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Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters
written by Elizabeth Brown Pryor
Studio : Viking Adult
by Viking Adult
Publisher : Viking Adult
Released : 2007-05-03
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9780670038299
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 20 reviews)
List Price : $29.95
Our Price : $2.98
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Product Description |
For the 200th anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s birth, a new portrait drawing on previously unpublished correspondence
Robert E. Lee’s war correspondence is well known, and here and there personal letters have found their way into print, but the great majority of his most intimate messages have never been made public. These letters reveal a far more complex and contradictory man than the one who comes most readily to the imagination, for it is with his family and his friends that Lee is at his most candid, most engaging, and most vulnerable. Over the past several years historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor has uncovered a rich trove of unpublished Lee materials that had been held in both private and public collections. Her new book, a unique blend of analysis, narrative, and historiography, presents dozens of these letters in their entirety, most by Lee but a few by family members. Each letter becomes a departure point for an essay that shows what the letter uniquely reveals about Lee’s time or character. The material covers all aspects of Lee’s life—his early years, West Point, his work as an engineer, his relationships with his children and his slaves, his decision to join the South, his thoughts on military strategy, and his disappointments after defeat in the Civil War. The result is perhaps the most intimate picture to date of Lee, one that deftly analyzes the meaning of his actions within the context of his personality, his relationships, and the social tenor of his times. |
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psychic or author |
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Fun to read a pissant writing about a man with such integrity. Taking some letters, scrutinize them carefully, add preconceived ideas and a few tea leaves, and viola, pissant can give a portrait of Robert E. Lee. |
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a man |
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I think Lee would have liked this book. Remember, Robert E. Lee was a devout Christian. According to Lee's Bible, Jesus Christ said that nobody is "good" but God. Lee was a humble man, and all his life he tried to learn from his own mistakes, his father's, those of others'. That's to say, yes, Robert E. Lee did make mistakes on occasion. And so, I'd bet the one most opposed to the "Marble Man" myth would be Lee himself. I liked this book. |
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A careful examination of the life of Southern Marble Man Robert E Lee portrays his humanity |
Robert Edward Lee (1807-1870) has won immortal fame among the great military captains of all time. Thousands of articles and books have been written about him. His most notable biographer is Douglas Southall Freeman's adulatory multivolumed work by a Lee worshipper. In recent years several revisionary works have appeared by the likes of Alan Nolan
who have castigated Lee for his white supremacist views Now it is the turn of Elizabeth Brown Pryor.
Pryor has sifted through over 10,000 pages of letters from Lee, his wife Mary and the Lee family. She has almost 200 densely written pages in her book listing first and secondary sources. She has done her homework!
Pryor has produced what is, in my opinion, a great book on the great Virginian. We see Lee as a great and good man but one who was not perfect. Pryor begins each chapter with a letter from Lee or family memory and then illuminates how that letter became an important mirror into the life of the Confederate hero.
We see Lee as a brave man who defended his beloved South against the North. Among salient points we learn:
a. Lee was a white supremecist who had trouble controlling the slaves on the Arlington estate he inherited from Washington Park Custis (Custis was the father of Lee's wife Mary and the grandson of George Washington_).
b. Lee could harsh in his treatment of slaves. Several slaves ran away from Arlington. He was not adverse to having them whipped for infractions
of his strict rules. There are reports that Lee was also kind to slaves.
He was a racist and believed the white race was superior to the African-Americans with whom he interacted. In this belief he was consistent with the widely held belief of the vast majority of nineteenth century Americans.
c. Lee was a great general as manifest in the brilliant Chancellorsville campaign but had trouble in supervision of his subordinates. Lee also kept inadequate leaders in positions of leadership in the Army of Northern Virginia who should have been replaced.
d. Lee was Virginia-centric. Lee believed in states rights.
e. Lee was an elitist who thought upper class white males should be the leaders of society.
f. Lee was frustrated by his antebellum army career as a member of the engineering corp. He suffered from depression and had a violent temper.
g. Lee was a good and faithful husband to his invalid wife Mary. The Lees had several children. He was an absentee father due to his military career.
h. Lee hated the years he spent as supt. of West Point. Following the Civil War he became President of Washington College in Lexington Va. bust disliked the work
i. Lee was often perceived as aloof and cold. Lee was able to unwind with famiily and close friends.
j. Lee's ideas on religion varied throughout his life from a mild Deism to evangelical belief in his later years. He was an Episcopalian.
