Gentleman of Letters

...For example, writing to the sister of a brother officer on her wedding night, he asked, "Did you go off well, like a torpedo cracker on Christmas morning...

...But Lee played the dashing beau with the full knowledge of his wife, and within, it seems, well-defined boundaries of propriety—in short, Robert E. Lee could be both a sensual flirt and a proper Virginia gentleman, all at the same time...

...Indeed, the full quotation of the letters, with their 19th-century peculiarities of style and diction, gives the uninitiated reader an uncommon window into the historical craft of manuscript research...

...Her deliberately self-conscious approach toward the presentation of that research, along with the photographic reproduction of some of the physical letters themselves—indeed, Pryor cites art historians' explication of individual objects as an inspiration—lets us, indeed, "read the man" in a fashion more direct and immediate than the conventional scholarly biography or analysis...

...Such criticism, perhaps only obligatory due to this reviewer's inclinations as a military historian most interested in Lee the warrior, should not be overstated...

...For example, she argues that Lee's invasion of Maryland in the fall of 1862, and his invasion of Pennsylvania the following summer, led in large part to the Federal "hard war" measures that did so much to destroy the Southern social fabric Lee hoped to preserve...

...Indeed, Pryor, while willing to make moral judgments on her subject, especially in relation to Lee's willingness to treat slaves in the same manner as the vast majority of Southern plant-ers—as property—generally shows a deft touch when dealing with the multitude of controversies that surround Lee...

...The portions of Lee's life most worrisome to current sensibili-ties—his acceptance of slavery and the antebellum Southern social order...

...Indeed, Pryor misreads the divisions within Northern public opinion to a large degree, which leads her to underrate the opportunities present in Lee's campaign in Pennsylvania, exemplified best by the New York draft riots...

...The difficulties of seeing beyond the legend of Lee can be immense...

...Her comments on the possibilities of a guerrilla or partisan strategy for Confederate independence ignore the social chaos that would have resulted, threatening both the Southern social order and Confederate generals' notions of legitimate warfare...

...Gentleman of Letters How General Lee comes to life in correspondence by Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh Worshipped, uncomprehended and aloof, Afigure lost to flesh and blood and bones, Frozen into a legend out of life, A blank-verse statue— How to humanize That solitary gentleness and strength...

...It seems that, as Pryor widens her lens to questions of national strategy, she loses some of the sharpness and clarity that so strongly marks her image of Lee the man, as opposed to Lee the general and strategist...

...the questionable nature of some of his wartime decisions as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia...

...Unfortunately, even a successful portrayal of that important characteristic of Lee would still have obscured the other aspects of Lee's life: The flashes of temper, the loving family man, the genial bon vivant who so charmed his brother officers, and the irrepressible flirt...

...Even Gallagher, perhaps Lee's most prominent current defender in the scholarly lists, is critical of Lee's decision-making at Gettysburg, although he takes pains to point out that Lee's actions were hardly without rationale or logic...

...and his inability to realize fully the possibilities of the post-Civil War South—receive, for the most part, excellent treatment in Pryor...

...not in battlefield glory but in triumph amid life's unexpected skirmishes...

...Connelly saw Lee as strategically myopic, ignoring the crucial Western theater for his own parochial Virginia...

...And while the consensus of Civil War military historians remains that Lee was, indeed, a great general, no serious military historian now sees his command decisions as flawless...

...As Pryor ends Reading the Man, "His example lies not in superhuman virtue but in human determination...

...Here, Pryor gives too much credit to Lee's effects on Northern military policy...

...The hard-war policies later exemplified by William T. Sherman's March to the Sea in 1864—emancipation paired with direct Federal attacks on civilian property and resources— stemmed in large part from events beyond Lee's control: The influence of Northern politics, Federal experience in the guerrilla-infested western theater, and various other factors...

...From this perspective, Pryor's book is best seen as comparable to the work of Emory Thomas and my own teacher, Gary Gallagher, who, while acknowledging Lee's real foibles as both a human being and as a general, have seen some of the recent criticisms of Lee as overdrawn, downright speculative, and anachronistic...

