Allen C. Guelzo | Lee: Life and Legend

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Reddit Comments
Captions
BLAKE HAWKINS: Good evening. I'm Blake Hawkins. And I am a sophomore accounting major from Omaha, Nebraska. And tonight, I have the honor of introducing our speaker. Our speaker is Allen C. Guelzo. He is a Senior Research Scholar in the Council of Humanities and a Director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison program at Princeton University. Dr. Guelzo earned his MA and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. In September 2005, he was nominated by President Bush to the National Council on Humanities. His articles and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, The Atlantic and the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of several books, including Abraham Lincoln-- Redeemer President, Lincoln and Douglas-- The Debates that Defined America, and Fateful Lightning-- A New History of the History of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Without further ado, Dr. Guelzo. [APPLAUSE] ALLEN GUELZO: Before I begin to talk about General Lee this evening, I want to say a word of thanks for the opportunity to be here at Hillsdale College, which is such a remarkable, remarkable institution. I wandered around a little bit this morning. I went over to see the chapel, and then I went over to the student center. And there, I saw something I had not seen in many, many, many years. I saw students diligently bent over tables with cups of coffee, reading Homer, Pope, Latin, and not only students, but some faculty, people of my vintage, so to speak. And I saw male and female students talking to each other and in an innocence that brought to mind what it must have been like before the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. [LAUGHTER] But it was a wonderful and for me a touching moment to see that kind of thing because it has become sad to say so very rare. There's a description in Roger Scruton, the late Roger Scruton. And I say that with great sorrow because he's now only just in the past two weeks, of course, become the late Roger Scruton. And he leaves quite a space, quite a space against the sky. But in his little book on hunting of all subjects, he had this to say. "Students today, their studies in victimology have all but deprived them of words. And their empty slogans and witless sneers make me both ashamed for them and anxious to invite them home for some tutorials. Between bouts of pop music and television, they are handed jargon-ridden drivel by outdated Parisian gurus, impenetrable texts of sociology, the half articulate leavings of the grievance trade." Scruton said what young people need is nothing so much as wit, allusion, and style. They should be studying advocacy and argument. They should be reading poetry, criticism, and the authors who have said things clearly and well. Thank you, Larry Arnn. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Larry Arnn. Thank you, faculty of Hillsdale. Thank you, trustees. Thank you all who are friends and supporters of Hillsdale for making what Scruton described as the real goal for education and students a real place here. In Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, he described a world in which books were bunrt. They were destroyed because, of course, they might contain very dangerous things like ideas. One fireman who had grown disenchanted with this ran away and ran in pursuit of a rumor that somewhere out in the swamps, there were small colonies of scholars and academics and other runaways who preserved the books by memorizing them. And this runaway fireman found one of these colonies in the swamps. And he was introduced to the people there. And they would step up and say, hello, I'm Descartes. I'm Descartes on first principles. Or hello, I'm Plato, The Symposium. They had memorized them to preserve them and hand them down until a better time would come when once again these works could be printed, and read, and treasured. And I thought today was a little bit like being in that swamp. Much more upscale, but the spirit, the spirit was the same. And it has been a joy to be here and be in the midst of it. [APPLAUSE] No one who met Robert Edward Lee no matter what the circumstances of the meeting ever seemed to fail to be impressed by the man. His dignity, his manners, his composure all seemed to create a peculiar sense of awe in the minds of observers. As a cadet at West Point in the 1820s, his classmate and later fellow Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston spoke of Lee having a dignity which was as much a part of himself as the elegance of his person, which evidenced a superiority that everyone acknowledged in his heart. In the 1840s, when he was posted as the engineering officer at Fort Hamilton guarding the approaches to The Narrows of New York City, one woman visitor described Lee as a most elegant man, quite the ideal of a military hero who received me with something more than military courtesy, bending his clear, handsome eye upon me. 10 years later, as the superintendent of West Point from 1852 to 1855, he appeared to the young John Schofield, who would go on to carve out a distinguished career of his own in the army, as the personification of dignity, justice, and