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Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History

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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.

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.

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.

It is so good to see someone stand up to this false idol of the neo-confederates. It's high time someone took him down and analyzed him as the very fallable human being he was and the repulsive cause he and his armies fought for. Don't listen to these neo-confederates reviews, his book is stacked with evidence, mostly stuff from LEE'S OWN MOUTH.

I'd encourage anyone to get this book. It's far more enlightening than anything you'll read that comes from the rationalizations of Southern revisionists.

Up until now, Robert E. Lee has been treated as a Southern savior, without blame for any of the failures of the Civil War. In fact, in order to maintain the Lee legend, blame has been heaped upon others in order to save the myth (James Longstreet comes to mind). Nolan's book is a point by point rebuttal of many of the trappings of Lee's story and backs it with documentary proof. At long last, some balance is added to the mix. I also recommend Freeman's 4 volume biography, but one should read Nolan's book also to temper the hero worship found in Freeman's monumental work.

Nolan analyzes the difference between Robert E. Lee as a historical person and as a semi-mythical icon.

I found the scholarship here pleasantly rational, and I particularly liked Nolan's portrayal of Lee as a product of his time. His purpose is not to "deconstruct" Lee or offer a "revisionist" history, but to correct long-accepted material that makes claims that contradict the evidence of primary sources such as Lee's own letters. Nolan consistently uses primary sources and considers nineteenth-century mentalities in making his arguments.

At times his analysis is brief, and in particular the chapter on grand strategy could have been longer and more detailed and taken into consideration more of the factors affecting Lee's actions, such as the proximity to the border of places like Richmond and the Shenandoah Valley that had to be defended. At times, he seems to ascribe Lee an overexaggerated amount of power over the hearts, minds and actions of the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia. It does not seem reasonable to suggest that Lee should have sought a surrender after Gettysburg (which most scholars now agree was not seen at the time as a 'turning point', and perhaps should not be seen that way today either) and it seems unlikely to me that anyone would have gone along with him if he had.

Nolan states his intention not to analyze or criticize Lee's smaller-scale decisions, so I can't knock him for keeping his word, but some analysis of Lee's relations with his subordinates might have been useful here. In particular, it would have been interesting to know to what extent Lee participated, post-war, in the making of his own myth.

Nolan's analyses of the Confederacy as a whole sometimes seem a bit broad and sweeping. I don't think that he's on particularly firm ground with his implicit claim that Confederate depredations in the North were somehow equivalent to Federal actions against civilian property in the South, and his insistence on the centrality of slavery to the Confederate cause, while probably not incorrect per se, leaves aside contemporary evidence on what actuated soldiers in the field to fight (such as the letters and diaries studied by James McPherson). It also ignores the vast regional and cultural variation across the Confederacy; slavery was not of enormous importance in some regions which nevertheless were strongly secessionist in their sympathies.

On the other hand, his discussion of postwar North-South confabulation and the North's limited commitment to the welfare of African Americans is well taken.

Overall, though, I felt this was a strong analysis containing intelligent scholarship. It remains difficult to offer any criticism of Robert E. Lee, even if the criticism amounts only to saying that he was a fallible human being and a product of his time, without experiencing violent opposition. I think that Nolan's work is a worthwhile addition to Civil War scholarship.

Reading some of the other reviews of this book is proof enough that the Lost Cause orthodoxy is alive and well. It would be simple enough to ascribe this book to vile Yankee enmity for daring to challenge accepted assumptions about RE Lee.

That having been said, I am not totally satisfied with Nolan's approach. He rightfully criticizes various historians for drawing conclusions about Lee based on single statements or letters written by Lee (often after the fact). However, Nolan is often guilty of the same misdeed. While I suspect that the documentary record would tend support Nolan's thesis than undermine it, nonetheless the documentation Nolan provides is quite limited. Carefully selecting the evidence that supports your argument might work in a court of law, but not in a work of history.

