Reflections on Lee

No other general in American history has attracted the attention and adoration accorded to Robert Edward Lee, the peerless chieftain of the Confederacy. Indeed, in all of history, only Napoleon can vie with Lee for the hold he maintains on the imagination of students and admirers around the globe. Succeeding generations have invented and reinvented Lee, trying to make him a man for their own times, and year after year the writings of worshipers and revisionists—and occasionally even reviler...