The historian Allen C. Guelzo is a self-described Yankee partisan. In a dozen books on the Civil War and Reconstruction, he has portrayed the Union cause as a righteous enterprise. In the very first sentence of his newest work, he charges Robert E. Lee with treason. This is not a warm recounting of Lee’s life. Still, if Guelzo is critical of Lee, he does not withhold praise when the circumstances justify it. By the end of the book, Guelzo chooses not to pursue the case against Lee for his treasonous choice to make war on the United States.
While the tenor of “Robert E. Lee” is far from that of the 1935 Pulitzer Prize-winning four-volume paean to Lee written by the journalist Douglas Southall Freeman, it is also not a biographical takedown in the style of Thomas L. Connelly’s “The Marble Man” (1977). Nor is Guelzo’s work the evenhanded portrait offered by Emory Thomas in “Robert E. Lee: A Biography” (1995), the best Lee biography currently in print.