I also think that Nolan at times indulges in unnecessary hair-splitting, such as in the 5-page Chapter 5, where he discusses Lee's feelings towards his adversaries. The chapter seemed to me to be totally superfluous and contributed nothing to the book overall.

Nolan, in an effort to discredit the dogma of the Lost Cause, at times goes overboard in his assumptions. When criticizing Lee for undermining the Confederacy's war effort by going too much on the offensive, Nolan states that the South actually had a realistic chance of winning the war. His argument is that if Lee had preserved his manpower more prudently, the South could have withstood the North's attempts at conquest. This is a valid argument, because it is obvious that Lee did a good job of wrecking his army from 1861-1863.

However, Nolan's larger argument rests on the supposition that the South was effectively managing its war effort elsewhere. Ironically, like many of the devotees of the Lost Cause, Nolan ignores the impact of the war in the Western Theatre while focusing on the Eastern Theatre. The reality was that in the Western Theatre, especially in the first two years of the war when North & South were more or less equally matched in the field, the South was steadily losing ground virtually from the beginning. This is due as much to the incompetent generalship of the Confederacy as anything else. Even if Lee had carefully husbanded his manpower, he could not have undone the damage caused by generals such as Polk & Bragg in the Western Theatre.

The best part of Nolan's book is the final chapter, where he discusses the overall effort by the South (with very willing collusion from the North) to turn the Civil War & the Antebellum period into some sort of idyllic fairy tale, due to the racist attitudes that both regions shared. He gives a convincing argument about century-long effort to change the very nature of the war, of which the Lee mythology is only one element.

While at times this book veers dangerously close to being a commonplace chop-job, overall it makes a decent contribution to the literature. If Nolan had provided more comprehensive documentation, its impact would be all the better. As it is, one cannot consider it the last word, but it has ushered in an honest debate on the subject.

No-one fought harder to destroy the Union than Robert E. Lee, so it's about time someone took him down a few pegs. Nolan puts Lee's reputation under a microscope and, point by point, convincingly refutes the myth created by Freeman and others. As Nolan shows, Lee's strategic blunders seriously weakened the Army of Virginia even as his tactical pyrotechnics dazzled such lightweight opponents as McClellan and Burnside. One wonders whether he would have been so successful against Grant (oh, that's right-he wasn't). This book, along with J.W. Cash's "The Mind of the South", is a welcome balance to the usual romantic folderol about Southern honor.

Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History by Alan T. Nolan is a book that brings us the human man and not he icon of the Civil War.

Lee is a paradox of sorts, while owning slaves he was opposed to the institution of slavery. Lee left the United States Army so as not to take his sword and use it against his native Virginia. A most revered but misunderstood man, Lee was a brilliant military leader who was tactically effective in bringing the exploits of the Confederacy to those of Northern aggression.

This book brings out a more human man, complete with all of the frailties and fallacies. A man or moral character, but a man whos job is that of a soldier. This book gives us a more honest view of Lee... a Lee not on his terms, but a Lee in the eye of history. No assumptions, just a rigorous reexamination through correspondence and historical sources.

Everyone knows the larger than life Lee, but knowing Lee is to know that he is a man... a man who happens to be the Commanding General of the Confederate Forces, a native Virginian, and a Southern aristocrat who opposed slavery.

Great book. Great read. You don't even have to be open minded to read this book. The author verifies what Lee really said about slaves and "those people up north." Book tells it like it is for once. Lee was the best the CSA had, with the exception of maybe Jackson. However, he was a racist (however less than a lot from the south and north, but he really didn't care about the blacks - He sold them, and had his work hands whip them, and hunt them down). Most of all, he was a traitor. Yes! I said that right. Many Generals from Virginia stayed with the Union. The most famous General at the start of the Civil War - Winfield Scott. Scott a Virginian stayed with the fight for the union. Lee said he had to go with Virginia (hogwash). He was a great general, but remember Grant kicked his behind.