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Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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-----Original Message-----
From: H-South Review Editor Ian Binnington [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 25 March, 2002 8:00 AM
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Subject: H-South Review: Dirck on Gallagher, _Lee and His Army in
Confederate History_


H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (March, 2002)

Gary W. Gallagher. _Lee and His Army in Confederate History_. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xviii + 295 pp. photographs,
maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 0807826316.

Reviewed for H-SOUTH by Brian R. Dirck, [log in to unmask], Assistant
Professor of History, Anderson University

Throwing out the Lost Cause Bathwater

Gary Gallagher moves Civil War scholarship forward by looking backward, so
to speak. He questions those who have discarded out of hand the received
wisdom on various Civil War subjects. His forte is Confederate history, and
in that area his talents are particularly valuable, for probably in no
other area of American history is there quite so much received wisdom, nor
so many historians who have assaulted that orthodoxy with such gusto. This
is because traditional interpretations of Confederate subjects are entwined
with the white South's Lost Cause mythology and its thick patina of
romantic white supremacy, which is of course anathema to most academic
historians.

Many modern-day neo-Confederates conflate their veneration of the
Confederacy with approval of the South's racial caste system, so it is
possible to construe any positive interpretation of Confederate history --
admiration for the fighting qualities of Confederate soldiers, for example
-- as a de facto expression of racism. But Gallagher believes it is also
possible to construct valid scholarly arguments that mirror some elements
of the Lost Cause mythos without implicitly accepting the racist
sentimentality lying at the heart of that mythos.

In his 1997 book _The Confederate War_, Gallagher argued that the Lost
Cause explanation for the South's defeat -- Yankee bullets, not a failure
of Confederate will -- was essentially correct. "Although class tension,
unhappiness with intrusive government policies, desertion, and war
weariness all form part of the Confederate mosaic," he wrote, "they must be
set against the larger picture of thousands of soldiers persevering against
mounting odds, civilians enduring great human and material hardship in
pursuit of independence, and southern white society maintaining remarkable
resiliency until the last stage of the war." [1] Gallagher argued that, in
their zeal to rid Civil War scholarship of Lost Cause racism, many scholars
inadvertently jettisoned valid insights by Lost Cause devotees along with
their less savory arguments about race and slavery.

This same philosophy animates _Lee and His Army_. Robert E. Lee has always
played a central role in the development of the Lost Cause mythos, and
subsequently he has also been a favorite target of those who wish to loosen
the hold of neo-Confederate Lost Cause stalwarts. Alan T. Nolan, one of
Lee's foremost critics, wrote of Lee's immunity to real criticism because
"there exists an orthodoxy, a dogmatism, in the writing about him. The
dogmas pertain not only to the general himself. They also extend to the
context of his life and to the causes, conduct, and consequences of the
Civil War." [2] Thus to question Lee's greatness is to question central
tenets of the Lost Cause mythology itself, and vice versa.

With this in mind, Gallagher's collection of essays asks whether the
purveyors of the Lost Cause mythology were correct in creating a portrait
of Lee as the Confederacy's greatest general. "Can we accept part of what
Lost Cause authors said about Lee and his army without also lending a
measure of authority to their denial of slavery's centrality to secession
and the Confederacy?" Gallagher asked (p. xi).

Gallagher offers as an answer three broad arguments. First, he believes
that Lee was in fact an effective combat leader who possessed extraordinary
tactical and strategic ability. Second, Lee was a highly respected and
revered figure for most white Confederates. He was the Confederates'
"primary national hero," according to Gallagher (p. 33). This perspective
contradicts arguments advanced by Nolan and others who believe that the Lee
myth was a creation of postwar Southerners. Third, Lee possessed a
multifaceted, modern conception of Civil War combat that took into account
the interplay between politics and the battlefield, and who well understood
the importance of events outside the war's eastern theater. Again, this
runs counter to current trends in Confederate scholarship that suggest Lee
was deficient as a strategist and failed to understand the relationship
between war and civilian morale. Not so, argues Gallagher, who wrote that
Lee "frequently manifested a grasp of how military events could influence
politics and civilian morale in ways beneficial to the Confederate cause"
(p. 71). In short, Lee certainly was the Confederacy's greatest general.

