"Brave though the Soldier, Grave his Plea" Melville and Robert E. Lee

One of the most ambitious and successful poems in Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) is "Lee in the Capitol (April 1866)." Partly narrative and partly interior and dramatic monologue, it consists of 212 iambic lines that vary in length from trimeter to hexameter. The rhymes, too, vary in their placement throughout. Melville's subject, taken immediately from contemporary history, is an account of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee's appearance for questioning in the U.S. Congress before the Joint Sub-Committee on Reconstruction, February 17, 1866. The committee's inquiry arose out of the ongoing bitter conflict between Radical Republicans in Congress and President Andrew Johnson over how to implement reconstruction. Why did a northern writer compose such an extraordinary poem about the South's still living and greatest military hero? And why did he insert into the narrative a purely fictional speech for Lee to present to Congress?

Although he is concerned throughout the "battle-pieces" to honor the "great captains" of the Union cause, Melville did not write any poem as impressive as "Lee in the Capitol" on Grant or Sherman or Sheridan, nor on any naval hero. Throughout Battle-Pieces there are allusions to Union military leaders, especially to Grant, as well as short poems of varying quality on Sherman's and Sheridan's men, and on heroes such as Nathaniel Lyon, George McClellan, Winfield Scott Hancock, David Farragut, James B. McPherson, William B. Cushing, and on his Pittsfield neighbor, William Francis Bartlett, subject of "The College Colonel." For Lee, however, he develops a well-rounded character sketch, a detailed account of his journey to the Capitol and of his testimony there.

The first half of the poem, except for a brief interior monologue as Lee rides past Arlington, is directly based on biographical information available to Melville in articles in Harper's Weekly during and after the war, in official reports of Lee's testimony in the Congressional Globe, in articles in the New York World, Times, and Tribune, and, especially, in Thomas W. Cook's detailed interview with Lee in Richmond, published in the New York Herald (April 1865). These sources cannot be cited in detail here, but they gave the poet considerable food for meditation about Lee's character and his motives—often from a negative point of view in Harper's, the Times, and the Tribune, but from a sympathetic view in the World and in the Herald interview. In the second part of the poem, Melville introduces a fictional speech—a rhetorical apologia—by Lee for his and his fellow Southerners' actions in taking up arms in 1861. Lee describes their moral dilemma in terms of a choice between two kinds of obligation—two conflicting duties—when the war came, and goes on to make a passionate and well-reasoned argument for magnanimity on the part of the North in reestablishing the Union. In a note Melville defends this imaginative excursion as "a poetical liberty," citing "the speeches in ancient histories" and "those in Shakespeare's historic plays." Stanton Garner, in The Civil War World of Herman Melville (1993), his definitive commentary on Battle-Pieces, acutely terms the speech an "audacious recreation of Lee as a Melville character—while the real person was still alive and able to respond and remonstrate." He suggests that Melville probably was confident that the admiration "implicit in his portrait and the justice of the words" that he gives Lee, "if noted by the defeated leader, would not be objectionable." Whether Lee ever had the poem drawn to his notice is uncertain.

The poem begins with a poignant sketch of Lee nearly a year after the war, contrasting his former heroic role as commanding general of the Armies of the Confederacy with his new one as president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia:

Rebellion's soldier-chief no more contends—Feels that the hour is come of Fate,Lays down one sword, and widened warfare ends.The captain who fierce armies ledBecomes a quiet seminary's head—Poor as...