R. E. Lee, Vols. Iii and Iv

THE MAN of the MONTH

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APPLY whatever test you will, this book will stand among the great biographies. Tireless and resourceful in his quest of materials, shrewd and scholarly in sifting and analyzing them, skillful in narration and portrayal of character, Dr. Freeman has completed in these two volumes one of the salient works of our time. As we follow Lee from Chancellorsville to Gettysburg, on through the long twilight of the Confederacy and the agony of defeat and surrender, the portrait of the man, never lost in a mass of detail, dominates the narrative. The story of his last five years, spent as president of a small and impoverished college, comes as no anticlimax, since Lee the man was even greater than Lee the strategist and tactician. A generation which has suffered so much for want of character, simplicity, humility, and self-denial might find inspiration in Lee’s self-mastery in defeat, his quiet leadership in reconstruction.

As in his two earlier volumes, Dr. Freeman’s account of military operations gains much from his careful study of topography, of the difficulties of subsistence and transport, and of the problems of army organization. To him the reorganization of the Confederate army alter Chancellorsville largely explains Gettysburg. With ‘two untried corps commanders, three of the nine divisions under new leaders, seven freshly promoted brigadier generals of infantry, six infantry brigades under their senior colonels, a third of the cavalry directed by officers who had not previously served with the Army of Northern Virginia, the artillery redistributed, the most experienced of the corps commanders inflated with self-importance, above all, Jackson’s discipline, daring, and speed lost forever to the army . . . the option of delay for the training of his new subordinates was denied him.’ To this was due the ‘most fundamental among the reasons for Lee’s failure at Gettysburg . . . the general lack by the reorganized army of coördination in attack.’

At Gettysburg, moreover, Lee’s ’greatest weakness as a soldier was displayed along with Longstreet’s, for when Longstreet sulked, Lee’s temperament was such that he could not bring himself either to shake Longstreet out of his bad humor by a sharp order, or to take direction of the field when Longstreet delayed. . . . It is scarcely too much to say that on July 2 the Army of Northern Virginia was without a commander.’

Indeed, in his masterly chapter, ‘The Sword of Robert E. Lee,’ Dr. Freeman questions Lee’s theory of the function of the high command: ‘that the generalin-chief should strive to bring his troops together at the right time and place and that he should leave combat to the generals of brigade and division. . . . If this policy failed with Longstreet, it was gloriously successful with Jackson. . . . Not properly applicable to a small army or in an open country, this theory of command may have justified itself when Lee’s troops were too numerous to be directed by one man in the tangled terrain where Lee usually fought. Once adopted where woods obscured operations, Lee’s method could not easily be recast for employment in the fields of Pennsylvania.‘

Preservation of the ‘fog of war’ by telling the reader no more than Lee knew at the moment brings into sharp relief the problems Lee deemed he was confronting. When the initiative passed to the Federals, however, this method leads to some lessening of clarity, as, for instance, in the account of the operations in May 1864.

It is no small triumph of the biographer’s art to maintain the interest of the reader in even the small details of Lee’s life after the collapse of the Confederacy. Impressive as had been his power of creating morale in the Army of Northern Virginia, the influence of his example on the South in the bitter days of Reconstruction is perhaps a still more striking illustration of leadership through character. He was so intent on obliterating the marks of civil strife that he never read a book on the war, or visited its battlefields, or attended a single assembly of any sort related in any way to the struggle between the States. Convinced that the South could expect no part in the administration of national affairs for many years, he felt that she should concentrate her energies on the development of her industries, building on the firm basis of improved education. Alike as general and as college president he practised daily his maxim that ‘the forbearing use of power does not only form a touchstone, but the manner in which an individual enjoys certain advantages over others is the true test of a gentleman.’

‘The clear light of conscience and of social obligation left no zone of gray in his heart: everything was black or white. . . . There is no mystery in the coffin there in front of the windows that look to the sunrise.‘

JAMES P. BAXTER, 3RD