Making Sense of Robert E. Lee

[rangerrebew]

Making Sense of Robert E. Lee
“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”— Robert E. Lee, at Fredericksburg
 
Lee’s father, Maj. Gen. “Light-Horse Harry” Lee fought in the Revolutionary War. (Robert E. Lee Memorial Association, Stratford)
By Roy Blount, Jr.
 
July 2003
 

Few figures in American history are more divisive, contradictory or elusive than Robert E. Lee, the reluctant, tragic leader of the Confederate Army, who died in his beloved Virginia at age 63 in 1870, five years after the end of the Civil War. In a new biography, Robert E. Lee, Roy Blount, Jr., treats Lee as a man of competing impulses, a “paragon of manliness” and “one of the greatest military commanders in history,” who was nonetheless “not good at telling men what to do.”

Blount, a noted humorist, journalist, playwright and raconteur, is the author or coauthor of 15 previous books and the editor of Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor. A resident of New York City and western Massachusetts, he traces his interest in Lee to his boyhood in Georgia. 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.”

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/making-sense-of-robert-e-lee-85017563/#ZUlrpI7Y5geem3fX.99
 

[catfish1957]

[Smokin Joe]

The writer seems completely oblivious to the seismic shift between the antebellum 'these United States", of which Lee was a Virginian, first. The federation of those States paled in comparison to the loyalty owed to the Sovereign State from which Lee came, where family and property lay. To take up arms, no matter how prestigious that command, against his homeland would be an act of treason most foul, to take arms against his family, friends, and neighbors, an unthinkable act.  Even then, Lee had sworn an Oath when he accepted his commission in the Federal Army, and doubtless that resignation was not a choice made lightly.

However, when the States were no  longer united, when his homeland had voted to withdraw from the compact it felt was no longer in effect, to withdraw that consent of the governed that gave the Federal Government any just power over Virginia, as had other States, that Federation was dissolving. Virginia remained, his home.

It is amazing how many historians ignore the fundamental shift in mindset surrounding the Federal Government that occurred ante- and post-bellum, from a Federal Government to a National Government, a significant change which haunts this country to this day.

Slavery would have died an economic death with the influx of immigrants from Europe, and the simple economics of hiring someone rather than owning them.