Best biography of robert e lee

Guelzo spends a good amount of time on Lee’s youth, education, and early military career. Following his graduation from West Point, Lee spent decades as an army engineer, working on east coast fortifications like Fort Pulaski and Fortress Monroe or western “improvements,” like a project to redirect the Mississippi in order to prevent the port of St Louis from silting up. A chapter on Lee’s performance in the Mexican War, in which he began as an engineer on the staff of General Winfield Scott but ended up as Scott’s favored reconnaissance officer and military protégé, is especially good, as Guelzo notes what Lee learned by example from the United States’s shameful perfidy toward Mexico and Scott’s high-minded and idealistically honorable conduct of the war.

These chapters, covering approximately the first two hundred pages, are well spent and give proper proportion to the Lee’s life before the Civil War. Throughout, Guelzo takes careful note of Lee’s uprightness and strength of character—already remarked upon in his teens and twenties—and his gravitation toward older male mentors, a series of army officers culminating in General Winfield Scott. He marks also Lee’s constant fretting about money despite being, by the standards of the time, apparently well situated; his marriage and family life (which can easily go missing in military biographies); and even the development of his religious beliefs, which began as what Guelzo characterizes as a noncommittal “genteel low church Episcopalianism” that gradually, especially during the war years, grew more open and more fervent.

Guelzo also carefully examines Lee’s political ideas—what there are of them—an inherited Federalist sentiment that evolved toward a preference for the anti-populist, anti-Jacksonian Whigs over the Democrats. But, most importantly, Guelzo notes Lee’s early apolitical stance, a stance maintained with greater and greater tenacity as political strife became more and more dif

“How do you write the biography of someone who commits treason?” asks Allen C. Guelzo, Senior Research Scholar at Princeton University and the distinguished author of some of this century’s finest books on the Civil War era. As it turns out, elegantly, comprehensively, and even-handedly.

I must confess that I was prepared to dislike this book. What new could possibly be said about Lee, except to paint him in the dark colors of a contemporary culture that disdains everything and everybody associated with the Confederacy? But the Lee that emerges from Guelzo’s pages rises above simplistic evaluation, reflecting the complexity of one of the central figures of the Late Unpleasantness.

Guelzo’s work might have been better titled, “The Life and Times of Robert E. Lee.” One of the great challenges of biography is to provide appropriate context while never losing sight of the protagonist. The author does a magnificent job of illuminating the world in which Lee operated, including attention to the extended Lee family that levied such a profound influence—good and bad—on the man.

Modern biography too often sinks into ill-considered efforts to psychoanalyze its subject, a pitfall that Guelzo largely avoids. He can’t resist however, suggesting that “Lee’s determination to not be Light Horse Harry [Lee’s dissolute father] fired his impatience and, in later years, his ferocious outbursts of temper at his own and others’ imperfections” (7). Similarly, the author finds a life-long conflict in Lee between his quest for security, independence, and perfection. Maybe, but for the vast majority of the book, Guelzo rests his conclusions on a laudably thorough canvass of newspapers, published primary and secondary sources, and a deep dive into the voluminous body of Lee’s own papers. For example, he provides a lucid description of no fewer than seven accounts of the momentous meeting on April 18, , at which Lee received an unofficial offer to command the army being raised to squelch

Robert E. Lee is an iconic and controversial figure which countless books have been written about since days of the Civil War.

Some of these books are a full account of Lee’s life while others focus solely on specific aspects of his life such as his personal thoughts and opinion’s as expressed in his private papers or his public image and how it came to be what is today.

To help you figure out which books to read, I’ve created this list of the best books about Robert E. Lee.

These books all have great reviews on sites like Amazon and Goodreads and many of them are best-sellers and have great reviews from critics.

I’ve also used many of these books in my research for this website so I can personally say they are some of the best on the topic.

The following is a list of the best books about Robert E. Lee:

(Disclaimer: This article contains Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

1. R.E. Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman

Published in , this four-volume book by Douglas Southall Freeman chronicles all of the major events and highlights of Robert E. Lee’s military career.

The book discusses everything from Lee’s experiences in the Mexican-War to his surrender at Appomattox. Freeman depicts Lee as an honest, straightforward man who is “one of the small company of great men in whom there is no inconsistency to be explained, no enigma to be solved.”

The book received positive reviews when it was published. The New York Times referred to the entire work as “Lee Complete for All Time” while Stephen Vincent Benet’s review in the New York Herald Tribune referred to it as a “a complete portrait – solid, vivid, authoritative, and compelling.”

The book is now considered the definitive biography of Robert E. Lee.

Douglas Southall Freeman, who died in , was a newspaper editor, military analyst, and a pioneering radio broadcaster.

In addition to his biography about Lee, Freeman also wrote a highly acclaimed six-volume bio