Civil War scholar Michael Fellman investigates the psychology and beliefs of that conflict's most admired general in an intriguing intellectual biography. From his days as a cadet at West Point, Robert E. Lee (1807-70) struck his companions and teachers as "a full-blown aristocratic beau ideal ... tall, stunningly handsome, bright, manly, commanding." His brilliant leadership of the Confederate army against daunting odds only increased Southerners' reverence, which came to be shared by many white Northerners after the partisan passions of the war had faded. Fellman probes behind the façade of the "Marble Man" to discover the conflicts and uncertainties that seethed there. Son of an American Revolutionary legend who ended his life in bankruptcy and disgrace, Lee felt that he must redeem his family name and become the perfect Southern gentleman; yet, he struggled to reconcile his ideals of Christian virtue, self-denial, humility, duty, and honor with his desire for fame and success. "In a very real sense," Fellman writes, "the Civil War rescued Robert E. Lee from marginality and obscurity. In it, he learned to focus his values, his talent, and his deepest feelings on the terrible martial problems at hand." Exploring those values, Fellman unsparingly reveals their roots in racism, repression, and hypocrisy; yet, he acknowledges and admires (with reservations) Lee's sincere adherence to them. "He walked not above but within all the contradictions of a specific society," Fellman writes. "This makes him far more interesting than some boring marble representation of the supposedly unitary and perfect saint." Some ardent worshippers of "Saint Robert" might disagree, but most students of American history will find this a stimulating reassessment. --Wendy Smith


From Booklist
Canadian historian Fellman's biography of Robert E. Lee is a more psychological appraisal than William J. Cooper's book on Davis. In general terms, Fellman (Citizen Sherman , 1995) tracks the life of the great Confederate general in a chronological fashion. But within that framework, his analysis of Lee is presented in thematic chapters, including discussions of Lee's ideas on race, slavery, marriage, fatherhood, and the "lost cause." Fellman argues that for Lee, "the struggle for self-mastery--the effort to repress every potentially disruptive impulse and emotion--was perpetual." Like Jefferson Davis, his commander-in-chief, Lee was highly principled, and readers follow the evolution and practical execution of his principles. But Fellman is careful to ensure that Lee is seen as a real person with complications and contradictions, a "far more interesting [individual] than some boring marble representation of [a] supposedly unitary and perfect saint." Brad Hooper
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Review
"A valuable work for anyone interested in the Civil War."--Albert A. Nofi, New York Military Affairs Symposium Newsletter


Review
Praise for Michael Fellman's Citizen Sherman


"This superb biography gives as full a portrait of
nineteenth-century family dynamics as of the dynamics of the battlefield."
--The New Yorker

"Gripping and original, this is the definitive modern study of
the Civil War's most feared fighter."                  
--Chicago Tribune

"A penetrating study of one of the most enigmatic and
controversial figures in American history."
--The Boston Globe

"Boldly argued and gracefully written."
--The New York Times Book Review

"A vivid portrait of perhaps the most savage warrior of the Civil War period."
--The Wall Street Journal

"A fascinating and readable book about a famous and
furious man, brilliant, insightful, garrulous, complicated, tightly wound,
energetic, aggressive, salty, angry, and racist. Here is a man who is
grudge-bearing, yet often kind; insecure, yet positive about what the war was about, how to win it, and how it would end."
--The Washington Post Book World


Book Description
With rigorous research and unprecedented insight into Robert E. Lee's personal and public lives, Michael Fellman here uncovers the intelligent, ambitious, and often troubled man behind the legend, exploring his life within the social, cultural, and political context of the nineteenth-century American South.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Perhaps no other American historical figure is as shrouded in legend as General Robert E. Lee. Long extolled as the perfect gentleman as well as the consummate military commander, Lee—known as the Marble Man—has been venerated more than understood. During his lifetime, he contributed to this picture through the austerity and rigid control he tried to impose on himself.
        The Making of Robert E. Lee reveals the flesh-and-blood Lee—not to expose him but to better understand a man who was perhaps the most fervent practitioner of the Southern code of conduct, behind which he camouflaged much of his character.
        With unprecedented insight into Robert E. Lee's personal and public lives, Michael Fellman humanizes this one-dimensional icon, placing him within history rather than above it. With both detachment and compassion, Fellman deftly probes beneath the surface to show Lee as a deeply conflicted man, one with sometimes surprising views on sexuality, family, religion, and politics, as well as military practice. This realistic portrayal situates Lee firmly in the contexts of his time, place, class, gender, and race.        
        Although Lee tried to be a virtuous, even perfect man, he often flirted extravagantly—and perhaps did more—with women other than his wife. While he strove to be a kind and honest leader, he was extremely distant from and controlling of both his sons and the soldiers in his Civil War army. With his deeply ingrained habits of command, Lee the aristocraticdisciplinarian looked down upon the white lower orders as he did upon slaves.
        After a distinguished if conventional career in the peacetime American army, Lee chose to join the Confederate cause on account of his unquestioning identification with the values and interests of the Virginia slaveholding class. Something of a failure during the first year of combat, Lee was thrust into command at a crucial juncture in the war, just as the Union army approached Richmond, the Confederate capital. Fellman argues that "the Civil War rescued Robert E. Lee from marginality and obscurity."
        No general proved more audacious and tenacious than Lee, and none had a greater passion for battle. For a year, almost without exception, an increasingly confident Lee guided a seemingly invincible army, winning great victories at high costs. Finally overreaching the capabilities of his troops, Lee led them into crushing defeat at Gettysburg, after which his customary humility returned.
        Paradoxically, even though war ultimately reinforced Lee's deep pessimism in the face of Fate, afterward he became a conscious inspiration and adviser to elite whites who sought to destroy Reconstruction and keep blacks at the bottom of the social order. he became a spokesman as well as a rallying point for those postwar Southern nationalists who sought, with success, to maintain and strengthen white supremacy.
        Fellman's study does far more than any previous book both to uncover the intelligent, ambitious, and often troubled man behind the legend and to explore his life within the social, cultural, and political contexts of the mid-nineteenth-century South.