kindness and was respected and admired as the ideal of a commanding officer. Even in the midst of battle at Fredericksburg in December of 1862, Lee awed Charles Francis Lawley, the London Times special correspondent in America, for the serenity or, if I may so express it, the unconscious dignity of General Lee's courage when he is under fire. Not even our friend Ulysses Grant could escape the sense of being upstaged by Lee at Appomattox. "He was a man of much dignity with an impassible face, Grant wrote in his memoirs, "dressed in a full uniform, which was entirely new, and wearing a sword of considerable value." While Grant was "self-conscious of my rough traveling suit-- the uniform of a private with the straps of a lieutenant general sewn on. I must have contrasted strangely," Grant admitted, "with a man so handsomely dressed, six feet high and of faultless form." These impressions appear so consistent and over so many years that it has been easy to conclude that dignity and manners and composure simply were the man and that there was, as Douglas Southall Freeman insisted at the end of his four-volume biography of Lee, no mystery at all to Robert E. Lee, or as Burton Hendrick wrote in The Lees of Virginia that Lee's character was ruled by a great simplicity, or that in the words of an even more worshipful biographer, Clifford Dowdey, Lee could rest totally in very simple things. However, this picture of straightforward, well-nigh, angelic serenity sits uneasily beside moments when cracks and inconsistencies in that fabled serenity appeared. For instance, Lee worried constantly and insistently about money despite the fact that he had married into one of the most prominent families in the Washington, DC, orbit-- that of George Washington Parke Custis, the step-grandson of George Washington, and his wife Mary Fitzhugh Custis, who owned the palatial estate that they called Arlington perched palatine-like on the Potomac bluffs overlooking the capital city. In fact, Robert E. Lee worried about money even though according to the will he filed before going off to fight in the Mexican War, he had actually inherited quite a healthy sum from his mother and Carter Lee and had invested with enough success to have acquired a portfolio worth $38,750. Translated into 2020 dollars, that's worth about $1.2 million. It made no difference. At the same moment, he assured his West Point classmate Jack Mackay that, "It was as much as I could do to make both ends meet this year, and I am anxiously looking for the dividend of the Virginia bank to enable me to square off all scores." When Lee left Fort Hamilton in 1847 for duty in the Mexican War, he complained to his brother that, "I fear I have not enough to take me and my servant to the Army and purchase my horses." When he transferred out of the Corps of Engineers in 1855 to become Lieutenant Colonel of the 2nd cavalry in Texas, he insisted on writing checks on his Alexandria bank from Texas for his wife at Arlington to deposit for cash and all the while chiding her to be "very particular, dear Mary, when you deal in money matters and to keep a memorandum book and set everything down." His advice for his youngest son in 1856 was to cultivate industry and frugality, and be prudent before he is liberal, and be just before he is generous. Other kinds of cracks opened under pressure. Trained as an engineer and the director of a series of demanding coastal engineering projects from controlling the silting up of the St. Louis waterfront to the construction of Fort Carroll in Baltimore Harbor, Lee was at his happiest with a draftsman's notebook in hand and impatient at every other sort of paperwork. "I abhor the sight of pen and paper," he admitted. "And to put one to the other requires as great a moral effort as for a cat to walk on live coals." This did not prevent him from writing over 4,000 letters in his lifetime, but that was personal correspondence. Official papers were his bane. He also grew impatient when matters spilled out of the kind of perfection that tea squares and equations can impose. After the close of the Maryland campaign in 1862, he unleashed on his two chief subordinates, James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson, a long lecture by letter on the depredations committed by this army, its daily diminution, and a loss of arms thrown aside as too burdensome by stragglers. It would be impossible to imagine Ulysses Grant writing a letter like this to William Tecumseh Sherman or James B. McPherson. But for Lee, no shortcoming in either of these commanders missed his perfect eye. "Roll calls are neglected. And officers of companies and regiments are ignorant of the true condition of their commands and are unable to account properly for absentees." He now wanted a brigade guard to bring up the rear of each brigade to keep up the ranks, drive up all stragglers irrespective of commands and all leaving the ranks. "We must," he demanded, "infuse a different spirit among our officers," which was more or less what he found a begging in the Confederacy as a whole. "Our people are so little liable to control that it is difficult to get them to follow any course not in accordance with their inclination," he admitted to Justus Scheibert, the Prussian military observer. And