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

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I have been a park ranger at Arlington House, The Robert E. Memorial for 17 years now and I can honestly say that I have read at least five biographies, assessments, evaluations or interpretations of Robert E. Lee for each of those years. I am certain that when all the books and articles are added together they number close to a hundred. It's important that I do that. It's my job and my responsibility to have as comprehensive an understanding of Robert E. Lee's life as is possible so that I can honestly and accurately convey it to the people who visit and the students who partake in our education programs. But with all of these books and articles there is a certain consistency, not with interpretation but with information. It is safe to say that since Douglas Southall Freeman wrote his landmark, Pulitzer Prize winning four volume biography in the 1930's the assumption has been that there is nothing new that can be found out about Lee. Freeman's work was so exhaustive, seemingly leaving no stone or document unturned, that, it seems, every biographer of Lee since then has taken the approach that no new research was needed or possible. Instead, it became the fashion for biographers and other historians to simply take what Freeman researched and interpret it in whatever way they wanted. Thomas Connelly chose to psychoanalyze Lee in a groundbreaking and exceptionally flawed work, The Marble Man while Alan Nolan chose a lawyerly approach, constructing the case against Robert E. Lee in his book, Lee Considered, as if Lee had never been considered before. And there have been others, many quite reverential but the problem with all of them is that they've all used the same information. Writing about Lee ceased being about scholarship and instead became bickering op ed pieces. And the greatest crime of it has been that it has made Robert E. Lee uninteresting. How many times can you read the same things, no matter what way they've been spun, and still remain excited? I stopped being interested in reading things about Lee over five years ago. I have forced myself to keep reading but there has been no joy in it.

Until now. Elizabeth Brown Pryor and her extraordinary new book, Reading The Man, has single-handedly revived what was hitherto unrevivable. She has made Robert E. Lee come to life in a way that no other writer has ever been able to do and she has done it in a way that should make every other biographer of Lee blush: she has let the man speak for himself and she has done it through new research. Yes, new research. Certainly much of the new material she has uncovered has been locked away in trunks for almost a century so other researchers including Freeman had no access to it. But some of what she's used has been available to researchers for decades they just chose not to look. Intellectual laziness? Or have researchers just been content with what they've had? Fortunately, Elizabeth Pryor was neither lazy nor content and what she has constructed is a masterpiece of biographical examination. The Lee that springs from her pages is dynamic and emotional, conflicted and complex, playful and loving and nothing like he has ever been portrayed before. But the magic of this work, what truly elevates it beyond mere interpretation into what can only be described as revolutionary, is how Ms. Pryor manages to be both critical and sympathetic with her subject. With Lee it has always been you either revere or revile him. There has been no middle ground. Those that simplified him to the point of mere symbolism insured that. He was either the Christ like martyr of the Lost Cause or the white supremacist Benedict Arnold of the Civil War. But Elizabeth Pryor has shown us, has proven beyond reproach, that you can be critical of someone and still like him. You can point out his flaws but empathize with his humanity. You can be honest without defilement. What Ms. Pryor has done for all of us interested in history, the Civil War and Robert E. Lee is incalculable. She has, quite literally, shown us a new way to examine our common history and truly learn from it. We would be fools not to follow her.

Having read a couple of reviews in the "main stream" print media that appeared to celebrate this book's exposure of Robert E. Lee's true sentiments about slavery (e.g., the Philadelphia Inquirer's review focused ad nauseum on the most negative report of Lee's ordered whipping of a captured runaway slave), I relunctantly bought this book (from Amazon, of course), fearful that this would prove to be yet another exercise in political correction by a less-than-objective historian.

Reading it, however, revealed something altogether different -- Lee was a man of his times (high society in the antbellum south, 19th Century) and also a real and very moral man, who focused more on the practical than the theoretical.

