NONFICTION
“The Man Who Would Not Be Washington: Robert E. Lee’s Civil War and His Decision that Changed American History”
by Jonathan Horn
Scribner, 384 pages, $28
Secession was treason, Robert E. Lee wrote to his oldest son in January 1861, shortly before Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as president of the United States. Dissolution of the country would be a calamity, he warned, and “I am willing to sacrifice every thing but honor for its preservation.”
Biographer Jonathan Horn writes that Lee’s sense of honor, however, was bound to his being less an American and more a Virginian. When his native state withdrew from the Union, Lee refused Lincoln’s offer to head the Union army. He, instead, accepted command of Virginia’s secessionist armed forces.
Lee drew his inspiration, in part, from his connections to George Washington, who had led the Continental Army during the American Revolution against the British Empire. Lee, the son of one of Washington’s commanders, had married to Mary Custis, a direct descendant of the childless Washington’s wife Martha. Their palatial home in Arlington, across the Potomac River from the District of Columbia, was a shrine to the nation’s first president.
Horn hears an echo of Washington’s advice to “his heirs never to raise their swords, save in ‘defense of their country,’” in Lee’s pledge never to draw his sword except to defend Virginia. But in Lee’s mind, “‘Country’ had somehow mutated into ‘state,’” he writes.
That decision ultimately makes Lee the smaller man. It also makes the title of Horn’s biography of Lee, “The Man Who Would Not Be Washington,” seem very apt.
Horn is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and “The Man Who Would Not Be Washington” is his first book. The resulting work is well-written, fair-minded and short.
Lee, as described by Horn, is brave, courteous, occasionally flirtatious and always dutiful. Lee was determined not to repeat the mistakes of his father, Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, and of his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis. Custis was the adopted son of Washington.
Both men struggled with detail. Neither proved able to complete projects, leaving their families in financial difficulties. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy and Tom Buchanan, the two men were “careless people” who “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
The Civil War would have been long and bloody even if Lee had agreed to head up Union forces instead of breaking his oath to defend the Constitution. He was a brilliant, rule-breaking field commander, and the conflict likely would have been shorter had he not commanded Southern armies.
Lee partially redeemed himself with his surrender to Ulysses S. Grant in April 1865. Confederate artillery chief Edward Porter Alexander had urged him to scatter his soldiers and fight a guerrilla war. Lee rejected the plan. The men of his army “would be compelled to rob and steal in order to live,” transforming them into “mere bands of marauders.” The results “would bring on a state of affairs it would take the country years to recover from.”
While Lee was not prosecuted after the war, his citizenship was not restored until 1868. Accepting the presidency of a small Virginia college, he stayed out of the public eye and rebuilt his reputation. While he looked much older, he was just 63 when he died in 1870 from the effects of a stroke. The institution where he served as president was renamed Washington and Lee University in his honor.