when Scheibert expressed frankly my admiration for the lion-like bravery of his men, Lee disagreed. "Give me also Prussian discipline and Prussian forms. And you would see quite different results." That perfectionism was linked to a more easily agitated temper than easily met the eye. Walter Taylor, who as Lee's adjutant during the Civil War had to sort and docket the incoming mail, discovered that Lee had lost nothing of his engineer's distaste for office work, especially if it was "heavy with matters of detail coming from the personal commands of our army which demanded the personal consideration and decision of the commander of the Army." If Taylor brought him some case of a vexatious character, Lee's irritation would flare up gradually, beginning with a little nervous twist or jerk of the neck and head and eventually erupting into a full-fledged argument. "He is so unreasonable and provoking," Taylor raged to his fiancee in a letter. "I never worked so hard to please anyone and with so little effect as General Lee." Charles Marshall, who handled Lee's outgoing correspondence, had an only slightly easier task because Lee either dictated first drafts or allowed Marshall to draw up documents himself. But then Lee "weighed every sentence I wrote, frequently making minute verbal alterations and questioned me closely as to the evidence on which I based all statements which he did not know to be correct." He did not allow any friend of soldiers condemned by court martial to reach his tent for personal appeal, remembered Charles Venable, another member of his civil war staff. And when such a disappointed man elbowed their way into his presence, Lee would bark not only at the petitioner, but at Venable for not preventing the annoyance. "Why did you permit that man to come to my tent and make me show my temper?" One of Stonewall Jackson's staff officers asked an innocent question while making a report to Lee. And Lee's response at this impertinence was so frosty that the staffer remarked, "I never felt so small in my life." Even Lee's son, George Washington Custis Lee, who was attached to Confederate President Jefferson Davis's personal staff, had to endure his father's flare-ups, reading letters from his father complaining that he was so tired of the pettiness of the Confederate Congress that he wished they "would pass a law relieving me from all duty and legislating someone in my place better able to do it. I fear you will think I am in a bad humor. And I fear I am." But the deepest mark of the depths of Lee's temper occurred in the spring of 1859. When his father-in-law died in 1857, Lee was named executor of the Custis estate, which to his surprise required him to superintend the emancipation within five years of all the Custis slaves at Arlington and two other Custis-owned properties. Lee could not hurry to execute this emancipation because the will also mandated that four $10,000 legacies be paid to each of Lee's daughters. Since the properties had been run haphazardly for years by old Custis, Lee would need to turn them into engines of efficiency to pay the required legacies. And that he did with an engineer's sense of precision. But the Custis slaves did not share his interest in making Arlington and the other places profitable. They believed that the Custis will had in fact emancipated them at once. And in 1858, three of them, two men and a woman, acted on that belief and fled to Westminster, Maryland, where they were eventually apprehended and returned to Arlington. His fabled self-control teetering unsteadily, Lee demanded of the three why they ran away. Because, they replied, frankly, we considered ourselves free. That to Robert E. Lee was not merely a legal misapprehension. It was a threat to his own integrity as the Custis will's executor and the future of his daughters. He then told us he would "teach us a lesson we would never forget," and ordered the three stripped to the waist, and directed the Arlington overseer, John McQuinn, to give the men 50 lashes each and 20 to the woman. McQuinn balked and had sufficient humanity to decline. So Lee turned to Richard Williams, the Arlington Constable who had brought the fugitives back, and had him perform the whipping while Lee demanded he lay it on well. By one account, Lee took the whip in his own hands and flayed them himself. Afterwards, he was so appalled at his own rage that he could not admit the full extent of what he had done, even to his son Custis, who read about the incident in the newspapers. "The New-York Tribune has attacked me for my treatment of your grandfather's slaves," he conceded to Custis. "But I shall not reply. Your grandfather," he added, "has left me an unpleasant legacy." Robert E. Lee's anxieties, his impatience, and his dark temper have, since the publication of Thomas Connolly's melodramatic recasting of Lee's historical reputation in The Marble Man-- Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society in 1977, been seized upon as a triumphant contradiction of the legendary Lee who so impressed his contemporaries civilian and military. To Alan Nolan in 1991, Lee was just a typical southern partisan with all the southern aristocrats' feeling for the inferiority of northern people. To Michael Fellman in 2000, Lee was really an exemplar