R. E. Lee
by Douglas S. Freeman
Summary
Douglas Southall Freeman spent years of research, including interviews with surviving members of Lee's own army and deep study of West Point and War Department records, on a four volume biography that follows Robert E. Lee from a Virginia childhood in the shadow of his Revolutionary War officer father through thirty two years in the United States Army, most of them in the Corps of Engineers, before the Civil War ever began. The book covers Lee's marriage to Mary Anna Custis, a great granddaughter of Martha Washington, and his difficult decision in 1861 to resign from the United States Army and take command of Confederate forces in Virginia rather than lead the Union army he had been offered, a choice Freeman treats as the hinge the entire biography turns on.
Freeman built the four volumes around a distinctive method later writers came to call the fog of war technique, restricting the narrative at every point to only what Lee himself knew at that moment, so that a reader experiences the confusion, the incomplete intelligence, and the difficult judgment calls of each battle exactly as Lee experienced them rather than with the benefit of hindsight about how the war actually turned out. The volumes follow Lee's major campaigns as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, the costly defeat at Gettysburg in 1863, and the grinding final campaigns against Ulysses Grant that ended at Appomattox Court House in April 1865.
The biography closes with Lee's five years as president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, where Freeman presents him arguing for national reconciliation rather than continued sectional bitterness before his death in 1870. Reading all four volumes means committing to an unusually immersive, moment by moment military biography built from years of archival labor, and it suits a reader who wants to understand a commander's decisions from the inside rather than from the vantage of a settled historical verdict on how the war eventually ended.
Historical Context & Significance
Charles Scribner's Sons published Freeman's four volumes across 1934 and 1935, and the completed work won the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. Freeman edited the Richmond News Leader for thirty four years while researching and writing the biography alongside his newspaper work, an output that made him one of the most prolific journalist historians of his generation.
The book stood for decades as the standard military biography of Lee, still cited for the depth of its archival research even as later historians have revisited Lee's legacy with a more critical eye toward the Confederacy's cause. Freeman went on to spend his final years on an equally ambitious multi volume life of George Washington, left unfinished at his death in 1953 and completed by two associates from his research; the finished work won Freeman a second Pulitzer Prize for Biography posthumously in 1958.