A unique study of mythmakers and theft vulnerable subject, the
Confederate general whose army engineer corps background, bitter
self-doubt, and family debts ill qualified him for his post-bellum
stature as symbol of the patrician, agricultural view of the Old
South. Lee's image as a combination of cavalier and St. George was
constructed, Connelly finds, only partly by opponents of the Union,
such as his early biographer J. William Jones - a "sycophant" who
rebuilt the Southern Historical Society - and by those who wanted
either to claim that Lee had really won the war or to ennoble the
defeat. Northern scholars, editors, and publicists developed theft
own sanctifications, sometimes on the premise that it was Lee who
tried to save the Union. The peak of such efforts - which also
involved praise of white, Anglo-Saxon tradition - coincided with an
1895-1910 burst of anti-industrialism in the North and with the
conservative mood of the 1920s, as expressed in journals like
Harper's and the Atlantic Monthly. In the academic sphere, Douglas
Southall Freeman's 1934 biography offered four volumes of brilliant
but Virginiaphilic portraiture, muted, though not fundamentally
challenged, by post-WW II historians' singular tendency to make Lee
an embodiment of the middle-class virtues the North had secured.
Connelly, a University of South Carolina military historian, maps
out the controversies about Lee's generalship concisely and
energetically; but his prime concern is psychological - he sees Lee
as tragic not because he lost but because his strong maternal
attachment, as well as the shrewish wife he married partly because
she was the step-granddaughter of his own hero, George Washington,
held him to narrower loyalties than Washington's, while his
adherence to a Puritan rather than an Enlightenment notion of
religion gave him a poignant fatalism at odds with his military
boldness. Connelly conveys these themes with a professionalism that
will enable readers to discriminate among his views of Lee, earlier
commentators', and his view of the latter; what could have been a
merely useful compilation of propaganda is transformed by
Connelly's own evaluations into a highly substantive and
challenging work. (Kirkus Reviews)
Robert E. Lee was both a military genius and a spiritual leader,
considered by many, southerners and nonsoutherners alike, to have
been a near saint. In The Marble Man a leading Civil War military
historian examines the hold of Lee on the American mind and traces
the campaign in historiography that elevated him to national hero
status.
General
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