Robert E. Lee

Richard B. Harwell, guest editor of this issue of Civil War History, is the compiler of The Confederate Reader and the author or editor of more than a dozen other Civil War titles. He is presently preparing a new edition of Fitzgerald Ross's A Visit to the Cities and Camps of the Confederate States. Robert E. Lee RICHARD B. HARWELL is this what general lee wanted? Is this fame which rides secure through time, marking him as the epitome, the finest flowering, of Southern manhood, what Robert E. Lee meant in saying, "I am always wanting something"? Did the nobility of the son's character erase the cloud which had marred the reputation of his patriot father in the early years of the Republic? Surely the overreaching ambition that had brought opprobrium on the head of General Henry Lee was a strong factor in motivating Robert Lee to a life almost incredibly blameless. Did the near perfect accomplishments of his lifetime regain for the Lees of Virginia the status that their combination of the family blood of Virginia 's finest Colonial stock merited? "It was not Cod or love or mortal fame," wrote Stephen Vincent Benêt, that Lee wanted. "It was nothing he left undone." Perhaps this kind of quiet fame is what it was. Perhaps what General Lee did want is most truly expressed in the deeply sincere homage that has been paid him throughout the sesquicentennial of his birth, homage that has been paid him as the supreme hero of his state and his section, paid him as the personification of the steadfastness, courage, and heroism of the indomitable band of soldiers he led as the Army of Northern Virginia. Benêt wrote of Lee as one who Listened and talked with every sort of man, And kept his heart a secret to the end From all the picklocks of biographers. 363 364richard ß. Harwell The problem, the poet suggested, is How to humanize That solitary gentleness and strength Hidden behind the deadly oratory Of twenty thousand Lee Memorial days, How show, in spite of all the rhetoric, All the sick honey of the speechifiers, Proportion, not as something calm congealed From lack of fire, but ruling such a fire As only such proportion could contain? But must we humanize; must we try to explain away the greatness of Lee? No. No hero has been more exhaustively studied than was Lee in the incomparable biography by Douglas Southall Freeman. Dr. Freeman gave Lee reality, but he did not, and would not, "humanize" him by trying to make him less than he was. Dr. Freeman's careful research made Lee more the hero than ever before. So be it. Let the South, let America, enjoy the honor bequeathed all Southerners, all Americans, in Lee's character. In every civilization, even one with a long heritage of monotheism, people need inspiration from sources close to their own experience, a fact which is all the more true when that civilization is at war. Such is the necessity for heroes. Lucky is the society which has such a hero as Robert E. Lee. Lee was the consummate Virginian, the archetype of a tradition which began with the Colony's first efforts toward political independence and which reached its peak in the short season of the state as one of the Confederate States. Patrick Henry, George Washington, John Marshall, Thomas Jefferson were great Virginians, but first they were great Americans . Lee was an American because he was first a Virginian—and a Confederate because he was first a Virginian. The Lee tradition began even before Lee himself loomed large on the Virginian scene. In a remarkably prophetic speech in Nashville in 1850 Virginia's noted Judge Beverley Tucker, one of the early ardent advocates of Southern independence, declared: "Do you want leaders? Seek for them in the true spirit, and you will find them. Seek for men distinguished by virtue as well as talent—men worthy to minister between God and you, in the great concerns of duty as well as right. . . . Let your actions show you worthy of such a leader—let your determined resistance to wrong, and devotion to right...