of the dark side of the white supremacist road. To Roy Blount, probably the most unlikely of all Lee biographers, in 2003, Lee was mentally and pathologically disturbed. But casting Lee in contradiction as either saint or as sinner, as either simple or pathological, is in the end less profitable than seeing his anxieties as a counterpoint to his dignity, his impatience and his temper as a match to his composure. To begin to understand the mystery of Robert E. Lee is to begin with three large-scale factors lodged deep in the man's personality. One of these was the desire for perfection, then the desire for independence, and then the desire for security. All three were rooted in the early trauma inflicted by one of the more remarkably dysfunctional families of the early Republic. Up through the revolution, the Lees of Virginia had been one of the first of American families presiding over large properties on the northern neck of Virginia. And in the case of the four Lee brothers who straddled the revolutionary years, Richard Henry Lee, Francis Lightfoot Lee, Arthur and William Lee, they were that band of brothers, according to John Adams, intrepid and unchangeable who stood in the gap in defense of their country from the first glimmering of the revolution through all its rising light to its perfect day. Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee both served in the Continental Congress at the outbreak of the revolution. And they are the only brothers who appear as signers of the Declaration of Independence. Arthur Lee would turn into an outstanding diplomat in Spain and France. And William Lee would represent American interests in the German states and Austria. But something in the succeeding generation of Lees snapped. And nowhere was the snap louder than in the gentleman whose picture is on the screen behind me, that of Henry Lee the third, Robert's father. Henry Lee was a graduate of Princeton, my employer, in the same class of 1771 as James Madison. Henry Lee served George Washington so effectively as a cavalry leader that he won the nickname Light Horse Harry. And in the glow of the revolution, Light Horse Harry captured not only the hand of his cousin Matilda and her family's estate Stratford Hall, but he also captured the governorship of Virginia. Nothing seemed beyond his grasp. After that, however, Light Horse Harry disintegrated. His ardent federalism antagonized Virginia's Jeffersonians. His harebrained investment schemes bankrupted him. After Matilda's death, he attempted to recoup his fortune by marrying a Virginia Carter, Anne Hill Carter. But he burned through her cash too or at least the limited amount of cash her father had prudently put at the newlyweds' disposal. If Henry Lee were alive today, he'd invest in ski resorts in Bangladesh. After he spent a stint in debtor's prison, the sadder but wiser Anne Carter Lee demanded that her family, which now numbered three sons, including Robert, and two daughters, move to more manageable quarters in Alexandria. But Light Horse Harry could not shake his penchant for disaster. After being beaten within an inch of his life in an Anti-Federalist riot in Baltimore in 1812, Light Horse Harry decamped the following year for the safety of the West Indies. Robert never saw his father again. He was six years old. Light Horse Harry only returned to America fatally ill in 1818, barely making landfall in Georgia before dying and leaving Robert to grow up in literal as well as figurative terms fatherless. "There is," wrote the literary critic Leon Edel, "no hurt among all the human hurts deeper and less understandable than the loss of a parent when one is not yet an adolescent." And Robert E. Lee offers us a textbook case in the truth of that saying. Until he achieved fame in his own right in 1862, people invariably referred to Robert as the son of the famed Light Horse Harry, but he never did, except in his application letter to West Point. He did not visit his father's grave until the winter of 1861 to 62 even though his first posting out of West Point to Cockspur Island was only a few miles away. He was instead his mother's son, becoming the de facto head of household in Alexandria. It was Robert who carried the keys, attended to the marketing, managed all the outdoor business, and took care of his mother's horses. When his mother was ill, it was Robert who ordered up the family's shabby brougham and then would be seen carrying her in his arms to the carriage and arranging her cushions with the gentleness of an experienced nurse. One of the flock of Lee cousins in Alexandria remembered that Robert became legendary for his devotion to his mother and the great help he was to her in all her business on household matters. Years later, he would simply describe himself as my mother's outdoor agent and confidential messenger. He would in other words fulfill the role his father had abandoned. He would sacrifice himself in order to perfect the imperfections Light Horse Harry had visited on the Lees. This pursuit of redemptive perfection lies behind much of the marble model that met so many people's eyes. And it was Lee's determination to be not Light Horse Harry when everyone expected him to be a reprise of his ne'er-do-well father which fired his impatience and eventually