Volume 38, Number 18 · November 7, 1991
How Noble Was Robert E. Lee?
By James M. McPherson
Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History
by Alan T. Nolan
University of North Carolina Press, 231 pp., $22.50
Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868
by Brooks D. Simpson
University of North Carolina Press, 339 pp., $34.95
The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans
by Charles Royster
Knopf, 523 pp., $30.00
Alan Nolan's previous book on the Civil War was a superb account of the Iron Brigade of the Army of the Potomac. He will need the same tough hide possessed by the Union veterans he described to endure the attacks from spiritual descendants of the legions who marched with Robert E. Lee. For Lee Considered is nothing less than a wholesale revision of the heroic image of the white South's favorite icon. Nolan calls his study Lee Considered rather than Reconsidered because he believes that the figure of the legendary Lee has blocked genuine consideration of the historical Lee—apart from Thomas L. Connelly's 1977 book, The Marble Man, which was primarily an account of the construction of the Lee myth.
Review, 4513 words
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