Monsters on the order of Hitler are comparatively uncommon. However monsters aren’t the one drawback for biographers. There are additionally the Inconsistent, the Out-of-Step, the Authors of Vital Errors, the Nearsighted, the Disastrously Effectively Intentioned. How can we write a biography of a Nearsighted just like the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and clarify how he may have misjudged Hitler so catastrophically? How can we have interaction with an Out-of-Stepper like Chamberlain’s successor, Winston Churchill (on the Dardanelles, Edward VIII and colonialism)? How can we deal with an Inconsistent like Ulysses Grant, combating for the Union as a basic within the Civil Battle however issuing an antisemitic order in 1862, or Woodrow Wilson, making the world protected for democracy however endorsing Jim Crow?
My examination of Robert E. Lee has posed many of those identical questions. He raised his hand in opposition to the USA he had sworn to defend, and there’s no different phrase for that however treason (Lee was indicted on a cost of treason however by no means delivered to trial). He fought with maddening talent through the Civil Battle in protection of a Confederacy brazenly dedicated to the perpetuation of slavery. By some accounts, he even whipped an enslaved one who tried to run away. And he turned the apex of the “Misplaced Trigger” mythology, which handled him because the peerless Southern cavalier and the final word vindication of white supremacy.
However then different realities intrude. If by “cavalier” Lee was speculated to be a plantation aristocrat, Lee was definitely no cavalier. His department of the well-known Virginia Lees was a marginal one, and Lee himself was the product of an adversarial childhood. (His feckless father, “Gentle Horse Harry” Lee of Revolutionary fame, abandoned him when he was solely 6.) That left him possessed by thirsts for safety, independence and perfection.
Lee is a research in contradictions. He frankly admitted that slavery was “an ethical & political evil in any nation” — however added mercilessly that it was actually extra of an issue for whites and made “the blacks … immeasurably higher off right here than in Africa, morally, socially & bodily.” He urged emancipation on the Confederacy’s management, together with the enlistment of emancipated enslaved individuals within the Confederacy’s armies — however the enlistment gambit got here solely within the battle’s ultimate months, as a final determined gasp, when the Confederacy’s scenario was already hopeless. Within the postwar years, he discouraged the fostering of “Misplaced Trigger” myths and assumed the presidency of a small faculty that he changed into a pilot for progressive training — and but confirmed no sympathy for the previous slaves throughout him and made no effort to combine the faculty’s scholar physique. Just like the Germans of the Thirties and Nineteen Forties described by W.G. Sebald, Lee was “at all times wanting and looking out away on the identical time.”
Not even the Lee statues specific a easy message. Accomplice statuary at all times carried with it a truculent refusal to resist the brand new racial and political world created by the Civil Battle and the abolition of slavery. Ana Edwards, a neighborhood activist, hailed the statue’s elimination as “consultant of the truth that we’re type of peeling again the layers of injustice that Black individuals and folks of coloration have skilled when ruled by white supremacist insurance policies for therefore lengthy.”