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When Charles Francis Adams Met Robert E. Lee: A Southern Gentleman in History and Memory
- Louisiana State University Press
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FOR NEARLY FORTY-ONE OF HIS SIXTY-THREE YEARS, ROBERT E. Lee was a military man. Indeed, for a good part of those forty-one years, he was a military man par excellence. He was second in his class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, fought brilliantly in the Mexican War, and of course ultimately became best known for his outstanding generalship on behalf of the Confederacy. In the years after his death and down to the present day, Lee has been praised not just for fighting hard and fighting well but also for achieving an unparalleled degree of military genius during his years of command in the Civil War. But while Lee will forever be entwined with his military endeavors, his life was also shaped by personal and domestic experiences that occurred off the fields of battle, experiences that various biographers, Emory Thomas among them, have helped illuminate. Beneath the polished exterior of the “Marble Man,” Thomas explains, was a man with complex human emotions. Lee, we learn, was a man preoccupied with control, order, and propriety, yet one who also tried repeatedly to escape some of the constrictions and confinements of Victorian society. He abided strictly by his husbandly duties and maintained a constant devotion to a wife who was often infirm, yet he also formed close ties with a bevy of young female acquaintances to whom he frequently uttered his most private and revealing thoughts. Similarly Lee tried to project a model of strict paternal authority but was often a nurturing and indulgent parent. No doubt he would have been seen, and would probably have thought of himself, as a foremost example of a “southern gentleman.” In fact teaching a sense of When Charles Francis Adams Met Robert E. Lee: A Southern Gentleman in History and Memory NINA SILBER 349 gentlemanliness became Lee’s central objective when, after the war, he served as president of Washington College.“We have but one rule here,”he wrote to a new student,“and that is that every student must be a gentleman.”2 Yet in many respects the label of “southern gentleman” obscures more than it illuminates. Perhaps in no case does it obscure more than in the life of Robert E. Lee. Certainly Lee conformed to many of the visible markers by which the “southern gentleman” has been judged. He lived a life of outward decorum and exemplary behavior. If he drank, he did so in moderation, careful to avoid any type of excessive indulgences. Like all good gentlemen of the nineteenth century, Lee took a sober and thoughtful approach to his religion, though he was not confirmed in the Episcopal Church until the relatively advanced age of forty-six. Nonetheless he firmly believed in Christian sacrifice and in avoiding the fatal sin of excessive self-absorption. Finally, Lee’s notion of race and his thorough acceptance of white superiority also marked him as what nineteenth-century white Americans considered a “gentleman.” Indeed, as many saw it, being a “gentleman” denoted superiority, a superiority that was tied to the cultural prescriptions of white society. “The manner in which an individual enjoys certain advantages,” Lee once wrote, “is the test of a true gentleman.”3 As a true gentleman, Lee firmly believed in his cultural and racial superiority but tried, as all good gentlemen did, to keep his sense of self-importance in check. Yet much as Lee became a model of southern gentlemanliness, there are indications—scattered throughout biographical accounts of the Confederate leader—that his behavior was not always consistent with what has often been presented as the typical elements of white southern manhood. In other words, examined from the perspective of both Lee’s contemporaries and present -day historians, there were times when he ironically seemed more Yankee than southern. For example, during his West Point years, Lee lived by northern rules: he was a model of discipline and frugality. Other southern cadets—notably Jefferson Davis and Leonidas Polk—lived a more spendthrift and carefree existence that set them apart from the more restrained and parsimonious Yankee boys. Both Davis and Polk, for example, spent liberally on the types of luxuries—clothes, alcohol, groceries—to which they believed “southern gentlemen ” were entitled. In contrast Lee received a refund from his educational allowance and, because of his pristine demeanor, completed his time at West Point without receiving a single demerit, a rare occurrence for most students, no doubt even more...