his ferocious outburst of temper at his own and others' imperfections. That did not mean that Robert would enjoy the shackles and demands of perfection. And it came as a shock to Anne Carter Lee when, in 1824, Robert announced his desire to leave her home in Alexandria and attend West Point. "How can I live without Robert?" she wailed. "He is both son and daughter to me." She would have been more disturbed if she could have sensed how much Robert, for all of his uncomplaining self-sacrifice, longed to be free and unencumbered of his mother as much as his father. "I thought," he wrote, "and intended always to be one and alone in the world. I am fond of independence," Lee wrote. And that, as he explained in 1851, was linked to his perfectionist impulse. "It is that feeling that prompts me to come up strictly to the requirements of law and regulations. I wish neither to seek or receive indulgence from anyone. I wish to feel under obligation to no one." The problem with longing for independence is that it does not guarantee security. And security was precisely the damaging subtraction Light Horse Harry made in Robert's life. So as much as Robert Lee longed to be his own man, he was also aware that the independent man could very well be the impoverished, lonely, neglected man. And he did not want that, either. One of the major attractions of a career in the US Army was its guarantee of lifetime employment security. For the tiny cadre of officers who commanded the pre-Civil War army, there was no retirement system. Once in, many stayed in and at paid rank until their last breath. The army was not generous. And promotion was agonizingly slow. But it was one of the few professions in the pre-Civil War republic which was secure. "All my schemes of happiness," he wrote, "depend on retiring to some quiet corner among the hills of Virginia, where I can indulge my natural propensities without interruption." But when his older brother Carter tried to persuade him to leave the army and do just that with the 17,000 acres in hardy Patrick and Shenandoah counties that they had inherited from their father, Robert hesitated. "Perhaps the charms of your establishment may win me from Uncle Sam," he replied to Carter in 1832. But in the end, he decided not. The army was his place "for better, for worse, as we say in matrimony." And he would have to relinquish such prospects as Western Virginia offered to "bachelors like yourself." Matrimony was yet another path to security. For in 1831, Lee married Mary Anna Randolph Custis, the sole surviving child of the Arlington Custises, and thereby won himself a permanent home at Arlington for the next 30 years. The difficulty was that the security represented by the Custis marriage and Arlington did not sit very easily beside Lee's yearning for independence. His Custis in-laws made no secret of their desire to withdraw Robert from his present professions and yield to him the management of affairs. But Lee had no desire to abandon the army merely to become the glorified overseer of the Custises. Despite his very real affection for his mother-in-law, Lee found his father-in-law an amiable but annoying dunce. "The major," the elderly Custis's honorary militia title, "the major is busy farming," Lee wrote to Carter. Busy was sardonic. "His cornfield is not yet enclosed or plowed, but he is rushing on all he knows." The old man had tried his hand at writing a Sir Walter Scott-ish play about 13th century Scotland, which he called Montgomerie or The Orphan of a Wreck. It ran for four nights. And so as Lee chuckled, Montgomerie failed. Worse still, one of Custis's six amateurish history paintings, the Battle of Trenton, has been exhibited in the capital and met with more or less the same response. It attracted some severe animant versions from the critics, which he says were leveled at his politics. Lee knew better. Seven months into the Civil War, when Arlington had been lost to union occupation, Lee shrugged off the estate's loss and turned his attention to the possibility of acquiring another property, nothing less than his one-time boyhood home, Stratford Hall. "Stratford," he wrote, "is endeared to me by many recollections. And it has always been a great desire of my life to be able to purchase it." He might have found security in attaching himself to the Custises, but he yearned for the independence of being a Lee. And nothing symbolized that more than Stratford. And perhaps it was no coincidence that two months later, Robert E. Lee finally paid his father's grave on Cumberland Island a long delayed visit. Robert E. Lee was not a profound thinker. His compulsive letter writing betrays little evidence of reading beyond the demands of his profession. But he was a clear thinker. And much of that thinking oscillated among the poles he had set up for himself of perfection, independence, and security. And that was particularly true in his role as the Confederacy's most successful and influential soldier. Lee was incessant in his demands on the Confederacy's civilian leadership for supplies, conscripts, and recruits, and for the perfection on the part of his officers. Time and again, Lee complained, "Beaten federal armies will get away because I cannot have my orders carried out." When one hapless brigadier had to report