The Making of Robert E. Lee (review)

The Making of Robert E. Lee. By Michael Fellman. (New York: Random House, 2000. Pp. xx, 360. $29.95.)

Over all studies of Robert E. Lee loom two imposing figures, Douglas Southall Freeman and Lee himself. Freeman's massive, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography has discouraged other historians from writing a comprehensive life of Lee. Even Emory Thomas's now standard one-volume biography is really too brief for the subject, and valuable, critical works by Thomas Lawrence Connelly and Alan Nolan sometimes came off as carping or harsh as Marse Robert seemingly defies revisionism.

Of course, the general's historical reputation, especially as a strategist, has fluctuated in recent years, but even students of the Civil War who would spurn the label "neo-Confederate" retain a fairly strong admiration for Lee. The general's positive image, as Michael Fellman suggests at several points in this new study of Lee's personality, stems from a traditional assessment of Lee's character. Fellman joins the ranks of Lee revisionists but is most concerned in reassessing the "Marble Man" as a fullblooded, yea even hot-blooded, human being. Lee embodied the values of "his class, his place, and his time," including duty, self-control, and discipline (xv). These virtues seem commonplace enough for the first half of the nineteenth century, though Fellman believes they hardly deserve emulation, in part because with Lee at least they often took extreme or even repressive forms. Based largely on a close reading of Lee's correspondence, Fellman concludes that "stoic perfectionism masked self-doubts and the often brittle urge to control. In an endless emotional cycle, half-formed desires and anxieties always threatened to burst through the surfaces of his personal and cultural conformity" (xx).

Fellman is not the first biographer to emphasize Lee's struggle to cope with the failures of his father Light Horse Harry Lee. To Fellman's credit, however, he does not make too much of familial reputation and readily acknowledges that despite Lee's natural reserve, he could be playfully humorous, especially in correspondence with women. But it is just at this point that the evidence is sometimes stretched beyond reasonable bounds. Because Lee did not smoke, drink, or swear and was physically robust, as Fellman explains, he became something of a flirt. The examples chosen are interesting and in some places new, but Fellman is far too quick to read sexual innuendo into what he admits is Lee's usually guarded words. In these pages, libido becomes one of the few, albeit limited, outlets for a man of Christian piety and stoic disposition.

Like Emory Thomas, Fellman notes how Lee's army career kept him separated from his wife, Mary, and their children for long periods. The skillful dissection of Lee's advice to his children is often perceptive but also presents a dark picture. So too Lee's comments on race--whether directed toward Indians, Mexicans, or slaves--sound quite conventional, though Fellman uses rather slender evidence to argue that the Virginian was not only blind to various social evils but, despite a qualified unionism, was also passively pro-slavery. According to Fellman, Lee was so "profoundly conservative" (76) that he could never adjust to the onrushing events of sectional conflict or later the Civil War itself, a flaw typical of an entire class that had become "social anachronisms" (77) in a democratic age. This world view made Lee a much less reluctant Confederate than many historians have described.

Fellman helpfully divides Lee's wartime career into three phases. The first, lasting up to the spring of 1862, was largely a failure, as Lee in West Virginia and South Carolina never lived up to his reputation or his own expectations. Then "luck" suddenly thrust him into command with Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan's army threatening Richmond, and here Fellman begins a pattern of attributing Lee's successes to favorable twists of fate. Even Chancellorsville, which many historians regard as Lee's...