That is not to say that the author, Elizabeth Pryor Brown, sought to try prove that Robert E. Lee wasn't the icon that he is held to be, even to this day, in many parts and in many hearts of the South. She dramatized the presence of a whipping post for errant slaves, with little proof that it was ever used. But as is often the case with historians who delve deeply into their subjects, her heart was touched the humanity, grace and character of Lee, through a thorough and scintillating read of private letters that had been locked away in a bank vault for more than a century.

Things I learned in the book: He was a mega-flirt, but never unfaithful to or threatened by his strong-willed, secure and relatively independent wife. He loved the company of others, particularly his fellow soldiers and officers. None of three daughters ever married. He was confident yet humble,loved his family, and had a tireless devotion to duty, both an an engineer and a soldier.

He, not unlike almost anyone who has ever served in the military, expressed his share of frustrations with the military life, and even showed a little jealousy when peers were promoted ahead of him (but also showing that he was not particularly adept at, or fond of, politics). Except, possibly, for his flirtations, apparently done with the full knowledge of Mary Lee, none of this would be a surprise to any devotee or student of the General.

This book is very well written; it is fair and balanced, and gives more time and attention to Lee, the man, than Lee the general or even the soldier. The book was a joy to read and very hard to put down, even for a historical tome, with difficult to understand reprints of entire letters by Lee and members of his family and a bit too much ink on Harry "Light Horse" Lee, Robert's heroic but badly flawed and largely absent father. Her final chapter, and its final words, are wonderfully insightful at answering an important question -- why, after all these years, are we stil fascinated by this lengdary man? This book is a wonderful achievement and a worthy read.

No minds will likely be changed about Lee, whether you're a son of the South or South-hating liberal yankee who will be disappointed that Lee isn't thorough demystified. The careful and thoughtful reader will come away with greater appreciation and respect for the man.

For those who wish to have a good look at the life of Robert E. Lee in one volume, this is the book to use as a basic biography and guide. Author Elizabeth Brown Pryor has taken letters written by Lee as the springboard for each of the chapters of the book, corresponding with the chapters in his life. This gives the reader a chance to read and sense the tone of the celebrated General, in his own words. Surely, this was not an easy task since there are about 10,000 known letters of Robert E. Lee scattered hither and yon. To find, read and cull the best of these must have been both Herculean and painstaking. One suspects it has also been a labor of love.

Those with the sketchiest knowledge of Lee will remember that his father was a Revolutionary War era hero, that he had an almost unparalleled record as a West Point cadet, that he married into the Custis and therefore Washington family, making him not only one of the First Families of Virginia but also of the First Family of America. Of course best known is Lee's choice to side with state and kindred during the Civil War and the resultant verve and disappointment on the field of battle.

In this 200th birthday anniversary year, Pryor fleshes out these facts with a nuanced portrait of a complex man whose personal and professional life are not as easily summarized as one might suppose. Dealing with those who came before her who served as Lee's uncritical biographers, Pryor demythologizes Lee in a respectful way, allowing him to be not only three dimensional but also multifaceted. She also gives an outstanding précis of aspects of the Lee hagiography and misconceptions that have persisted through repetition. It would be correct to call Pryor's approach even-handed. She clearly appreciates that Lee was a towering figure in his time; she also allows the reader to see his eccentricities.

The book is excellent on some challenging subjects such as Lee's attitude toward slavery and how it compares to the attitudes of his contemporaries. Pryor also gives us an account of Lee's unabashed affection for women. The chapter on Lee's tenure as head of West Point speaks volumes about how Lee was perceived by those who observed him as a professional soldier preparing others to be professional soldiers.

The author's description of what went right and what went wrong at some of the key battles of the war, notably Gettysburg, are well done, and will provide both the general reader and the Civil War expert good starting points for conversation. Even so, I must confess that the second part of the book was for me slower-going than the first half. Whether that is due to Lee, Pryor or me, I am not sure. Nor am I sure what to conclude about Robert E. Lee--a man of honor (rightly placed or mis-placed), of brilliance (and obstinacy) in peace and in war, and a man who took a road less traveled by which made all the difference.

The book has many fine illustrations scattered throughout the text, including many portraits and photographs of Lee from youth to old age.

