John Lord
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 12: American Leaders

Lee's military conduct revealed, it must be admitted, one weakness, that of undue leniency toward slack, dilatory, and opinionated subordinates. This was, however, only in part Lee's personal fault. Mainly it was the military counterpart of the rope-of-sand infirmity inherent in a Confederacy which in every possible way deified the individual State and snubbed the central power. Without jeopardizing the Confederacy, Lee could not at Gettysburg deal with Longstreet as Grant did with Warren at Five Forks, or as Sherman did with Palmer in North Carolina. It seems that Lee's orders to his main subordinates were habitually of the nature of requests. Yet what obedience was not accorded him in spite of this!

Most striking among the characteristics of General Lee which made him so successful was his exalted and unmatched excellence as a man, his unselfishness, sweetness, gentleness, patience, love of justice, and general elevation of soul. Lee much loved to quote Sir William Hamilton's words: "On earth nothing great but man: in man nothing great but mind." He always added, however: "In mind nothing great save devotion to truth and duty." Though a soldier, and at last very eminent as a soldier, he retained from the beginning to the end of his career the entire temper and character of an ideal civilian. He did not sink the man in the military man. He had all a soldier's virtues, the "chevalier without fear and without reproach," but he was glorified by a whole galaxy of excellences which soldiers too often lack. He was pure of speech and of habit, never intemperate, never obscene, never profane, never irreverent. In domestic life he was an absolute model. Lofty command did not make him vain.

The Southern army had one prominent officer with a high ecclesiastical title, the Rt. Rev. Lieutenant-General Leonidas Polk, D.D., LL.D., Bishop of Louisiana, commanding a corps in Bragg's army. He was killed in battle at Pine Mountain, Ga., during Sherman's advance on Atlanta. Stonewall Jackson was so famed for his rather obtrusive though awfully real piety that men named him the Havelock of the army. But none who knew the three will call Lee less a Christian than either of the others. He prayed daily for his enemies in arms, and no word of hate toward the North ever escaped his tongue or his pen. He had the faith and devotion of a true crusader. His letters breathe the spirit of a better earth than this. Collected into a volume, they would make an invaluable book of devotional literature. No wonder officers and men passionately loved such a commander, glad, at his bidding, to crowd where the fight was thickest and death the surest.

Sir Thomas Malory's words are not inaptly applied to Lee: "Ah, Sir Lancelot, thou wert head of all Christian knights; thou wert never matched of earthly knight's hand; and thou wert the courtliest knight that ever bare shield; and thou wert the kindest man that ever strake with sword; and thou wert the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights; and thou wert the meekest man and the gentliest that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in rest."

Exquisitely appropriate is also Professor Trent's comparison of Lee "with Belisarius and Turenne and Marlborough and Moltke, on the one hand, and on the other with Callicratidas, and Saint Louis, with the Chevalier Bayard and Sir Philip Sidney."

A remarkable trait of General Lee's military character was his tireless and irresistible energy. While one whom he deemed a foe of his State remained on her soil, he could not rest. From the moment he took command of the Army of Northern Virginia, all was action in that army. During the nine weeks after A.P. Hill struck Mechanicsville that earthquake shock, how did not the war-map change! Richmond was set free; Washington was threatened. Lee whipped McClellan before Pope could help, then Pope before McClellan could help. The first evening at Gettysburg, Longstreet having impressively pointed out the strength of Meade's position on Cemetery Hill, Lee instantly replied, "If he is there in the morning, I shall attack him." The second morning of the Wilderness battle, Grant, obviously expecting to anticipate all movement upon the other side, ordered charge at five o'clock. Lee charged at half-past four. Grant was determined to reach Spottsylvania first, but there, too, Lee awaited him, having had some hours to rest. Prostrate and half-delirious in his tent one day during Grant's effort to flank him, he kept murmuring: "We must strike them; we must not let them pass without striking them." Longstreet was too slow for him, and so was even the ever-ready A.P. Hill. Years later, Lee's dying words were: "Tell Hill he must come up."

To appreciate his cat-like agility, one must remember that Lee was the oldest general made famous by the war. It is thought that years accounted for Napoleon's refusal to fight the Old Guard at Borodino, as his ablest generals urged. Napoleon was then forty-three, eleven years younger than Lee was when our war began. It is to young Napoleon we must turn to find parallels for Lee's celerity. Second Bull Run and Chancellorsville may fitly be compared to Arcola and Rivoli. It has been observed that, like Napoleon, Lee avoided passive defence, seeming the assailant even when on the defensive. Like him, he was swift and terrible in availing himself of an enemy's mistakes. It can hardly be doubted that Lee's campaigns furnished more or less inspiration and direction for Von Moltke's immortal movements in 1866 and in 1870-71.

That Lee was brave need not be said. He was not as rash as Hood and Cleburne sometimes were. He knew the value of his life to the great cause, and, usually at least, did not expose himself needlessly. Prudence he had, but no fear. His resolution to lead the charge at the Bloody Angle–rashness for once–shows fearlessness. Tender-hearted as he was, Lee felt battle frenzy as hardly another great commander ever did. From him it spread like magnetism to his officers and men, thrilling all as if the chief himself were close by in the fray, shouting, "Now fight, my good fellows, fight!" Yet such was Lee's self-command that this dreadful ardor never carried him too far. Once, namely, at Fredericksburg, recovery from the fighting mood perhaps occurred too promptly. Some have thought this, suggesting that had the leash not been applied to the dogs of war so early, Burnside's retreat might have been made a rout.

