Confederate States of America. Army - Lee: a biography

Books on the Confederacy
by C LIFFORD D OWDEY

BUGLES BLOW NO MORE

EXPERIMENT IN REBELLION

THE LAND THEY FOUGHT FOR

DEATH OF A NATION

LEE S LAST CAMPAIGN

THE SEVEN DAYS

LEE

Editor with Louis H. Manarin

THE WARTIME PAPERS OF R . E. LEE

First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2015
Copyright 1965 by Clifford Dowdey

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Anthony Morais

Print ISBN: 978-1-63220-718-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-803-3

Printed in the United States of America

For my wife, Frances;
to my daughters, Frances Blount and Sarah Bowis,
and to the memory of their great-grandfathers,
James Monroe Bowis and Michael ODowda,
who served with Lee

Foreword

D R. William Gleason Bean, professor emeritus at Washington and Lee University, was the first academic historian to stress to me the need for a one-volume Lee which would use the extensive new material uncovered in the past twenty-five years in a fresh interpretation. Fundamentally, a fresh interpretation would remove Lee from the delimiting frame of the Civil War and, by placing him in the context of the total history of the Republic, reveal both his eternal relevance and the nature of his involvement in the evolutionary stage of nationalism which is still in the process of change. In his reluctant involvement Lee, who wasas one of his chief opponents saidessentially a peacemaker, became a tragic national figure on a scale far to transcend the four years of actual warfare.

In addition to the new material that has come to light on Lee, since World War II considerable specialized research has been made available on the period from 1850 to 1876. This has been used, or drawn upon, in contemporary studies on the relation of this total period to our times. When Experiment in Rebellion, a narrative of the Confederacys civil leaders, was published in 1946, the late Randolph Adams wrote that the book proved his point that history should be rewritten every twenty-five years. Attitudes change and the writer of history views the past from new perspectives.

Today, for example, Americans have lost their illusions about war as a political resolution and no longer believe a permanent pattern of good will result from mass killings and destruction, spreading ruin and misery. From this current attitude, Lees contemporaneity can be found in his unchanging disbelief in the efficacy of war and his conviction that civilization would not advance until reason and humanity were the bases for the settlement of disputes. When sections of the United States showed an inclination to resolve their differences by arms, he wrote, I shall mourn for my country... and for the future of mankind.

Yet, with the perspective of changed attitudes and the availability of new material, I was awed at the prospect of trying to offer any supplement to Douglas Southall Freemans definitive biography. Having begun work as a reporter on the Richmond News Leader when Dr. Freeman very personally combined the jobs of editor and managing editor, I wrote my first signed words for publication (book reviews) under his tutelage, began my first research in history under his guidance, continued with his encouragement and support, and long used his R. E. Lee and Lees Lieutenants as guides as well as sources for bibliographical references. And yet, a less comprehensive, less military, less detailed biography was needed to present the fresh interpretation. I was decided, finally, by the proportions the new material reached when the George Bolling Lee Collection of more than two hundred personal lettersmostly unseen previouslywas acquired by the Virginia Historical Society and made available to me specifically for a Lee biography.

The bulk of these letters were written before the war, many between Lees thirty-fourth and forty-ninth years (he was fifty-four when war embraced him). In one of Lees letters from Mexico, he stated that General Scott had requested his services on the commanding generals staffthus disposing of the long-held belief that it was a myth that Lee was the only junior officer whom Scott personally asked for. The letters to older women of his family, to whom he revealed his most intimate thoughts, contained fresh insights into Lee during periods in his life when no shadow of a divisive war, or any controlling external events, lay in his consciousness.

Prior to this windfall, when I edited The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee
with Mr. Louis H. Manarin in 1960, we discovered that on the war period alone available Lee correspondence had grown to more than six thousand items, and new materialprewar as well as war periodwas being collected yearly in various repositories. Since then, the Virginia Historical Society has acquired one collection of 557 items of correspondence restricted to a single period in 1861.

Of the prewar and very few postwar letters that are continually appearing, significant personal letters have been published in the Huntington Library Quarterly and by the Missouri Historical Society. The Huntington letters, written to his wife during the first years of marriage, show Lee as a young lieutenant outraged at the long absences of his lady from her husband. The Missouri Historical Society letters were written to a confidant, Henry Kayser (who had been Lees assistant engineer during his work on the Mississippi River at St. Louis), and they reveal some of his personal attitudes with a frankness seldom found in Lees correspondence.

The importance of all the recently uncovered personal and mostly prewar letters, in juxtaposition to the considerable volume of personal letters already available, has been to emphasize the human aspects ofas they saida Christian gentleman whose fate it was to personify not only a society that was destroyed but an Old America of the federated republic that was doomed. Of this Old America as reflected through his Virginia environment, Lee towered above all others as the single most perfected product. Indeed, it was the suggestion of a total perfection that has tended to dim Lee with a certain remoteness. Even the die-hard Unionists who renounce Lee as a traitor tend to place his villainy in the abstract.

But with contemporary perspectives, sharpened by clinical psychology and philosophical theology, Lees appearance of perfection can be understood in very modern terms. E. R. Keyes, a fellow cadet at West Point and, later, a Federal general who opposed Lee, explained the young Lees completeness in terms of his lack of any feelings of inferiority (Keyess word)or, as we would say, the absence of unresolved inner conflicts. He grew in organic wholeness, as a work of art is whole. As if he were a work of art, Lee created himselfin an image implanted by his mother and on a monumental design of moral concepts. Nothing of his life-potentialities was wasted or negated. He acted in accordance with his belief that in God all good would be affirmed in Gods time. With this eternal view of life, Lee also met the modern precept of being ultimately concerned, though he would have said that to do Gods will was his constant concern.