is statue, removed from a public park in Charlottesville in July 2021, was donated that December, by the City Council, to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. The latter plans to “transform a national symbol of white supremacy into a new work of art that will reflect racial justice and inclusion.” Be careful for what you wish. Some decades hence, statues of carnivores such as King and Clinton may fall to the wrath of the herbivores.
In the meantime, Robert E. Lee is one of so many swept from the complexity of life into the clarity of caricature. That makes any prospective biographer brave as well as vulnerable, liable to provoke the ire of others searching for flaws.
Fortunately, in Robert E. Lee: A Life,Allen C. Guelzo, an experienced biographer and historian, whose well-chosen subjects have included Abraham Lincoln, proves adept at locating key elements of Lee’s personality and charting their shifts, including Lee’s sense of unfulfillment in the 1850s. The secessionist crisis found him at first incredulous, then apprehensive, and then an equivocator. Lee is viewed, in the popular conception, as having publicly turned his back on his service, his flag, and his country, but that might imply a degree of clarity that does not really capture the uncertainties of 1861. In turn, Lee was to be a figure around whom the Confederates could rally, and this was important in helping to create a Confederate “nation” from people who stood for states’ rights.
