Lee's Lieutenants

I must confess that I’m fascinated by military history. No, I don’t sit around replaying famous battles with those hand-painted, lead soldiers, and I’ve never been to one of those ridiculous Civil War re-enactments. Nonetheless, I read a lot of military history.

I can’t really say why I’m so fascinated by the history of war. I’m certainly no fan of the military, and I made damn sure that I didn’t get caught up in the horror that was the war in Vietnam. What’s more, I don’t think that there is such a thing as a good war, or a just war. Even when a war is seemingly necessary, the only people who really benefit from it are the ruling elites. Those who do the actual fighting and dying are just their chumps.

So again, what is it that is so intriguing about military history? Perhaps it’s the fact that war is one of the few experiences in which everything is on the line, and in which dramatic, historical changes can be made. This can be appealing to lots of people, particularly the young. At the outbreak of World War One, there was partying in the streets of London, Paris, and Berlin. Millions of young men where all excited and ready to go, probably for the reasons stated above, and what came of it? Death, death, and more death on an industrial scale. It didn’t take long for the excitement to wane.

All this is to lead up to saying that I recently finished Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study In Command by Douglas Southall Freeman. The book is a study of the leadership of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by Robert E. Lee, and it is considered a classic of its kind. The original is in three volumes. I read an abridged version that was still awfully long, over 800 pages of small type.

Ironically enough, Freeman’s middle name, “Southall”, sums up his point of view. He is all about the South and, though the three volumes were originally published in 1942, he writes as though addressing a Confederate audience with which he is in full sympathy. The Confederate soldiers are “our boys” and, from time to time, he even occasionally refers to some of the more well-known Southern officers by their nicknames. It seems kind of unbelievable, but there was apparently an audience for that sort of thing as recently as sixty years ago.

It should be said that there is a lot of good information in Lee’s Lieutenants and, in spite of Freeman’s perspective, the book is no hagiography. He is very objective in his evaluations of the Confederate leaders, but I found myself shaking my head again and again. Freeman’s point of view is unrelentingly chivalric. He refers to various generals as knightly, gallant and honorable. It’s as though his model was Sir Walter Scott. What makes this just plain obscene is the nature of the American Civil War. It was the first truly industrial war, and men were killed on an industrial scale. There was nothing at all chivalrous about it.

This book brought to mind my reading of Kevin Phillips’ Cousins’ Wars. In that book, his thesis is that the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War were all just the continuation of a single conflict, that between the Royalists and the Roundheads. Freeman is an out-and-out royalist. Lee and his general represent the aristocracy and the ordinary soldiers are the yeoman. One doesn’t need an actual monarch to be a royalist. The king is just the boss of bosses among the aristocracy.

Phillips also maintained that this conflict has continued in America. I would tend to agree and, under George W. Bush, the royalists have triumphed. How long this will remain the case remains to be seen.