While writing a book about Abraham Lincoln, I naturally thought of Robert E. Lee. Not often, for I was determined to avoid that great pitfall of Civil War historiography, battle porn. Yet there, across enemy lines, was that other famous bearded face: handsome and well-groomed, not angular and scruffy, but dyed, like the president’s, with melancholy. Well might Lee be melancholy, for though he had all the virtues, yet at the crisis of his and the nation’s life he made all the wrong choices.
Jonathan Horn’s fascinating book looks at Lee through the prism of yet another famous man, George Washington. His subtle and sympathetic examination of the Washington–Lee connection helps us understand the Lee question.
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