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A distinguished historian once remarked that General William T. Sherman was incapable of writing a dull letter. He also added that the same could not be said of General Robert E. Lee. As Elizabeth Brown Pryor demonstrates in her admirable new work, Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, that historian's judgment was a bit premature.
In fact, Lee could be a most entertaining writer. There was in the man a streak of impish humor, too often constrained by the mores of the time and the disapproval of his frail and rather humorless wife, Mary. He could play pranks, act the clown, and commit the most gentle yet direct double entendres at times. And in times of stress and personal tragedy, he could express his own heartache and sorrow in wonderfully emotive terms. Contained as Lee always seemed to be in his public face, in his private letters he allowed that face to assume myriad expressions.
There have been several collections of Lee's wartime military letters and dispatches, and another is even now in compilation. In Reading the Man, however, Pryor has delved instead into virtually every known personal letter written by Lee. Indeed, many of these letters have only become available now as they were released by the family to her alone for this book. Where Lee was formal and thoroughly professional in his official correspondence, exposing virtually nothing of the inner man, in his letters to family and friends he seems at times almost anxious to reveal himself.
Reading the Man offers dozens of Lee's letters verbatim, and used hundreds of others to present, largely in his own words, a portrait of a warm, witty, sensitive, ambitious, loving, and often frustrated man. She also uses his letters as springboards to delve into Lee's feelings on slavery, emancipation, the Union, his complex relations with his wife and children, and even his most controversial act of all, perhaps, his decision to resign from the United States Army and offer his services to the Confederacy. Pryor's analysis of his resignation letter, what he said about it at the time, the justifications he gave later, and what his friends and family said about it in their own correspondence, adds wonderful depth and complexity to a decision that has for too long been accepted as cut and dried.
Pryor's research is outstanding, as befits her performance in past works. She gives Lee's wartime career a brief overview, leaving his military activities to the host of others who continually bring out more and more studies of the same actions. But her attention to his pre-war development is extensive, and her shorter look at his post-war efforts at sectional reconciliation, and personal rebuilding, are perhaps the most interesting of all, for it was always in defeat and adversity that Lee's character shone most brightly.
In this, the bicentennial of Lee's birth, several new books on Lee will appear. It is probable that most will have little to say that is new, and much that has been said before, and sometimes better said at that. Amid such a field, Pryor's Reading the Man will stand out both for its originality, as well as for the keenness of its perceptions and conclusions. This is truly the first indispensable book on Lee since Douglas Southall Freeman's magisterial biography of the 1930s. 688 pages • 6 1/8" x 9 1/4" • halftones
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