Not everyone will like this biography of a Southern icon without peer who has been elevated to the ranks of Dixie sainthood along with Elvis!
As one who has read all the important biographies of Lee I consider this book an essential in understanding the great but enigmatic man. Pryor's book will engender controversy but is a vital read for anyone wanting a good understanding of Lee that does not portray him as a Lost Cause saint.
Essential and excellent! |
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Trees Died to Create this Book! |
"There is indeed a certain childish willfulness in the American mind that insists on chastising the people of the past for not being like them, or else pretending that they were. Which is a certain way NOT to learn anything from history." ---Dr. Clyde Wilson
Put it this way - if you are the type of person Dr. Wilson is describing, you're going to love this book! If not, you'll be wishing you had paid for it in Confederate bills instead of U.S. dollars.
The book itself contains roughly 175 pages of footnotes, bibliography and index. There are 50 pages of actual letters, some of which have already been published and others of which are not even by Lee, but by other people. If you're planning on seeing 500 pages of newly discovered letters, forget it. The fewer than 50 pages of new letters by Lee himself will leave you grossly disappointed. Finally, we have 425 pages of Ms. Pryor's perseverative and monotonous interpretations of those letters, which I suppose is the "meat" of the book.
According to Ms. Pryor, Lee did not release the Custis slaves immediately. The terms of the will specified "within 5 years" of the elder Custis' death (in 1857). Lee fulfilled that mandate by manumitting them in 1862. This apparently wasn't satisfactory enough for Ms. Pryor as she repeatedly drones on about Lee's failure to understand how the slaves felt.
Ms. Pryor is also critical of Lee for expecting the slaves to actually work!? Oh horror! Oh horror!
Of course, there is the matter of several slaves being whipped by Lee, something which has never been conclusively proven. Like a second rate shyster, Ms. Brown does her best to drum up the case against him.
According to Ms. Pryor, Lee had no appreciation of other cultures and saw nothing worthwhile in the Mexican culture when he was there during the Mexican war. I'm wondering what Pryor expected Lee, an educated, well-to-do man from one of Virginia's first families, to say when he was in Mexico? "Gee! What lovely mud huts!?" I'm pretty sure that Mexico didn't have Grand Melia and Paradisus or any other resorts at that time, so I can't figure out what Ms. Pryor expected him to see in the place? I suppose to understand her reasoning, or her expectations, one would have to refer back to Dr. Wilson's quote above.
Also, according to Ms. Pryor, Lee had "poor cross cultural communications skills", a term apparently taken from today's lexicon of multicultural drivel. In this case she was referring to his "communication", or lack of it, with the Comanches. I ran this past a native American friend of mine and he almost fell over laughing. I'm not sure there were too many folks at the time who had good cross cultural communication skills with the Comanches of that era, as this particular group wasn't usually given to such things themselves. Would that it were possible to transport Ms. Pryor back in time to the 1850s and observe how her "skills" with the Comanches would fare? I would be taking bets on how long she kept her pretty blond hair.
In sum, this book, touted though it is by most "contemporary" historians, is one more example of the sham that has become what we used to call, "the field of history".
If you feel compelled somehow to read it, buy it used and pay as little as possible. When you're through with it, it will make for an excellent target at the firing range.
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Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters |
Historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor has based her biography of Robert E. Lee on a huge collection of Lee family letters so that the reader sees Lee through his own words in repsonse to life situations. He comes through as a very complex person with a largely conflicted life. Lee of course was primariy a soldier (at one point he had been superintendent of West Point) and while Lincoln offered him the leadership of the Union army he followed his Southern background and in a few short weeks sided with the Confederacy. In this book we also see Lee as a husband and father. One example of Pryor's insight shows the reaction of Lee and his wife to the Union army taking over their Arlington estate which had been in his wife's family and their recognition that the house had been looted, and as the war progressed their land turned into a military cemetary for both Union and Confederate dead. Pryor says that that incident made the break complete and left the Lees embittered for the rest of their lives.
This is a fine study of the man based on his own words and is a valuable addition to Civil War history. I would agree that Reading the Man will beocme a standard reference on Robert E. Lee. |
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