the federal escape after Chancellorsville, Lee's fury was volcanic. "General Pender, that is what you young men always do. You allow those people to get away." But beyond the demand for perfection, Lee also saw more clearly than any other Confederate leader that the South could not survive a long, drawn-out bout with the North. Independence and security both dictated that Southern armies must cross Maryland into Pennsylvania and there convince Northerners, either by battle or by simple occupation, to agree to peace and Southern independence. He would attempt this twice in 1862 and 1863. And he was ready for a third attempt in 1864 when Grant's Overland Campaign struck that option away. This strategy, which some have characterized as audacity, was for Lee merely logic. Lee's modern critics have railed against what they decry as Lee's obsession with Virginia at the expense of the rest of the Confederacy. But Lee understood that the Confederacy could lose Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, even Georgia, and still win. Losing Virginia meant losing nearly 20% of the Confederacy's white population, 17% of its banking capital, a third of its industrial goods, and 40% of its wheat. Richmond alone held the Confederacy's depots and arsenals. And through Richmond, Lee's army had its chief means of access to sources of supply further south. He dreaded nothing more than being forced into a siege of Richmond. "He frequently spoke," recalled Charles Marshall, "to the effect that if the siege of Richmond were once undertaken by an army too strong to be beaten off, the fall of the place would be inevitable. And with it would go Virginia and the Confederacy," which in 1865 is exactly what happened. Lee had foreseen it all and understood it as a failure to meet the standard of perfect commitment. "It is so difficult," he admitted to his wife, "to get our people unaccustomed to the necessities of war to comprehend the measures required for the occasion. Instead, they failed the standard of perfect commitment that independence and security required." Lee told William Mahone at Appomattox that he had advised the Confederate authorities at the start that the contest on which we had entered could not be overestimated. And our chance to win was to be found by throwing the whole military or fighting power of the Confederacy into the struggle. And this, he said, manifestly had not been done. Yet, this was not the final chapter for Robert E. Lee. In the summer of 1865, he was made the unlikely offer of the Presidency of Washington College in far away Lexington, Virginia. Almost as unlikely, he accepted. And in the final five years of his life, he managed to achieve the resolution of the impulses to perfection, independence, and security that he had spent a lifetime seeking. The trustees of the college were congratulated on acquiring a figurehead. But Lee made them the figureheads. And he turned the nearly bankrupt college into a southern educational powerhouse, outstripping even the University of Virginia. When he assumed the presidency in 1865, Washington College had only 17 students on the rolls. After one year, Lee had built that to 146. By 1868, enrollment stood at 411. He also took in hand the reconstruction of the curriculum, sidelining the traditional studies of Greek and Latin, one thing for which I have not yet forgiven him, in favor of recreating Washington College as a commercial school to give instruction in bookkeeping and the forms and of details of business. "No wonder," he would remark looking back that, "the great mistake of my life was taking a military education." A small, remote college would become instead the place where he would find independence to run matters as he saw fit, security for himself and his family, and perfection in what he could demand of his students. Perhaps, in retrospect, we can say that Robert Lee should have shrugged off the shadow of Light Horse Harry. Perhaps, he should have left the army and built a real estate empire in Western Virginia. Perhaps, he should have become the handsome but aloof family overseer of Arlington and let the Civil War wash past him, but he did not. And the forces that made him what he was in the past governed the extraordinary skill with which he managed Confederate military affairs. Those forces did not, however, make him a happy man. That only came at the end in Lexington, but it was a perfect end. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] AUDIENCE: Thank you, Dr. Guelzo. We now have time for Q&A. Please make your way to the microphone if you have a question. AUDIENCE: Thank you, doctor. I'd like you to comment on a man who is often quoted as saying, do your duty in all things. You can never do more. You should never do less. And then he violated his oath to the Constitution of the United States. ALLEN GUELZO: When I look at the figure of Robert E. Lee, I look at it-- and this will surprise nobody-- as a Yankee from Yankee land. So I am an unlikely Lee biographer to say the least. And that never comes more to a point than on the question that I'm probably most frequently asked this way. Did Robert E. Lee commit treason? And I think there's only one answer to that. And it's inescapable. The answer is yes. Yes, he committed treason. He had served in