In proving this point, Gallagher offers essays ranging across a wide
variety of issues and events: Lee's conduct at the battles of Spotsylvania
and Chancellorsville, Confederate homefront perceptions of his defeats at
Antietam and Gettysburg, and the prospects for Confederate victory during
the bloody summer of 1864, when Lee was forced into a defensive posture to
thwart Grant's relentless drive towards Richmond. Gallagher also offered a
nice historiographic overview of the Lost Cause literature on Lee by Jubal
Early and Douglas Southall Freeman.

Different readers will find value in different parts of _Lee and His Army_.
For me, the heart of the book was chapter five, "An Old-Fashioned Soldier
in a Modern War? Lee's Confederate Generalship." Here Gallagher addressed
the longstanding arguments proffered by Lee's admirers and his detractors
that the general was an old-fashioned, courtly gentleman -- a "grand
anachronism" -- who fought a chivalric, limited sort of warfare that was
inappropriate to the Civil War's harsh, modern realities (p. 151).
Gallagher instead sees in Lee a man who understood modern warfare quite
well. Lee "crafted a strategy based on a careful, if sometimes flawed,
reading of the military and political situation," he wrote, "In short, Lee
adapted well to the demands of a conflict that far exceeded in scope and
complexity anything he or anyone else could have anticipated in the spring
of 1861" (p. 163).

Gallagher cited Lee's expansive nationalism, his downplaying of narrow
local concerns, and his support for modernizing (and necessary) measures
like Confederate industrial development, and -- most radical of all --
enlisting African-Americans to fight in the Confederate armed forces. "Far
from looking back toward the traditional South, he looked forward to a
Confederate nation that in many ways would little resemble the society into
which he had been born," according to Gallagher" (p. 170).

Perhaps the least satisfying essay in the collection is chapter six, "'I
have to make the best of what I have': Lee at Spotsylvania." Here Gallagher
disputes a longstanding notion that Lee was too much of a gentleman in
dealing with subordinates. As the English correspondent Arthur J. L.
Fremantle put it, Lee's "only faults, so far as I can learn, arise from his
excessive amiability" (p. 209). Gallagher effectively illustrates the
shortcomings of this perspective, showing how Lee acted with decisiveness,
and maybe even a bit of ruthlessness, towards manifestly flawed
subordinates like Richard Ewell. But showing that Lee was not a softy is
not quite the same thing as proving that Lee "possessed unusual gifts as a
military politician" (p. 191). Lee did allow a smoldering resentment to
grow between Ewell and his successor, Jubal Early, and, given the
well-publicized feuds that occurred between numerous general officers in
the Army of Northern Virginia, it may a bit too generous to credit Lee with
an ability "to control destructive backbiting" (p. 221).

Still, these are comparatively minor criticisms. Every essay in the book is
strong, and several are extraordinary. All of Gallagher's arguments are
enhanced by his ability to effectively weld together military, political
and social issues and events. _Lee and His Army_ also strikes a nice
balance in terms of its format. Essay collections are notorious for being
either too narrowly focused, and therefore tediously repetitive; or (far
more often) too diffuse, containing wildly divergent styles and
perspectives that clank around in the book like mismatched toys in a poorly
designed toybox. Gallagher's collection is eclectic, but not overly so,
ranging across a wide variety of topics without becoming unmanageable.

Taken together, Gallagher's multiple arguments in _Lee and His Army_, and
indeed much of his scholarship as whole, constitute a plea to Civil War
historians: don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. That is, in our
zeal to rid ourselves of the unpleasant lies of Lost Cause mythology, we
should be careful to avoid a dogmatic rejection of everything related to
the Lost Cause. Sometimes, perhaps even in spite of themselves, Lost Cause
writers did manage to get at the truth of Robert E. Lee's formidable
talents. Gallagher sympathizes with those who would summarily discard the
entire moonlight-and-magnolias school of Confederate history. "The idea
that historians should take elements of the Lost Cause interpretation
seriously is unsettling," he admits, "It places us in the awkward position
of having to concede some points to the defenders of slavery."
Nevertheless, he writes, "it is important to engage each part of the Lost
Cause interpretation on its merits" (p. 276). This valuable collection of
essays illustrates the wisdom of such an approach.

_Notes_

[1]. Gary W. Gallagher, _The Confederate War: How Popular Will,
Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat_ (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1997), 4.

[2]. Alan T. Nolan, _Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War
History_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 7.

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