Which Biography of Robert E Lee Should You Read?

Freeman, Dowdey, Others?

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[AUDIO] Which Biography of Robert E Lee Should You Read?

The 250th is upon us, summer is here, and so many people are looking for biographies of great Americans to read while on vacation.

Amongst those men whose moment in the sun has come yet again thanks to the fighting over American identity is Robert E Lee, son of famed Revolutionary Cavalier Light Horse Harry Lee and commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. A rebel with little interest in secession, a man renowned for his generalship in a war he lost, a son of the Old Dominion who mourned its passing even as he expended all his remaining life force upon rebuilding it anew in the wake of war and ravages of Reconstruction, Lee is one of the great figures of American history.

Lee’s greatness has long been recognized not just by Southerners, but by Englishmen, Midwesterners, and even Northerners.

"General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation... Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history. From deep conviction I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee's caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul,” Midwest-born General and President Dwight Eisenhower said. Or, as his contemporary Winston Churchill put it, "Lee was the noblest American who ever lived and one of the greatest commanders known to the annals of war”.

Similarly, New Yorker of ancient lineage Teddy Roosevelt said, "General Lee has left us the memory, not merely of his extraordinary skill as a general, his dauntless courage and high leadership in campaign and battle, but also of that serene greatness of soul characteristic of those who most readily recognize the obligations of civic duty."

That makes reading about him worthwhile, though the plethora of Lee biographies makes choosing one difficult. Having read numerous of them for my The Old World Show videos on the Lee Family, and out of general personal interest over the years, I can help narrow it down somewhat.

Pretty much anything written after the 1960s, such as Michael Korda’s 2015 Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee, isn’t worth reading. Some of these are fine (Korda’s is the best of the bunch); most are terrible: all suffer from the same affliction, which is the need to make ritual denunciations of slavery and break apart the Lee myth to some extent.

The better ones minimize this; the worse ones emphasize it. None of the mainstream ones avoid it, and all do it because modern authors struggle to understand Lee or his times. Suffused by the egalitarian delusion from birth, they neither understand the essentially aristocratic nature of the Old Dominion that made Lee the last of a different breed of men, nor see how that helped make him one of Plutarch’s men in a way that no one at present is. All the modern hogwash about equality, democracy, and so on permeates these works, and so the real character of Lee and the Old Dominion for which he fought is lost. The last chevalier of a vanished civilization cannot be understood by those who think only of Excel spreadsheets and the equality of man.

Further, other than a more thorough investigation of his Norman ancestry, little if anything has been “discovered” about Lee since Douglas Southall Freeman did the meticulous research for his work on the man in the 1930s, so modern scholarship doesn’t benefit from having had more time to gather research on him. Instead, working with the same source material, modern historians come to predictably modern conclusions.

On the other hand, the earlier biographies of Lee—such as anything written by Thomas Nelson Page or John Esten Cooke—lean too far in the other direction. Intended to cement Lee’s legacy rather than be a factual or accurate reprisal of his generalship or character, they tend to be overly flowery, poorly researched (if researched at all), full of inaccuracies that make them unreliable at best, and reading more like a propaganda pamphlet than a biography. That can be enjoyable to read, and is certainly more fun than the dreary modern alternative. But, still, they’re far from being the best that is available.

That leaves works that came out of the Golden Age of American historical scholarship, which lasted for roughly the middle third of the 20th century: the period where interest made writing historical works remunerative for authors, scholarly standards were high, and the Civil Rights Cultural Revolution had not yet forced a reappraisal of all of American history in the name of making various communist subversives somewhat less surly.

Of those works written in this period, two stand out: Douglas Southall Freeman’s four-volume biography of Lee, titled R. E. Lee: A Biography, and Clifford Dowdey’s single-volume history of the man, which is titled Lee: A Biography. Margaret Sanborn wrote a two-volume biography of Lee around the same time that is fine but not exceptional. What makes these works particularly interesting to view in tandem is that Dowdey was a protege, contemporary, and disciple of Freeman, and wrote his Lee to complement his friend and mentor’s most famous work. Of the two, one is distinctly better, for reasons I will describe below, along with a few thoughts on the relative strengths and weaknesses of each.

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Which Lee to Read?