Elizabeth Brown Pryor has previously given us a similar life of Clara Barton. Pryor is both an award-winning historian and senior diplomat in the American Foreign Service, having served as a senior adviser to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe of the U.S. Congress.

Is their person more of an icon than Robert E. Lee? Toward the end of the war, he was the living symbol of the Confederacy's hope. After his death, he became the Christ-like central figure in Myth the Lost Cause, the "marble man" of history. The Politically Correct Myth of the Civil War insistently attacks him as a traitor and slave owner while trying to show his feet of clay. Biographies tend to be sugarcoated stories of his life, denouncements or pseudo-psychological studies of his "mental problems".

This book contains none of the above and allows the Lees among others to speak for themselves. The format of each chapter is a letter or excerpts from letters that introduce the subject followed by an intelligent and balanced discussion. Those looking to worship "General Lee" or those looking to damn him, will not be happy. However, if you wish to gain an understanding of the man, this is an excellent book. The author is neither judgmental nor loving. She presents Lee within the confines of his class, training and the times. This helps the reader understand the decisions made and his actions. What emerges is an intelligent, ambitious family man doing what he feels is best.

On of the nicest items in the book is the author's recognition of the pseudo-psychological studies and why they fail to explain the man. While this in not a major item in the book, it shows a sense of fairness lacking in some books. It is hard not to admire Robert E. Lee and the author clearly admires him. However, I never felt that this admiration interferes with her honest evaluation of him. After reading the book, I agreed with the observation "Cousin Robert is only human" and had all the contradictions of the species.

As of the writing of this review (5/13/07) I am only 50 some pages into this book and I am already finding it the best book written for any one with a desire to place RE Lee the man into the framework of family, society, and the unique culture of his time.

I will add to this review as I move through the book.

(5/31/07) I am now more than 260 pages into the book and it is still capturing my attention and drawing me into a deeper discovery of REL.

This is NOT revisionist history. If you are looking for something to help get you past the "Lost Cause Mythos" of the Civil War and crack the surface of Lee as the so-called "Marble Man" then this is the book for you.

If there is one thing I wish the author had done differently it would have been helpful to have a time line of Lee's life pointing out major events, as well as a family tree of the families that are central to the history.

I was given a chapter of this book as part of a workshop on Southern History and was completely engaged by it. I saw the book at a Civil War museum later that week and picked it up. Though not a military biography of Lee's tactics and battles, which is what I normally read, this very unique book is a biography of Lee based on many primary sources. I can not properly say or convey just how readable and engaging this book is on Robert E. Lee. I can think of few 700 page biographies that I actually read on a plane, like I did with this one. Perhaps my only critique of this book, which may be actually why the book is good, so its a bit unclear if it helped or hurt is that the author does not seem to be an expert or someone who is really interested in the Civil War or the Army of Northern VA. Perhaps the opposite of a Southhall Freeman who seemed to worship Lee. I really learned a lot from this book and it is very well written and researched. Highly recommended.

I have not yet finished the book, but I can say without reservation that thus far this has been the most revealing book on Robert E. Lee I have read. Even the huge four volume biography that Douglas S. Freeman wrote on Lee (that won a Pulitzer Prize) doesn't compare. One reason is that the author had access to previously unreleased letters by and to Lee, along with other family members and close associates. Given that letters were the main form of communication in an era before the telephone, faxes and email, much is revealed about Lee and his life. Of course, Pryor's research, organization and writing style is helpful, explaining the letters in the context of the times and also placing them in chronological/themeatic chapters.
I do have to agree with one of the reviewers- a family tree, showing the relationships between REL and his huge extended family would have been extremely helpful. Pryor points out that like many upper class Southern families of the time, the Lees tended to intermarry with a few select other families, making it very difficult to figure out who was who.
I have always felt it was tragic that RE Lee died before he could write his own story. Since then, others have written his story for him, often with axes to grind both positive and negative. This has been a disservice to Lee and his place in history. I think finally that READING THE MAN comes closest to revealing Lee as he was.

