At 3 p.m. Friday, a Confederate honor guard will march into the State Capitol and secure the rotunda for a ceremony honoring the most revered rebel of them all: Robert E. Lee.

The occasion? As the cake from Sam's Club proclaims, "Happy 200th Birthday, Gen. Lee."

BEN GRAY /Staff (ENLARGE)

John Hall, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans Roswell Mills Camp, snaps a cellphone shot of a Robert E. Lee portrait at the State Capitol after last year's celebration of the general's birthday.

(ENLARGE)

Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee

WHAT YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT ROBERT E. LEE From "Robert E. Lee," a biography by the University of Georgia's Emory M. Thomas: • He graduated from West Point without receiving a single demerit. • Trained as an engineer, one of his first Army assignments was building up the island that became Fort Pulaski in Savannah. • He led the troops that put down John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry in 1859. • His first two Confederate commands — in western Virginia and coastal Georgia and South Carolina — were largely failures and earned him the nickname "Granny Lee." • He emancipated his family's slaves several days before Lincoln issued the full Emancipation Proclamation. • Jefferson Davis wanted him to defend Georgia when Sherman's army began its campaign for Atlanta, but Lee talked the Confederate president into letting him stay in Virginia. • The federal government seized his family's plantation across from Washington and it became the site of Arlington National Cemetery. • He was indicted for treason after the war but was spared prosecution when Grant threatened to resign if the government didn't honor the pardon he promised Lee at Appomattox. • As president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee), he began courses for newspaper editors that some regard as the nation's first journalism program. • Invited to join an effort to build memorials at Gettysburg, he declined and said it would be better "not to keep open the sores of war." • He once stopped a lynch mob in Lexington, Va. — Jim Auchmutey

"It seems like all the Confederates have gotten attacked in recent years, but it's hard to trash Gen. Lee," says Charles Kelly Barrow of Griffin, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who helped plan the observance, which will include a singing of Lee's favorite hymn, a reading of his favorite Bible verse and, of course, a chorus of "Dixie." Then the sons will enjoy some old-fashioned Southern victuals at one of their favorite retreats, Mary Mac's Tea Room.

While it's true that Lee has dodged some of the revisionist scorn aimed at other Confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest, he hasn't entirely escaped. In New Orleans a few years back, they rechristened a high school named for Lee because he owned slaves.

For the most part, though, Lee's reputation as one of the nation's greatest military minds and a symbol of honor and duty has endured. American Heritage magazine discovered what an army of admirers Lee still commands when it published a professor's opinion that the Virginian was an overrated general and "a traitor." "Nothing," editor Richard F. Snow wrote of the protests that filled his office, "has ever come close to igniting the fire that this did."

In Georgia, where Lee's larger-than-life image looks down from the Confederate memorial on Stone Mountain, his birthday remains a state holiday — although many people don't realize it.

It's observed on the day after Thanksgiving, a time when most folks are thinking about Christmas shopping and not infantry maneuvers at Chancellorsville. Lee's birthday celebration was moved after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday became a federal holiday, thus avoiding two days off in the same week.

Because of another latter-day accommodation, Lee's portrait has hung in the Capitol for the past six years. Former Gov. Roy Barnes resurrected the painting as part of a deal meant to make it easier for legislators to change the state flag.

Some civil rights groups have grumbled about the painting, which overlooks the third floor stairway, but it doesn't bother Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond, one of the state's highest-ranking black elected officials. If every portrait of a slave owner were taken out of the Capitol, he says, there might not be any pre-1865 Georgians left on the walls except James Oglethorpe.

As a young legislator almost 20 years ago, Thurmond raised eyebrows by accepting a constituent's invitation to address a Lee birthday observance at the Capitol.

"I was scared to death," he jokes. "They had a Confederate honor guard escort me in, bayonets drawn. I didn't know whether I was their speaker or prisoner of war."

Thurmond, a published historian, takes a detached view of Lee and is even considering writing his next book about the general's racial views, "just to dispel some myths."

"Lee was the most progressive of Confederate generals," he says, noting that late in the war he favored emancipation for slaves willing to fight for the Confederacy — an idea hotly opposed by other Southern leaders. "He was a complicated person, but it's hard to talk about that now because the discussion gets so political."

Lee was, indeed, a man of many contradictions. Born into the Virginia gentry, he owned slaves yet denounced slavery. He swore an oath to defend the United States as an Army officer, yet took up arms against it. He became a central figure in the Lost Cause mythology that spread across the South after the war, yet showed little patience for those who obsessed with the late unpleasantness.

Emory Thomas, professor emeritus of history at the University of Georgia, weighed those contradictions for his 1995 biography "Robert E. Lee."

"There's a collection of true believers who think Lee is a secular saint, the Christ figure of the Confederacy," Thomas says. "On the other hand, he falls victim to this equation that the Confederacy stood for slavery, he fought for the Confederacy, therefore Lee equals slavery. All that is true, but it strikes me as an oversimplification."

The historian compares Lee to Thomas Jefferson, who found slavery distasteful but could never quite bring himself to do much about it. Lee did free his family's slaves in 1862, but it was something of a moot point because they were already behind Union lines and beyond his control.

"Lee was a racist like 99 percent of Americans at that time, Northerners and Southerners," Thomas says. "He believed that upper-class whites were more evolved than blacks, who were more evolved than Native Americans."

But his attitudes may have evolved. A few months after the war ended, Thomas says, Lee was attending church in Richmond when a large black man walked up the aisle and kneeled for communion. The white congregation gasped. After an awkward interlude, Lee went to the rail and kneeled beside him.

(Some historians question whether the incident occurred, but Thomas believes it did.)

Of all Lee's actions, the one that secured his place as an American icon was the way he behaved after his surrender at Appomattox.

"He refused to fight a guerrilla war," says Holt Merchant, a historian at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., where Lee became president after the war. "To me, that's one of his greatest achievements: He accepted defeat and tried to reconcile the country."

Lee's willingness to move on influenced at least one Georgia legislator during the state flag controversy.

Perhaps no one at the Capitol celebrates Lee more than Rep. Joe Wilkinson (R-Sandy Springs), a descendant of Confederate officers who jokingly refuses to capitalize any part of William T. Sherman's name.

Wilkinson's office is a shrine to the things he holds dear. He displays four portraits of Lee, along with pictures of Ronald Reagan, Larry Munson and all six of the University of Georgia's Bulldog mascots. There's also a strange bust of Lee behind the door — it looks less like the general than a face on a tree in the "Wizard of Oz" that he even he concedes may have to go.

"If you are a Christian and believe that Jesus was the most perfect man who ever walked the face of the Earth," Wilkinson declares, "then as a Southerner, you believe that the second most perfect was Robert E. Lee."

When it came time to vote on changing the state flag, Wilkinson turned to his hero for guidance.

"You know how people ask themselves, what would Jesus do?'' he says. "I asked myself, 'What would Lee do.' I think he told us. Lee said we should reconcile and restore the nation. He said we should furl the flag."

Wilkinson voted to change the flag. Needless to say, he will be toasting Lee's 200th birthday — with Virginia Gentleman bourbon, no less.