Some Cracks in the ‘Marble Model’ : Flirting with young women; flinching from confrontation : ROBERT E. LEE: A Biography, <i> By Emory M. Thomas (W.W. Norton & Co.: $30; 472 pp.)</i>

Americans are a strange breed. They go to war and frequently compensate their defeated enemies with indemnities or financial aid, sometimes to their regret later on. And they revere the most unlikely people: film stars who can’t act; singers with no voice and who know little about music; writers who have nothing to say. Worse, their heroes can include misfits, Wild West personalities, outlaws, even rebels.

Take Gen. Robert E. Lee, for example. Here is a man of limited vision who believed that secession was unconstitutional but said that he could not war against his own country and its people. And he meant Virginia, not the United States of America! Here is a man who came close to destroying the Union, yet many Americans, particularly in the South, revere him as something of a deity.

In the modern era the person most responsible for Lee’s outsized reputation was the noted biographer and newspaper editor Douglas Southall Freeman, also a Virginian, who published a four-volume biography of the Civil War general that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1934. Recently reissued as a single volume condensation, this magnificent study is regarded by some as the finest biography of an American subject in the English language. Over the past 50 years it has remained the definitive statement on Lee, although some critics, notably T. Harry Williams, Allen Tate, Thomas Connelly, have sought to challenge Freeman’s exalted view.

The time has come, says Emory Thomas in the preface of this new work, to “review and rethink Lee alive.” A distinguished historian of the Confederacy and biographer of J.E.B. Stuart, Thomas is not a revisionist critic of Lee, nor a believer in the man as some kind of Christ-like figure. Rather he describes himself as a “post revisionist” who has steeped himself in the secondary literature but, for the most part, has written his biography from his own extensive reading of the primary sources by or about Lee. He unquestionably admires the general for his many virtues, which he cites whenever appropriate, but he also takes note of Lee’s limitations and weaknesses. He reveals not a deity or a superman, but a fully rounded mortal, a more recognizable human personality.

Robert Edward Lee, the son of Revolutionary War hero Lighthorse Harry Lee, was conditioned by his father, even though he hardly knew him. He was conditioned because of the shame the father brought to the family on account of his financial failures that landed him briefly in jail. After Harry’s death Robert, still an adolescent, assumed responsibility for the household. He entered West Point, survived four years of monastic discipline without incurring a single demerit, and graduated at the top of his class. Other students dubbed him the “Marble Model.” He earned a commission in the Corps of Engineers and married Mary Custis, the daughter of Martha Washington’s grandson, and the only child of doting parents.

In many respects it was an unfortunate marriage. Mary Custis Lee was spoiled, self-centered, complaining and regularly afflicted with various ailments. Her arthritis became so painful that by her mid-50s she was an invalid. As a diversion, if not a means of escape, Lee “flirted” with other women, particularly young women, forming “special friendships with some of them.” “You are right in my interest in the pretty women,” Lee confided to one friend, some 14 years after his marriage, “& it is strange I do not lose it with age. But I perceive no diminution.” Thomas is at pains to exonerate Lee from any sexual involvement with these young women, but some of Lee’s letters raise suspicions. For example, one of his more intimate friends and a sometime companion, Eliza Mackay, received the following query from Lee the day after her wedding. “But Miss E. how do you feel about this time? . . . And how did you disport yourself My Child? Did you go off like a torpedo cracker on Christmas morning. . . .” Thomas acknowledges that the metaphor is sexually graphic and speaks to a “rich relationship” between the two but he insists that Lee was scrupulous about informing his wife of his flirtations.

Lee’s obvious need for female companionship is only one element in the total personality that Thomas portrays so splendidly in this book. To know Lee one must not only appreciate his absolute devotion to duty and his extraordinary self-control, but also his avoidance of confrontation and conflict. A brave and courageous man, he could face combat and crisis, but in his day-to-day encounters with others he went to great lengths to escape disagreements or unpleasant situations. Throughout his life he physically and regularly fled from friction. He fled from in-laws, wife, children, recalcitrant slaves and quarrelsome army officers, politicians and bureaucrats. Thomas suggests that “in a real sense” Lee even became a Confederate and went to war to avoid the certain conflict at home had he chosen to remain in the United States Army and fight for the Union!

Thomas is especially good at tracing Lee’s military activities, not hesitating to point out the general’s errors of judgment and his sins of omission and commission in several engagements. At Sharpsburg the author faults Lee for offering battle and nearly losing his army and the war. But he also credits him with achieving extraordinary martial feats in his aggressiveness and risk-taking. A few times, says Thomas, Lee came to the very brink of winning the war.

The Gettysburg battle, always a difficult and contentious subject, is particularly well handled in this book. It was Lee’s last chance for a decisive victory that would end the war--and he blew it. He gambled and lost. He failed because he shrank from confrontation. He preferred to lead from consensus and did not command the obedience of his subordinates who disagreed with his attack plans. Although the author rightly blames Lee for the disaster, he also faults Longstreet, Stuart and Ewell. Gettysburg could have been won, along with the war, says Thomas, if Longstreet had augmented Pickett’s charge with strong supporting units, if Ewell had seized the commanding ground of Cemetery Hill and if Stuart had not ridden off with his captured wagons and left Lee blind in the presence of his enemies.

After Appomattox Lee accepted the position of president of Washington College in Lexington, Va. He also appealed to President Andrew Johnson for a pardon and the restoration of his citizenship rights. A few months later he signed the required Amnesty Oath swearing he would defend the Constitution and faithfully support all laws and proclamations made during the “rebellion” with reference to the emancipation of slaves. But the Amnesty Oath disappeared until 1970 when it was discovered in the National Archives. Five years later, Lee regained his citizenship by act of Congress, which President Gerald Ford signed into law.

In the end, Thomas regards Lee as a hero but an enigmatic one; “even those closest to him could not know Lee whole, could not penetrate his reserve and understand the series of paradoxes that conditioned Lee’s life. In this well-written book, Thomas declares that history “needs Robert E. Lee whole.” Thanks to the author of this insightful and revealing study it has now been provided.

Two eminent biographers of Civil War figures discuss the scholarship of war. Page 10