Matthew Penrod's review of Elizabeth Brown Pryor's "Reading the Man" is spot-on, and hardly needs amendment-- but I want to add my five stars to bump up the overall rating and perhaps help more readers find their way to this volume.

This is the most in-depth, insightful and fair-handed review of Lee I've come across. I'm not nearly as widely read on Lee as is Mr. Penrod, who is a National Park Service guide at Arlington House (the Custis/Lee Mansion outside of Wash. DC), but I've read a good bit on him, and I believe Ms. Pryor's biography is the best place to start (and finish, at least until more biographies of such quality come along) as we seek to understand Lee as a man of his time, as a father and husband, as a general, and as a leading veteran (and reluctant spokesman) after the war.

What comes through most clearly and invaluably in this book is Lee's humanity-- both his loving side (toward his family and close friends), his irascibility and occasional anger (toward his lieutenants and slaves), his military successes, and his fallibilities and failures. These latter are rarely seen in Lee biographies, the bulk of which are more hagiographies.

Like all of the Founding Fathers and other key notables in American history I'm familiar with, Lee was a careful, even wily packager of his own public reputation, a skill Ms. Pryor explores masterfully. Like those men of his and his preceding times, Lee believed African Americans were racially inferior to whites, and even if freed would still be non-integrable within white America (Lincoln felt much the same).

Yet Lee also knew (as did Lincoln) that slavery corrupted both the slave and master-- but, like Jefferson, Washington and other slaveowners, Lee left it to 'Providence' to eradicate that scourge at some indistinct future date. Pryor explores Lee's discomfort as a slaveowner and his sense of slavery as evil-- though not evil enough to free Arlington's slaves before the five-year deadline established by his wife's father in his will, and not evil enough to forgive without lashings those few who ran away from Arlington-- the William Norris episode and testimony is fully explored here (and beware of biographies that ignore it completely or brush it off).

Lee also had occasions of failure as well as smashing success as a military commander. Readers in search of a more in-depth, nuanced view of "Who lost Gettysburg?" (beyond the Lost-Causer's ongoing and simplistic blame of Longstreet and Ewing) will especially enjoy Ms. Pryor's dissection of that key battle and Lee's ultimate responsibility for that loss.

Yet she effuses praise of Lee where it's due, as a father/husband, military strategist and tactician, and an inspiring leader of men-- the spark plug that drove the ragged, hungry Army of Northern Virginia through trials and successes far beyond what we can expect of fighting men.

Pryor correctly notes that, when Lee joined the Confederacy, he violated the pledge he made in accepting his original commission with the U.S. Army. Yet she also illuminates how labeling him (and the other CSA officers) as traitors, while legally correct, is too simple a way to fully understand those men, in that time, facing those issues, and fighting that war.

Pryor also fully documents what a blow it was to the Lees to lose Arlington House and the many Washington artifacts Mary held as Washington's granddaughter. Did the Lees "deserve" to lose Arlington over Lee's role in the CSA? Yes or no, the impact of losing their home is described so fully as to move the most cynical of Lee critics.

Pryor documents how Lee also led former Confederate officers in urging a peaceful reconciliation after the war, and for Southern men to return to their communities and begin to build what became "The New South." His dedication to leading Washington University after the war was all about training Southern youths to step up to this new world, and was far more hands-on than one might otherwise expect of a supposedly 'figurehead' president.

In short, Ms. Pryor unerringly punctures the deification that even Lee was uncomfortable with in his time, while emphasizing the many traits and successes that still make Lee one of our most notable Americans and-- until this volume-- one of our least fully understood.

I wondered for many years how Robert E. Lee, apparently a fine man of high moral character, could align himself with the wrong side of that terrible Civil War. I wondered how God would judge him...Did he just make a mistake? Was he a man of him times and just accepted slavery? Were there character flaws no one ever talked about?
I need to do more reading before I make up my mind about him. It does appear that he had a problem with pride, however.

