When the mighty fall, where do they land?

In the case of Robert E. Lee, his reputation, at least, landed in a very good place. For a long time after the American Civil War, he was the man Southerners most respected -- the man who held off the Yankees for four years and then helped make things better after the war.

Alan T. Nolan begs to differ. He sets out to examine the aspects of Lee's reputation and compare them to the actual truth. This is a good and useful thing to do -- it's something that all of society is attempting to do today, with less than perfect luck, as we argue about, e.g., Confederate monuments. But I think Nolan goes too far at times.

Much of this work is very good. For example, Chapter 2, "Lee and the Peculiar Institution," examines Lee's feelings about slavery. The record is curiously mixed. For example, Lee's father-in-law wanted his slaves freed when he died, making it Lee's problem to free them. Lee did it, but rather slowly. And Lee clearly was not particularly fond of the idea of a mixed-race society. Lee was not the worst racist among Southerners -- not by millions of them! -- but he was certainly not one who believed in Black equality. Nolan demonstrates this clearly and convincingly.

But his other arguments bother me. When he discusses Lee and secession, he finds a number of somewhat contradictory statements in Lee's record -- and treats this as some sort of perfidy. Certainly Lee's statements, expressed over the course of years and to different audiences, contradict each other in part. I don't think this justifies Nolan's conclusions. It should be remembered that Lee genuinely did not want the Union to break up. Thus his early statements on secession were mostly opposed to it. But once it happened, and Lee went south, he had to adjust to his new role. What person would not slowly change his attitudes to match his situation? And who does not adjust the way he says things to match the feelings of his readers? One may argue that Lee's change of attitude was unfortunate, but it was certainly human.

Nolan also points out that, particular after Gettysburg, Lee expressed the belief that the Confederacy could not win the war by military means -- and from this suggests that Lee should have surrendered his army to save unnecessary bloodshed. Ignore the fact that, if Lee had tried, his officers would have overruled him and had him shot -- Lee was not in position to just end the war! But, as I say, ignore that. The fact that the Confederacy could not win by military means did not mean that it could not win. It just needed other means. And to surrender when not compelled to is, to put it mildly, not in accord with military ethics. (Which is why Lee would have been shot.) This is simply an unfair complaint.

Nolan also argues that Lee was too aggressive -- too willing to go on the offensive even though he fully knew that the South's grand strategy was ultimately defensive. This is flatly unfair. If the Confederates had simply been content to passively defend, they would have quickly lost the war, because the North could simply have bypassed their armies, taken over the rest of the South, and starved the armies to death. Sometimes, the Southern armies needed to come out and fight. Was Lee sometimes too aggressive? Nolan makes a good case for excessive aggression at Antietam, but otherwise, I think his argument fails. Lee made mistakes -- more than we generally acknowledge -- but mistakes aren't the same as violating his purpose in fighting. Lee's mistakes were far fewer than other Confederate officers such as Braxton Bragg and Earl van Dorn. The officer who hardly ever made mistakes was Joseph E. Johnston, and it didn't win the war and it caused Jefferson Davis to fire him during the Atlanta campaign!

This is a genuinely good corrective to the myth of Lee -- he was human, he was inconsistent, he made mistakes, and he certainly wasn't a believer in Black rights. But most of the conclusions really strike me as going too far. Nolan's view seems to be that, since Lee was not a mythic hero, he must have been a complete schnook. Having met real people in my life, I believe that there is an intermediate position: That Lee was a human being. He had flaws, but on the whole he probably had fewer of them than most men of the time. He had just been brought up in a culture whose attitudes we now -- rightly -- reject. If that is a recipe for calling a man evil, there wouldn't be much good left in the world! The Confederacy was founded to preserve slavery, and that was pure evil. It certainly doesn't deserve commemoration. I would still consider Lee both a more competent and a better man than most southern leaders. I readily grant that that isn't saying all that much. ( )