the United States Army for 30-some years. He had sworn the oath. He had fought under the stars and stripes in Mexico. And he consciously turned against all of that. And I don't have another way of speaking of Lee except to use that word. It is the Constitution's definition. Constitution defines treason as making war against the United States and giving aid and comfort to its enemies. I don't have some mystical way of being able to get around that and seeing Robert E. Lee as not capturing precisely that reprehensible behavior. I understand that there were many contingencies. And there were many qualifications which went into his decision in 1861. Yet, at the same time, I have in past time sworn an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. My father swore that oath. My son has sworn that oath. And whether it's Robert E. Lee or not, when you raise your hand against that flag and that Constitution, you are my enemy. And I will regard you as such. And I do not hesitate to say that if by some odd transposition of time I should find myself with Robert E. Lee in my gun sights, I would not hesitate to pull the trigger. I don't say that with pride or pleasure, but I say it as a reality recognizing the seriousness of what he did. He was at the close of the war indicted for treason. It never came to trial. There were a number of legal complications which got in the way of anything like that. But if we are to look at Robert E. Lee and see him as we should see him, as a citizen who has obligations under the Constitution of the United States, then there really is no other word that we can use and no way to escape from that word. Robert E. Lee committed treason. I don't have a better way of putting it. I hope that answers the question. [APPLAUSE] AUDIENCE: We have time for one more question. AUDIENCE: There are historians in the medical military history that speak to Robert E. Lee's state of health, especially his problems with congestive heart failure and how they may have affected his judgment and his ability to command during Gettysburg. Could you comment on that? ALLEN GUELZO: Robert E. Lee began suffering symptoms of angina in the 1850s when he was then Lieutenant Colonel of the 2nd cavalry in Texas. It was referred to then as rheumatism. But knowing the subsequent developments of his medical history, it seems pretty plain that these are the first symptoms that we begin to see. And it shows up more dramatically in the spring of 1863 when he has a heart attack. He has all the classic symptoms. He's bedridden for almost a month. And he tries to, in letters to his wife, he-- because he stays with the army. He doesn't go back to Richmond and let family take care of him. He stays with his army. But the letters that he writes, he's always trying to downplay the seriousness of what has happened. "Well, I've got a very bad cold. The doctors have been thumping me like an old steam boiler." But it was a heart attack. He had a second one in the fall of 1863, less severe, but severe enough that he could not ride. He had to get around in a wagon or an ambulance. And the terms wagon and ambulance and the Civil War are almost interchangeable. He has a case of dysentery in the spring of 1864 at the apex of the Overland Campaign. And one reason why Grant is able to move as fast as Grant does and move around Lee is that Lee is just not up to par in terms of health. So there are repeated health problems that Lee deals with and which plague him and affect his performance. Bear in mind that he is the oldest field commander in the Civil War. He is 56 years old at the time of the Battle of Gettysburg. Ulysses Grant, by contrast, is 41, William Tecumseh Sherman, 43. You go down the list of other major figures in the Civil War, same thing. George McClellan was 39. Lee is the oldest and in some respects, given the rigors of 19th century campaigning which is literally living in the rough, it takes its toll on him physically. And it is a toll which he probably should have recognized. And it leads him in August of 1863, partly because of the defeat at Gettysburg but also partly because of his health considerations, to offer his resignation to Jefferson Davis. Davis refuses. "Where," Davis says in reply, "where would I find someone more capable of command than yourself?" And that was true. Because even Robert E. Lee, plagued with angina, was infinitely more resourceful than any other secondary commanders who could have been put into his place. When he complained about officers and generals not taking his orders seriously, not carrying them out perfectly, he was not exaggerating. Who would have taken Lee's place? There was no deep bench in the Confederacy. So Lee soldiers on. And he goes all the way to Appomattox. And what I think is poignant is that he goes to Appomattox saying to William Nelson Pendleton, "I always knew that it would turn out this way." He saw it from the beginning. AUDIENCE: Please join me in thanking Dr. Guelzo. ALLEN GUELZO: Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]
Info
Channel: Hillsdale College
Views: 12,584
Rating: 4.8100891 out of 5
Keywords:
Id: OO-bbyGREVk
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 52min 34sec (3154 seconds)
Published: Fri Feb 14 2020
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.