Elizabeth Pryor, a trained historian and former diplomat, delivers an unorthodox, critical, and engaging biography of Lee in "Reading the Man." Pryor selects some of Lee's thousands of letters and around them writes a topical, roughly chronological biography. She impressively captures Lee's character and personality, and seeks to understand "what constitutes heroism." Beyond battlefield bravery, the heroism remains illusive, but Pryor writes with a sure hand, informed by strong research, about Lee "the man."
Pryor claims to reject the debunking of mythology, although in the end she does just that. She exposes some of Lee's fateful mistakes as a general, especially at Gettysburg. She carves the mysticism away from Lee's decision to join his state, Virginia, and therefore the Confederacy, in 1861, rather than fulfill his oath to the US government. Pryor pulls the protective curtain away from Lee's views about slavery and race, revealing a conventional white supremacist and beleaguered slavemaster. The old creed in the Lost Cause catechism that Lee never fought for slavery crumbles in this book. And even Lee's vaunted postwar reconciliationist spirit, quite real in public ways, was privately just the opposite. Pryor judiciously chips away at the marble encasements around the real Lee.
One can hardly count the number of cousins and other relatives Lee had in Virginia, and the author adroitly weaves these deep family ties into her story. Lee married into ownership of nearly 200 slaves. Pryor forthrightly confronts this side of Lee's life; he disliked slavery and found it a burden, but he was no "good" master, communicating badly with his slaves and considering them naturally indolent and incapable of freedom. He confronted an "epidemic of runaways" in the late 1850s and oversaw the brutal beating of one returned fugitive. Modern-day Lee lovers will cringe at some of Pryor's conclusions, rooted in strong evidence: Lee broke up families and "denied the slaves' humanity."
