’s Charge, the frontal assault on the heart of Union defenses arrayed on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg could not have been a more militarily foolhardy undertaking.
Lee is practically shown as infallible, the Yankees are portrayed as malignant, vile creatures that cheerfully trample the Constitution underfoot, and Lee's mistakes are written off to the bumbling incompetence of his subordinates.
While Freeman did spend almost his entire life researching Lee, his idol worship of Lee gets in the way of serious scholarship. The passage begins: “In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. For all his audacity on the battlefield, he accepted rather passively one raw deal after another, bending over backward for everyone from Jefferson Davis to James McNeill Whistler’s mother.
The works of a general are battles, campaigns and usually memoirs. That no doubt suited the Confederate fighting man, who didn’t take kindly to being told what to do—but Lee’s only weakness as a commander, his otherwise reverent nephew Fitzhugh Lee would write, was his “reluctance to oppose the wishes of others, or to order them to do anything that would be disagreeable and to which they would not consent.” With men as well as with women, his authority derived from his sightliness, politeness, and unimpeachability.
They looked at the site of Pickett’s charge and were baffled. Lee had actually advanced farther north than the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when he learned that Meade was south of him, threatening his supply lines. To efface the squalor and horror of the war, we have the image of Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves, and we have the image of Robert E.
Lee’s gracious surrender. He was a person, with great things about him, faults, and all the rest. This is work which needs to read in concert with more recent scholarship.
One thing I found unsettling is the erroneous descriptions of Lee's relationship with Montgomery Meigs, the army engineer who worked for Lee on the Mississippi River projects when they were both young officers.