Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee through His Private Letters Book

Elizabeth Brown Pryor's Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters offers an insightful reassessment of the Confederacy's most famous general. As the title suggests, this isn't a straightforward biography; like Joseph Ellis's books on the Founding Fathers, it uses Lee's correspondence and key incidents to illuminate his personality and beliefs, and how he acted on them. If nothing else, it's extremely useful for dynamiting the Marble Man myth from every conceivable angle. We see Lee's acts of rectitude were largely a reaction to his footloose father, whose poor investments bankrupted the family and who abandoned them while Lee was a young boy. We also see Lee the Faithful Husband who was also a shameless flirt, sometimes with in-laws and distant family members (he was more admirable as a father who doted on his children); Lee, whose visions of being A Father to His Men led his subordinates to see him as aloof, cold and often condescending; Lee the Patriot, who claimed to favor country over section until put to the test; and Lee the General, a skilled tactician but often a poor commander with little sense of strategy and difficulty in handling subordinates (not a fatal problem with Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson, more so at Gettysburg and later). Pryor also explodes the defense of Lee as "anti-slavery," showing at great length how he owned slaves, fought to keep slaves, may even have personally abused his slaves, and that his "moral qualms" about slavery were heavily qualified by beliefs that a) it was a greater burden on whites than blacks, b) it was God's will and there was no purpose opposing it. Pryor's book isn't completely negative; this Lee does seem more approachable and occasionally sympathetic, if not necessarily likable, than he did before. Even so, it's impossible to come away from this remarkable book thinking that Lee was anything like the Marble Man of Military Myth; instead he was a deeply flawed man who, faced with the 19th Century's great moral choice, chose poorly.