Sitting astride his fine gray horse Traveller on the heights above Fredericksburg, Virginia, General Robert E. Lee watched the brave, blue-clad soldiers of General Ambrose Burnside charge out of the morning mist and up the slope into the withering fire of the firm Confederate lines.
"It is well that war is so terrible," said Lee to one of his officers; "otherwise we should grow too fond of it."
The great Southern Civil War commander had no desire to see men needlessly slaughtered. But he was so skillful at the tragic game of war that he delighted in outmaneuvering —and then outfighting if he could—the numerically superior Union forces. His major strategy was to outwit his enemies by swift strategic maneuvers, as often as possible drawing Union troops away from his endangered capital of Richmond, Virginia, by wide flanking movements which threatened the Union capital of Washington, D. C.
Wily as a fox but courageous as a lion, he whipped McClellan in the Battles of the Seven Days, Burnside at Fredericksburg, and Hooker in the wilderness near Chancellorsville, but here he lost his great lieutenant, Stonewall Jackson. Not until his defeat at Gettysburg did Lee begin to lose his power of maneuver. And when President Lincoln appointed the relentless Ulysses S. Grant to supreme command, the greatly weakened Confederacy began to see that its days were numbered.
—from the dust jacket
Few wars produce a military hero who in time is loved by both friend and foe. But the American Civil War gave us Robert E. Lee, who today is honored in every state of the Union.
It was Abraham Lincoln who said, "With malice toward none; with charity for all... let us strive... to bind up the nation's wounds..." But the sentiment was identical with that of the gallant Southern commander when he offered his sword to the generous Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox.
Lee, like Lincoln, would have avoided the Civil War if that had been humanly possible. Like Lincoln, he thought the institution of slavery was an evil. And like Lincoln he would have found a more gradual and peaceful means for achieving justice.
He was offered command in the field of all the Union forces, but declined with a heavy heart, realizing that his first loyalty was to his native state, Virginia.
Jonathan Daniels, who in his many books and through many public services has shown himself to be a patriot with loyalties too broad to be merely regional, has written a tender but objective life of Lee. He follows the often tragic narrative from Lee's unwanted birth through West Point, the Mexican War, and the Civil War to Lee's gentle final years at Washington and Lee, seeking to educate a new generation of peaceful Southerners to be proud of the entire nation. If anything can more closely bind the South and North together, it is men like Lee, and books like this one.
Sterling North
General Editor
—from the book
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