Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee through His Private Letters (review)

First, disclosure: as the author of a recent biographical study of Robert E. Lee, I have decided opinions about the subject of this book. In fact, I am usually so chary of intruding my views onto other later biographers of Lee (and William T. Sherman), that I turn down requests to review my “competitors.” Another part of me, however, sees such authors as fellow toilers in the vineyard, and, given my own limitations as a historian, looks to learning new things about a subject I have considered. No one, of course, has the last word on any historical subject, and every angle of vision, well, almost any, presents possibilities for discovery.

Elizabeth Brown Pryor is an enormously assiduous collector of information—she claims to have read ten thousand manuscript documents while working on this book. And she is a patient reader of all this information, teasing out subtle insights, many of which had not occurred to earlier biographers.

At her best, Pryor is a tough-minded and realistic critic of her subject. Especially impressive and original is her thorough analysis of Lee as a slave manager, particularly in the late 1850s, when his wife inherited Arlington and her father’s slaves. Discounting Lee’s rather abstract regret that slavery existed, Pryor demonstrates more fully than has anyone else that he broke up every slave family on the plantation and that he had slave protesters severely whipped. She also discovered letters from several former slaves under Lee’s control who considered him a terrible man.

Another considerably original chapter concerns Lee’s tenure as superintendent of West Point in the mid-1850s. Here Pryor demonstrates how much Lee wanted to avoid the appointment and how quickly he fled it when he had the chance. She also shows him as a rigid and distant authoritarian, far more resented than loved by the cadets. Much the same would apply to Lee’s last job, as a college president after the war, a subject about which Pryor is similarly revealing and persuasive.

In addition to other glancing readings of Lee, many of which strike sparks, Pryor has read deeply into the letters of Mary Custis Lee and the Lee daughters (though not the sons to nearly the same degree). This becomes particularly revealing when Pryor thoroughly discusses the personal, familial, and material losses suffered by the extended Lee clan during the Civil War.

If Pryor makes many fine readings of several episodes in Lee’s life, the biography lacks an overall argument or sustained analysis of central elements of Lee’s personality and political sensibility. This lack of acuity appears even in the title of the book: reading the man through his private letters is an antiquarian rather than an historical formula. All the major biographies of Lee, not in the least Douglas S. Freeman’s cloying three volumes, are based on considerable reading in Lee’s correspondence. In an interview distributed by her publisher, Pryor claims to have read a “huge number of newly discovered papers,” although she does not specify in the text or notes just which material is new. Nothing I noticed was all that earth-shatteringly different, and it is a pity the author failed to be specific about her documentary discoveries.

The antiquarian sensibility also leads Pryor to open each chapter with several letters written by Lee or his extended family. As she rarely deconstructs those texts very fully, her choices often seem scattered, and they break up her narrative flow. Despite Pryor’s enthusing, Lee’s prose style is, on the whole, rather formulaic and conventional stuff, particularly as Lee grew older and more distant from human contact.

I would add that I think it would prove a splendid addition to our understanding of Lee if Pryor were to be commissioned to edit his collected letters. Clearly, she has done more up-to-date spadework than anyone prior to...