Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History [Paperback]

Alan T. Nolan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 14, 1996

In a careful reexamination of the historical evidence, Alan Nolan explodes many longstanding myths about Robert E. Lee and the Civil War.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Lawyer and historian Nolan considers how the historical Lee differed from the legends about him.

Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Marching in the tracks of such historians as Bruce Catton, Thomas Connelly, and T. Harry Williams, Nolan tries to unhorse the mythic Lee. In pointing out the contradictions between the legend and the man, Nolan shows that Lee the slaveholder was not antislavery, that the reluctant secessionist endorsed Southern independence, that the general lost the war by his repeated offensive thrusts and provincial vision--and more. Lawyer Nolan's brief challenges all the commonplaces by insisting that we look at the record rather than the legend in viewing the man, and through him, the war itself. Nolan's debunking is less original than he claims, and his own reading of Lee is somewhat idiosyncratic. But he makes a forceful case for rethinking Lee and all the myths his memory has draped over the Lost Cause. A provocative book, highly recommended for university and major public libraries.
- Randall Miller, St. Jo seph's Univ., Philadelphia
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 243 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (August 14, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807845876
• ISBN-13: 978-0807845875
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #983,144 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #78 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( L ) > Lee, Robert E.

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Very Mixed Bag, August 13, 2004

By 

Stephen M. St Onge "Stephen M. St. Onge" (Mpls, MN USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History (Hardcover)

Alan T. Nolan claims that Robert E. Lee has never been objectively considered as a man and general.  Instead, he says Lee has become an icon, a sacred symbol of the rightness of the Secessionist cause.  There is much truth in this.

Nolan goes on to say he will attempt to examine the Lee myth and compare it with the facts.  It is here that he sometimes falls down.

In some respects, Nolan seems right on the money.  He documents that Lee's opposition to slavery was almost purely verbal -- someday, God in his wisdom would end slavery, but till then, everyone was obliged to allow it to continue unmolested.  Quite a few of Lee's fellow slave holders felt the same way.  The possibility that the Civil War Between the States was God's way of ending the Peculiar Institution never occured.

Nolan also shows that Lee had typical attitudes of a white southerner of his time towards blacks, namely, he didn't like them very much and felt that they were inferior to whites; that Lee frequently referred to the Union forces as 'the enemy;' and that Lee wasn't infallible as a general.  It's long past time such simple points were made.

But other times Nolan is quite bizarre.  Although he doesn't quite say it, he seems to feel that Lee was morally obligated to fight for the Union, because as an officer in the U.S. Army he'd taken a loyalty oath to the govt.  So what?  No one at the time expected that oath to be binding on someone who'd resigned his comission.  Nolan flatly argues that Lee should have surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant sometime after the fall of Atlanta, and certainly shortly after the re-election of Lincoln.  It doesn't seem to occur to him that he probably couldn't have done this, physically (why would his officers and men obey, when they were in touch with Richmond, where Davis was most certainly not surrendering?), and Nolan doesn't realize that this would have been a betrayal of Lee's oath to support the Constitution of the Confederate States.

And although Lee did more than anyone else North or South to heal the divisions of the War, this isn't enough for Nolan.  He thinks Lee should have made a public repudiation of the Secession.  Why he imagines Lee would think the cause he fought for was wrong and immoral he never says.  Heck, I'm a stone Union man, and I can't see how Lee would have come to that conclusion.

Still, this book is a good begining on the task of finally seeing Robert Edward Lee clearly, as a very great and good man and general, but not the Christ figure some historians have made him out to be.  Despite its flaws, its worth reading and thinking about.

39 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No facts? This book is chocked full of them..., July 1, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History (Paperback)

I found this book very interesting and in the precise tone that a serious historical review should take. Namely, present the facts and draw your conclusions from them, not anything else.

I'm amazed at the comments from other reviewers that Nolan doesn't present facts. This book is FULL of facts, many drawn directly from Lee's own writings or the writings of those who spoke or corresponded directly with him.

The picture of Lee that emerges from this book is that he was fallible...his ideas of honor and his own ego were inseparably intertwined..he was a man of his times and culture in his feelings about race...and that while a brilliant campaign general, his grasp of grand strategy was sorely lacking.

The bottomline, this book humanizes Lee, and in many ways this makes his tactical genius even more impressive...while exploding the fallacy that he was some "uber-noble" tragic hero of mythic proportions, forced to fight when he would rather not. The man was a soldier...it was what he did. And he almost destroyed the United States pursuing that profession. I for one am glad he didn't succeed.

20 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A "Prosecution" of Robert E Lee, with mixed results..., August 25, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History (Paperback)

As a Southerner whose ancestors fought for both the Confederacy AND the Union in the Civil War, I tend to disagree with both sides in the debate over "Lee Considered". I agree with those who argue that a more balanced and realistic view of Robert E Lee is long overdue, and that Nolan's book does offer some telling blows at the Lee mythology. But, I also don't believe that Nolan has made the "convincing" case against Lee that some of the posters on this board would have you to believe. Nolan, who is a lawyer and not an historian (a fact which should be borne in mind as you read this book), attempts to put the romantic, mythological Lee "on trial" and expose him for the flawed and decidedly unheroic person that Nolan believes him to be. Like a good lawyer, Nolan denies trying to "convict" Lee in the beginning of the book, and even states that he admires him in some ways, but the rest of the book reveals Nolan to be committed to "convicting" his target of several specific charges. Namely: 1)That Lee was privately far more supportive of slavery than the Lee myth would have it; 2)That Lee was far more supportive of secession and "breaking up the Union" than his myth reveals; 3)That Lee made numerous mistakes as a General that helped cause the South's defeat - mistakes such as pursuing an aggressive, "go get'em" strategy that led to the highest casualty rates of any Civil War General and bled his smaller army dry; and 4)That Lee prolonged the Civil War longer than was necessary by continuing to fight after Gettysburg, which Nolan argues "convinced" Lee that the South was doomed to defeat, and therefore he should have urged the Confederacy to surrender, or at least refused to fight or encourage his men to make useless sacrifices for a cause he privately knew was doomed. Nolan presents a good deal of "evidence" (much of it in Lee's own words), but like a good prosecutor he leaves out "evidence" which contradicts his theories, and he completely ignores the fact that Lee was a nineteenth-century man, not a late twentieth-century one. An historian would have put many of Lee's views into further context (without necessarily excusing them). Dr. James McPherson, the famed Civil War historian and author of "Battle Cry of Freedom", can hardly be called a "neo-Confederate" historian (if anything he's pro-Union), but even he has some problems with Nolan's book. A few years ago he wrote a criticism of "Lee Considered" in which he "judged" Nolan's "trial" of Lee, and while he found Lee to be "guilty" of being more pro-slavery than the Lee myth allows, he also found Lee to be "innocent" of prolonging the War (McPherson points out that the South still had a good chance of winning the war right up to Lincoln's reelection in November 1864), and that Nolan failed to "prove" many of his other charges, although McPherson argues that Nolan does raise some worthwhile questions about the accuracy of the traditional Lee myth. I fully agree with McPherson's views - this book is worth reading because it does offer a view of Lee that is in some ways more "realistic" than the Lee myth. However, Nolan fails to destroy Lee's reputation as a great general and one of the true "legends" of American military history. Overall, this book is quite a mixed bag, but it's still a thought-provoking, intellectually stimulating piece of work, even if Nolan is sometimes off-target.