Robert E. Lee, the Southerner

Description

Thomas Nelson Page was the most read of the Southern novelists, and in 1908 he turned from fiction to the figure his readers cared about most. This is not a campaign history: Page sets out to explain Lee as a product of Virginia — the Lees and the Carters, Westmoreland and Arlington, a tradition of public service that he argues made the man before the war found him. The battles are here, from the Peninsula to Appomattox, but they are read for character rather than tactics, and the closing chapters on Lee as a college president are given as much weight as Gettysburg.It is a partisan book and does not pretend otherwise, which is much of its interest: it shows how the South wished to remember Lee at the moment that memory was hardening into monument. With the photographic portrait of Lee that faced the original title page.