‘Clouds of Glory’ reveals the man behind the Robert E. Lee myth

832 pages; $40

“He was, from the beginning, the totem of the Southern cause,” writes Michael Korda in “Clouds of Glory,” his sweeping 700-page biography of Robert E. Lee. True enough, over the last 150 years, Lee has been made to seem upright and wooden, the eternal gray icon used to confer honor on the failed Confederate regime.

The author of books on Grant and Eisenhower, Korda insists that Lee never had a hand in this unseemly symbolic promotion, not that “Clouds of Glory” declines to grapple with the moral dilemmas that Lee faced over the slavery issue.

In Korda’s portrait, Lee comes to life as more of a Renaissance man. An accomplished watercolorist and skilled cartographer (“his maps were works of art”), he never hit the bottle, though he liked a good joke, and once kept a rattlesnake for a pet. He was known to be a flirt partial to romantic grandiloquence, verging on erotica: “The Daughters of Eve,” he penned, “make your lips water and your fingers tingle.”

Still, Robert lacked the roguish way of his father, Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, and, against a background of family disaster, he fashioned himself into a model of Christian rectitude. But the ideal man was subject to near-cosmic contradiction: He would sacrifice his U.S. Army career on behalf of his native state, even though he regarded secession disdainfully as “revolution”; he wrote that abolition was “an evil course,” but he was repelled by slavery. For Lee, who “believed absolutely in God,” these oppositions were resolved within the Almighty’s unknowable will, which, for Korda, explains “a certain opaque quality in Lee’s character,” certainly something suggested by his otherworldly daguerreotype gaze.

A scion of Virginia gentry, Lee was a star at West Point, where he studied the military tactics of Napoleon in French. In the Army Corp of Engineers, he cleared the Mississippi River around St. Louis, transforming the port into a gateway for Westward expansion. He distinguished himself in the Mexican War, where the vainglorious Gen. Winfield Scott claimed Lee was “the best soldier I ever saw in the field.”

If there are fawning moments in “Clouds of Glory” — it is Robert E. Lee, after all — it cannot have been easy to overcome the magnetic draw of Lee’s refined manners and “stoic charisma.” And, of course, there is the simple fact that he was a military genius. Lee effectively used the railway system of his interior lines in a way that pioneered the concept of “lightning war.” His ruses like “Quaker Guns” (logs painted black) were calculated to confuse the Federals about the much smaller size of the Army of Northern Virginia. Serene and fearless, he would divide his main force in the face of a larger enemy, and he would win.

A master of defensive strategy, Lee’s preference was for all-out attack, which put him at loggerheads with one of his top generals, James Longstreet. (The author’s evenhanded approach to this enduring controversy is most welcome.) Korda is by no means uncritical of Lee’s leadership, often citing as a key failing his reluctance to enforce discipline among his subordinates.

If there is the fog of war, then there is the fog of writing about war. Korda hurls himself into the mist with Lee’s “preference for swift movement.” His sharp analysis of the major battles and minor skirmishes brings new clarity to a conflict that often seems like 200,000 men running around aimlessly in the woods. Following the great defeat at Gettysburg, for which Lee accepted blame before the smoke had cleared the field, Korda’s section on the long run-up to surrender at Appomattox is especially good.

In the aftermath, Lee secured a contentious place in the American mind. A federal judge failed to indict him for treason, though his petition for citizenship languished until 1975, when it was restored by Pres. Gerald Ford. He became a “secular saint” in the South, and, while he was admired in the North, he was just as often denounced as a traitor in the region’s editorial pages. (He had been called as much by Southern fire-eaters, who had whined when Lee predicted the war might last 10 years.)

As for the impropriety of judging Lee’s association with slavery by present-day standards, perhaps it is best to cite the words of his fiery contemporary, John Brown. Admonishing an interlocutor, the condemned abolitionist said, with Lee present, “You are guilty of a great wrong … I say this without wishing to be offensive.” Ulysses Grant struck a more discourteous note: “The cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there is the least excuse.”

In his quiet years, he became president of what is now Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Va., where he unearthed the family silver that had been “providentially” buried at the outbreak of hostilities. He visited Cumberland Island and wept beside the headstone of Light-Horse, whose legacy had caused him so much anguish. For his final words upon his death in 1870, he exclaimed the subsequent terse command: “Strike the tent.”