But Lee possessed another order of courage infinitely higher and rarer than this,–the sort so often lacking even in generals who have served with utmost distinction in high subordinate places, when they are called to the sole and decisive direction of armies: he had that royal mettle, that preternatural decision of character, ever tempered with caution and wisdom, which leads a great commander, when true occasion arises, resolutely to give general battle, or to swing out away from his base upon a precarious but promising campaign. Here you have moral heroism; ordinary valor is more impulsive. A weaker man, albeit total stranger to fear, ready to lead his division or his corps into the very mouth of hell, if commanded, being set himself to direct an army, will be either rash or else too timid, or fidget from one extreme to the other, losing all.

Hooker began bravely at Chancellorsville, but soon grew faint and afraid. Hood says that Hardee's timidity lost him a great victory at Decatur, Ga., the day the Union General McPherson fell; and that Cheatham's, at Spring Hill, during his northward pursuit of Thomas, lost him another. Yet Hooker, Hardee, and Cheatham were men to whom personal fear was a meaningless phrase. Stonewall Jackson was personally no braver than they; it was his bravery of the higher sort that set him as a general so incomparably above them. The same high quality belonged to Grant and Sherman, and to Washington and Greene in the Revolutionary War.

It was in this supreme kind of boldness that Robert Lee pre-eminently excelled. Cautious always, he still took risks and responsibilities which common generals would not have dared to take; and when he had assumed these, his mighty will forbade him to sink under the load. The braying of bitter critics, the obloquy of men who should have supported him, the shots from behind, dismayed him no more than did Burnside's cannon at Fredericksburg. On he pressed, stout as a Titan, relentless as fate. What time bravest hearts failed at victory's delay, this Dreadnaught rose to his best, and furnished courage for the whole Confederacy.

Lee's campaigns and battles "exhibit the triumph of profound intelligence, of calculation, and of well-employed force over numbers and disunited counsels."

Lee always manoeuvred; he never merely "pitched in." As he right-flanked McClellan, so both at Manassas and at Chantilly he right-flanked Pope,–all three times using for the work Jackson, the tireless and the terrible. At Second Bull Run, to show that he was no slave to one form of strategy, he muffled up Pope's left instead of his right, here using Longstreet. His tactics were as masterful as his strategy. At Second Bull Run, fearfully hammered by the noble Fifth Corps, that had fought like so many tigers at Gaines's Mill and Malvern Hill, even Stonewall Jackson cried to Lee for aid. Aid came, but not in men. Longstreet's cannon, cunningly planted to enfilade the Fifth Corps' front, shattered the Federals' attacking column and placed Stonewall at his ease.

Considering everything, his paucity of men and means, the necessity always upon him of reckoning with political as well as with military situations, and his success in holding even Grant at bay so long, Lee's masterful campaigns of 1862, 1863, 1864, and 1865 not only constitute him the foremost military virtuoso of his own land, but write his name high on the scroll of the greatest captains of history, beside those of Gustavus Adolphus, William of Orange, Tilly, Frederic the Great, Prince Eugene, Napoleon, Wellington, and Von Moltke.

In a sense, of course, the cause for which Lee fought was "lost;" yet a very great part of what he and his confrères sought, the war actually secured and assured. His cause was not "lost" as Hannibal's was, whose country, with its institutions, spite of his genius and devotion, utterly perished from the earth. Yet Hannibal is remembered more widely than Scipio. Were Lee in the same case with Hannibal, men would magnify his name as long as history is read. "Of illustrious men," says Thucydides, "the whole earth is the sepulchre. They are immortalized not alone by columns and inscriptions in their own lands; memorials to them rise in foreign countries as well,–not of stone, it may be, but unwritten, in the thoughts of posterity."

Lee's case resembles Cromwell's much more than Hannibal's. The régime against which Cromwell warred returned in spite of him; but it returned modified, involving all the reforms for which the chieftain had bled. So the best of what Lee drew sword for is here in our actual America, and, please God, shall remain here forever.

Decisions of the United States Supreme Court since Secession give a sweep and a certainty to the rights of States and limit the central power in this Republic as had never been done before. The wild doctrines of Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens on these points are not our law. If the Union is perpetual, equally so is each State. The Republic is "an indestructible Union of indestructible States." If this part of our law had in 1861 received its present definition and emphasis, and if the Southern States had then been sure, come what might, of the freedom they actually now enjoy each to govern itself in its own way, even South Carolina might never have voted secession. And inasmuch as the war, better than aught else could have done, forced this phase of the Constitution out into clear expression, General Lee did not fight in vain. The essential good he wished has come, while the Republic, with its priceless benedictions to us all, remains intact. All Americans thus have part in Robert Lee, not only as a peerless man and soldier, but as the sturdy miner, sledge-hammering the rock of our liberties till it gave forth its gold. None are prouder of his record than those who fought against him, who, while recognizing the purity of his motive, thought him in error in going from under the Stars and Stripes. It is likely that more American hearts day by day think lovingly of Lee than of any other Civil War celebrity, save Lincoln alone. And his praise will increase.

It was thoroughly characteristic of Lee that he would not after the war leave the country, as a few eminent Confederates did, and also that he refused all mere titular positions with high salaries, several of which were urged on him out of consideration for his character and fame. He was, however, persuaded to accept in 1865 the presidency of Washington College, at Lexington, Va., an institution founded on gifts made by Washington, and at present known as Washington and Lee University. In this position the great man spent his remaining years, joining refinement and dignity to usefulness, and revered by all who came within the charmed circle of his influence. Since 1863 he had suffered more or less with rheumatism of the heart, and from the middle of 1869 was never quite strong. Spite of this, with the exception of brief holidays, he performed all his duties till Sept. 28, 1870, when, at his family tea-table as he stood to say grace;–it was his wont to say grace before meat and to stand in doing so,–he was stricken, had to sit, then be helped to his bed. He never rose, though languishing a number of days. He died at nine in the morning, Oct. 12, 1870. Ave, pia anima!