SYNOPSIS

Fellman (history, Simon Fraser U.) finds that the collision of detachment and inactivity with striving and ambition provided the central dynamic of US Civil War general Lee's lifelong self-creation. The 2000 cloth edition was published by Random House. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Max Byrd - The Wilson Quarterly

Michael Fellman, a professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, begins with the familiar facts of Lee's unstable choldhood, including its two examples of male self-indulgence and indifference to duty. As one of its many strengths, The making of Robert E. Lee provides, if not an explanation, at least a wonderful series of slow motion pictures of that evolution from sociable, even ebullient young man to marble hero.

KLIATT

While Michael Fellman's biography of Robert E. Lee should not be the only book on Lee one reads￯﾿ﾽEmory Thomas's would be a good balance￯﾿ﾽthis is a thought provoking if somewhat overly focused work. In Fellman's writing, the self-contained, self-controlled leader of legend is an inwardly tortured man, burdened by his born-again Christian beliefs and the Stoic principles he derived from a constant reading of Marcus Aurelius. A book about Robert E. Lee will never please every American. Fellman, however, is a Canadian professor who seems not to suffer from the American ambivalence about the Southern hero. What this relatively brief, mostly psychological biography offers to the reader is, through an intense study of Lee's letters, a glimpse of an inner Lee, perhaps a view of what was in his mind as we see him standing so straight in grey. KLIATT Codes: SA￯﾿ﾽRecommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2000, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 360p. illus. notes. index., Moore

Library Journal

The subject of numerous studies, Robert E. Lee has proven as elusive to biographers seeking to comprehend and explain the inner man as he was on the battlefields of Virginia. Fellman (history, Simon Fraser Univ.), author of a pungent and controversial study of William T. Sherman, does as well as anyone has in exploring the inner tensions that bedeviled Lee, who was always conscious of the image he projected and the man he wanted to be. Struggling to subdue his ambitions and passions in a peacetime military career whose monotony was only momentarily breached by the Mexican American War and at Harpers Ferry, Lee found in the Civil War a chance to express himself fully. In a study rich with discussions of Lee's religious beliefs and political opinions, the author skewers previous efforts to detach Lee from slavery, racism, and the mentality of the Lost Cause. Sure to arouse debate, this book challenges and delights, and no one will come away from reading it thinking of Lee in quite the same way. Recommended for public and academic libraries.--Brooks D. Simpson, Arizona State Univ., Tempe Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A brisk, thoughtful analysis of the character, temperament, and social philosophy of the Confederate general. Fellman (Citizen Sherman, 1995) only briefly sketches Lee's martial exploits, focusing instead on the interplay between historical events, domestic demands, and the general's inner life. This presents some difficulty for the psycho-historian, for, as the author acknowledges,"[a]lmost nothing is known" of Lee's childhood (generally the richest resource for character studies), and the future lion of the Confederacy does not really begin to roar on history's stage until 1824, when he enrolled at West Point. Accordingly, Fellman can only infer from Lee's later life (and from the lives of his coevals among his beloved Southern aristocracy) what his boyhood must have been like. Nevertheless, he proceeds in steady chronological fashion to create (with the help of many primary documents) a convincing portrait of Lee as a devout, teetotaling Christian (who was"convinced that God rode with him"), an adherent to"the timeless code of the gentleman," a stern disciplinarian, a stoic who disdained personal comfort, a loyal husband and dedicated father who dispensed advice to spouse and offspring in prodigious amounts, a brilliant military strategist (Pickett's Charge notwithstanding), and a racist slave-owner who"never questioned his belief in the inferiority of blacks." Fellman effectively conveys—often in Lee's own words—the general's fluctuating moods, demonstrating, for example, how the melancholy occasioned by his defeat at Gettysburg"never again entirely lifted." Of special interest are thepostwarchapters dealing with Lee's five-year tenure as president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee), where he attempted to put into practice his belief that"education meant moral education." Fellman is not a great stylist—his words are rather more dutiful than lyrical—but he does accomplish his stated task:"to rescue the human from the marble."