Worse than self-proclaimed objectivity in a historical rendering is a dual proclamation of objectivity and present-centric intent. To my fellow students of history: this ought to serve as a big red flag. As another reviewer pointed out, terms like "cross-cultural communication skills" might be fashionable to some in today's political climate, but they often serve as poor metrics in evaluating historical figures. Pryor works to condition readers to adopt her conclusions, starting with the observation that the subject of this book is far too lionized and that her goal is to be objective in her evaluation of new evidence. But the main problem here is not with the obvious conclusion that Robert E. Lee has been wrongly elevated, in some circles, to a superman, but with the author's expounding of her own premise.

Pryor's judgment (and this reviewer's) of the legality and practicality of secession should be of little relevance as it relates to the task of understanding what Lee thought about it. Pryor comments with phrases like "nor was secession merely a matter of jurisprudence," which suggests that she has at least allowed for the weight of the complexity of the secession issue and the subsequent strain it caused many Southerners in deciding who to fight for. But other conclusions she renders belie the objectivity she seeks. Pryor finds a great contradiction in Lee's pre-war letter to a family member with a statement that secession "is nothing but revolution," and a post-war, un-sent letter that attempts to articulate a legal basis for this political action. Of course, it should be obvious to a serious historian that many Southerners' beliefs about secession evolved in the course of the war in either direction, rightly or wrongly. That a belief about a political crisis so monumental can evolve should not be surprising, and nor should it necessarily be regarded as self-contradictory. Innumerable historians allow for an evolution of Lincoln's beliefs about slavery, race relations, and Christianity, despite statements made by Lincoln on these matters that were seemingly at odds with each other at various points in time.

Our author has discovered that Lee made mistakes, that Gettysburg was ultimately his fault, and that mistakes and defeats can be found in each year of the War. Of course historians, even Confederate sympathizing historians, have long acknowledged these facts. One sort of sees where Pryor is trying to go with this in that her point is to emphasize Lee's shortcomings in order to respectfully remove him from the pedestal he had never wanted. But again, she finds a contradiction in Lee, and perhaps an insincerity of his admission of fault at Gettysburg, in that publicly he admitted fault for the outcome but privately he chided his lieutenants. Lee's intentions as to explaining the Gettysburg campaign could not be more clear in militaristic terms: It is the leader's ultimate responsibility for battlefield losses, but that does not excuse the grave mistakes and negligence of some of his subordinates. In fact, Lee was doing his job by accepting responsibility and fault, and then reprimanding his generals privately. If Lee is deserving of criticism within the military strain (and he is), he should be criticized for not reprimanding his subordinates enough.

I cannot help but raise an eyebrow at the editorial review of this book, mentioning cadets' resentment of Lee's authoritarian manner. If cadets in military school resented his "authoritarian ways," frankly they needed to learn to deal with it or seek another career. If not authoritarian, what should he have been?

In all sincerity, Pryor's book is not without a bright spot. Her best chapter comes early on, when she attempts to explain the origin of Lee's more attractive leadership qualities. Pryor fleshes out his home life and basically concludes that leadership and duty were ingrained in Lee at an early age largely because these qualities were mostly absent in his household. Lee's father, a celebrated revolutionary war hero, might have been great on the battlefield but he was a decidedly absentee husband and father, and seems to have greatly neglected the welfare of his family. Lee likely inherited some good qualities, and some of the bad ones he possessed may have been snuffed out by the necessities dictated by his family circumstances early in life. As an adolescent, he was surrounded by men of responsibility who were concerned about his upbringing. This all seems plausible and restrained enough and I applaud Pryor for this chapter. What makes this chapter so strong might be the relative absence of a political element, and, subsequently, an absence of an entirely present-centric interpretation.

Pryor sought out to vanquish the vast mythology concerning Lee, but she stepped a bit too far out of her realm of competence. That Lee is sometimes over-admired is hardly a crime against nature, rather, it speaks to the qualities he undoubtedly possessed that can be appreciated by all Americans, and indeed were admired by many honorable soldiers, many of whom fought valiantly for the Union.