Pryor - Reading the man : a portrait of robert e. lee through his private letters

A Greek proportionand a riddle unread.
And everything we have said is true
And nothing helps us yet to read the man.

Stephen Vincent Bent, John Browns Body

R OBERT E. L EE S personal saga is one of the most riveting stories of American history. It is a family tale; a national epic; a theater piece worthy of Shakespeare. I entered this drama quite literally through the rear stage door. On a summer day many years ago I climbed the back steps to Arlington, and walked into Lees house and life. I was there for a temporary job with the National Park Service, working on research for the restoration of the property, and was given access to letters and papers that at that time were restricted for general use. To say they were a revelation would be a powerful understatement. Like so many Americans, I knew a little of Lees story, or at least was familiar with its exoskeleton. I was aware that Lee was a regional icon, and that generations had been taught to revere his ability to inspire devotion and to lose with dignity. I also knew he had grown to be a polarizing figure, a symbol of values both lofty and low. Agnostic myself, I was neither filled with awe for Lee, nor disdainful of his decisions. Like his acquaintance Mary Boykin Chesnut, I thought him too cold and quiet and grand to be of much interest.1 The very name Robert E. Lee I knew to be an artifice, for neither he nor his family and friends ever used ita fitting pseudonym, I thought, for an empty mythological creature. Until I read his letters it could not have occurred to me to describe Lee with the adjectives that now hurry to my mind: witty, bourgeois, self-justifying, scientific, lusty, disappointed.

Everything we have said is true, sings poet Stephen Vincent Bent in the epigraph to this book. And nothing helps us yet to read the man. Bent challenged picklock biographers to find a more substantial person; to question the stagecraft surrounding Lee; to find the man enclosed within that image.2 Inspired by the resonance of Lees own words, I set out to do just that.

Along the way I discovered a treasure trove of unpublished or unused documents in scores of archives and attics and trunks. I was greatly aided in this by Lees descendants, who generously shared many previously unknown documents with me. At the time of this writing I estimate I have read about 10,000 manuscript pages written by Lee or his close associates. In so doing, I have been a privileged listener as he reveals himself. His words show a far more complex and contradictory man than the one who comes most readily to the imagination.

Lees papers have never been collected and published, which seems astonishing given his historical prominence. Only casual collections and an imperfect and strongly edited set of his wartime documents are available in printed form. Nor did he write a memoir, or any other personal account of his experiences, though he had hoped to do so. As a result, few people are aware of Lees talent for writing. Yet its quality, and the story he tells, are so compelling that even had he not distinguished himself as a general, his family correspondence would still be considered an extraordinary record of the nations development.

Many of Lees personal letters were lost in the upheaval of war. Some have been recently rediscovered. Others are still missing. The unavailability of so many documents has created a certain void, which in turn has fostered Lees remoteness and the mythology that surrounds him. In the last dozen years many letters have been quoted, often with great skill. But no matter how faithful the process, by definition such excisions also cut away context and meaning. Moreover, hundreds of books have been written about Lee, a historiographical overload. It seems the more that is written about him, the more he has become obscured.