by Douglas Southall Freeman
[Vols. I and II, Scribners, $7.50]
AFTER twenty years of labor on ample stores of material new and old, Mr. Freeman has produced the first two volumes of a four-volume biography, which carry Lee to his victory at Chancellorsville and the death of Jackson. In exhaustiveness of research, sanity of judgment, and clarity, vigor, and beauty of style, they bid fair to rank with the greatest of military biographies.
Manuscript collections public and private, especially those of the Bureau of Engineers and the United States Military Academy, have yielded much that is new in Lee’s career prior to 1861. There are no secrets or scandals to be exposed, not ‘the echo of a liaison, the shadow of an oath, or the stain of a single obscene suggestion.’ But the reserve which Lee showed so strongly in later life is shown to have developed with the crisis of secession and the strain of the ensuing war, rather than to have been a part of his personality from youth.
Mr. Freeman skillfully portrays Lee’s military education, indicating the lasting influence of his experience in Mexico, the incompleteness of his training, and ‘the cnlire absence of anything to forecast his great skill in troop movements.’ His survey of Lee’s correspondence and the memoirs of those who were with him in the winter of 1860-61 shows clearly that ‘before he left Texas he had decided, without any mental struggle, or thought of personal gain or loss, to stand with Virginia, though he hoped with all his heart that the Union would be preserved.’
Outstanding is Mr. Freeman’s success in preserving the ‘fog of war,’ by giving the reader no information beyond that which Lee possessed at a particular moment regarding the strength, movements, and plans of his adversary. We remain at Confederate G. H. Q. and receive the intelligence reports only as they arrive, although some explanation of Federal operations that were unknown to Lee is made in footnotes. Not merely does the biographer thus ensure a fairer appreciation of the problems confronting his hero, but he greatly heightens the suspense of his narrative, as in the masterly account of the long struggle around Sharpsburg on the bloodiest day of the war, ‘while the September sun seemed to stand still at the bidding of the Northern Joshua, [and] crisis piled on crisis.’ The reader is provided with a liberal supply of sketch maps illustrating the situation as it appeared at Confederate headquarters, with admirable descriptions of the terrain based on exhaustive study, and a wealth of personal incident drawn largely from the lesser-known memoirs of the Civil War.
This method, moreover, does not sacrifice clarity to interest. When the evidence is in, Mr. Freeman reviews it with remarkable insight, fairness, and lucidity. He does not gloss over the misadventures of the campaign in western Virginia in 1861, which brought on Lee ‘an unpopularity that might readily have ended his military career before his great opportunity came.’ Here Lee’s kindliness, consideration for others, and dislike of quarrels led him to positive weakness, ‘a weakness that was to be apparent more than once and had to be combated. deliberately or subconsciously. His personal humility and his exaggerated sense of his obligations as a man and a Christian were to make him submit to a certain measure of intellectual bullying by those of his associates who were sour and self-opinionated.’
Nor is Mr. Freeman sparing of criticism in his analysis of the Seven Days’ campaign. Lee’s first battle, fought where he had not expected to be engaged, was ‘a ghastly failure. With 56,000 men north of the Chickahominy, or crossing it, Lee had been able to get only 14,000 into action and had lost nearly 10 per cent of them.’ After his victory the next day at Gaines’s Mill, his ambitious plan for the convergence of Jackson, Huger, Longstreet, A. P. Hill, Magruder, and Holmes ‘failed tragically. . . . Many times thereafter he was to discover a weak point in his adversary’s line or a mistake in his antagonist’s plan, but never again was he to find the enemy in full retreat across his front. . . . He had only that one day for a Cannæ, and the army was not ready for it.‘
In his penetrating study of Lee’s efforts to make the Army of Northern Virginia a more perfect instrument, Mr. Freeman has thrown much new light on Lee’s capacity as a military administrator, and on the problems of transport and supply which sorely beset him. The discussion of the shortage of food and of horses in the winter of 1862-63 is one of the most significant contributionin a masterly chapter entitled ‘The First Warnings of Coming Ruin.’ The second volume closes with the great triumph at Chancellorsville, overshadowed by the death of Lee’s incomparable lieutenant.
JAMES P. BAXTER, .RD