...regard to the larger historical context, especially in the chapters on the Civil War proper, but the work as a whole remains a humane, judicious, and graceful exposition of Robert E. Lee the man, as opposed to Robert E. Lee the symbol...

...Do regulate me thereon in your next...

...And everything that we have said is true And nothing helps us yet to read the man . . . Elizabeth Brown Pryor aptly uses three stanzas of Stephen Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body as the jumping-off point for her study of Robert E. Lee's personal life, as expressed through his private letters...

...Indeed, for one period of time in the 20th century, if there was any distinguishing trend in writing on Lee, it was of revisionist debunking, best seen in the work of Thomas L. Connelly, Alan T Nolan, and Michael Fellman...

...Although it should be no surprise for anyone familiar with slavery as an institution that Lee had at least one runaway flogged, and broke up slave families, it bears repeating to those who have too fully imbibed the apotheosized image of Lee...

...For professional academic historians (Pryor does not teach history in a college setting, but is a Foreign Service officer), the joys and frustrations of reading the mail of the dead is a matter so routine, and masked by our formulaic use of citation and documentation, that most of our books efface the experiential nature of our research...

...In a more original contribution to the historical literature, Pryor's exposition of the divisions within Lee's own family over secession raises profound questions regarding the conventional interpretation that Lee's resignation from the United States Army was foreordained...

...Here we find worthy lessons, concerned not so much with generalship and high politics but in the aspirations of fallible human beings to surmount their own limitations...

...But most of these topics have received thorough scholarly treatment by previous biographers...

...his frustrations with service in the antebellum Army...

...Sometimes Pryor loses her way with Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh is assistant professor of history at the United States Naval Academy...

...While Pryor excels at capturing the special bond between Lee and the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia, it is on military questions where her treatment of Lee becomes most questionable...

...Nolan raised troubling questions regarding both Lee's departure from the regular Army and his generalship...

...If "To read the man" and "to humanize that solitary gentleness and strength" stand as the two signal purposes behind this admirable portrait of Lee, then she has succeeded, in a book refreshingly difficult to classify in terms of both genre and historiography...

...The best recent example of that legend is the cinematic portrayal of Lee in Gods and Generals, where Robert Duvall seems to have hoped to portray above all else Lee's well-known and historically attested dignity and gravitas...

...while Fell-man went so far as to find precedent for Lee's aggressiveness on the battlefield in what he saw as Lee's previous inability to fully tame his erotic impulses— one of the more spectacular abuses of psychohistory in scholarly writing on the Civil War...

...A Greek proportion—and a riddle unread...

...In the process of this examination, however, the reader also learns much about the various worlds Lee inhabited: The slaveholding planter gentry of Northern Virginia, West Point, the antebellum U.S...

...Good history can and should be many different things—Clio's mansion contains many rooms, each suited to the wide variety of human experience—and in Pryor's work, we find a fine room devoted to Robert E. Lee...

...Neither a conventional biography, nor a focused monograph, it stands in effect as a series of essays (or "historical excursions") on Lee's life, structured in roughly chronological fashion, and using reprinted personal letters at each essay's opening as interpretive windows into Lee's life...

...By using Lee's correspondence as her focal point, Pryor's book excels at capturing such fascinating daily texture in Lee's complex character...

...Lee beckons us not to attain some impossible height of moral righteousness, but to be fabulous in our fallibility, to face unflinchingly all of the vicissitudes of life, and in so doing to transcend them...

...Although Pryor's copious endnotes show a mastery of the vast body of scholarly and non-scholarly literature on Lee, it is in this sensitive and humane portrayal of the texture of Lee's daily life that her study makes its real contribution to historical writing on Lee...

...For his whole adult life, including well after his marriage, Lee enjoyed the company of attractive women, who he charmed with his genial wit, handsome features, and magnetic presence...

...Army, the Army of Northern Virginia, and, finally, the post-Civil War South...