The True Gentleman: On Robert E. Lee's Definition of the Gentleman

THE TRUE GENTLEMAN: ON ROBERT E. LEE'S DEFINITION OF THE GENTLEMAN William C . McDonald The STORY has BEEN REPEATED SO OFTEN that it has the air oflegend about it. While president of Washington College after the Civil War, Robert E. Lee was approached by a student. The young man asked the general for a copy ofhis rules for the college. Lee replied, "Young gentleman, we have no printed rules. We have but one rule here, and it is that every student must be a gendeman." Lee's response is revealing for the light it sheds on his ideals ofinstitutional administration. "Make no needless rules," he told his faculty. Lee is credited with having replaced earlier narrow regulations with a lofty code of conduct emphasizing honor and self-respect of students . As scholars have noted, Lee never believed in making the military discipline of West Point, an academy he had directed, the discipline of Washington College. "He believed in self-discipline," Merrill Bishop and Joseph Roemer argue, "rather than compelling men."1 But beyond this, his answer to the student, which contains two references to the word "gentleman ," demonstrates that for him and the student body, that word alone was invested with sufficient currency to require no precise definition. Contrary to the impression given by this anecdote, Lee had once composed a sort of code expressing his conception of the gentleman. It is preserved uniquely on a hand-written "loose sheet" found in Lee's military valise after his death (die sheet also contains the famous passage beginning "My experience of men . . ."). Reverend J. William Jones discovered the two paragraphs of definition comprising just over 150 words, and he pub1 John B. Collyar, "A College Boys Observations ofGeneral Lee," in GeneralRobert E. Lee after Appomattox, ed. F. L. Riley (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 66; Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Ue: A Biography (1935; rpt. New York: Scribner's, 1962), 4:278. Cf. Ollinger Crenshaw, General Lee's College: The Rise and Growth ofWashington and Lee University (New York: Random House, 1969), 156-58; and Merrill Bishop and Joseph Roemer, The Gentleman Commander: A Character Portrayal ofRobert E. Lee (Oklahoma City: Economy Co., 1937), 199. Civil War History, Vol. XXXII, No. 2, ©1986 by The Kent State University Press 120CIVIL WAR HISTORY lished them in 1876 without commentary.2 The text, which Franklin L. Riley calls "The Test ofa True Gentleman," follows here: The forbearing use of power does not only form a touchstone; but the manner in which an individual enjoys certain advantages over others, is a test of a true gentleman. The power which the strong have over the weak, the magistrate over the citizen, the employer over the employed, the educated over the unlettered, the experienced over the confiding, even the clever over the silly: the forbearing and inoffensive use ofall this power or authority, or a total abstinence from it, when the case admits it, will show the gentleman in a plain light. The gentleman does not needlessly and unnecessarily remind an offender ofa wrong he may have committed against him. He cannot only forgive; he can forget; and he strives for that nobleness of selfand mildness ofcharacter, which imparts sufficient strength to let the past be but the past. Atrue manofhonorfeels humbledhimself, when he cannot help humblingothers.3 Lee's definition ofa gentleman has appeared regularly, often in abbreviated form, but no critical study exists on it. One difficulty is that the text has appeared in print in a corrupt version. In fact, the foremost Lee scholar, Douglas S. Freeman, gives such a version, which suggests that he did not have access to the original. Freeman, or his copyist, omits a key phrase "(The power which) the magistrate (has) over the citizen." As to origins, Freeman offers two possibilities in a footnote: first, that this and several notes of Lee were original to him; or second, that the general copied the definition from "some little-known books that he had read."4 Many common points exist between Lee's test of a true gentleman and literary sources, chiefly British. Still, the brevity of his treatment in contrast to the conventional gentleman literature, the themes that he...