“The decision was honorable by his standards of honor-which, whatever we may think of them, were neither self-serving nor complicated,” Blount says. Army commission to defend Virginia and fight for the Confederacy, on the side of slavery. “Also,” he says, “Lee reminds me in some ways of my father.”Īt the heart of Lee’s story is one of the monumental choices in American history: revered for his honor, Lee resigned his U.S. I plunged back into it for this book, and am relieved to have emerged alive.” Though Blount was never a Civil War buff, he says “every Southerner has to make his peace with that War. A resident of New York City and western Massachusetts, he traces his interest in Lee to his boyhood in Georgia. Lee, Roy Blount, Jr., treats Lee as a man of competing impulses, a “paragon of manliness” and “one of the greatest military commanders in history,” who was nonetheless “not good at telling men what to do.”īlount, a noted humorist, journalist, playwright and raconteur, is the author or coauthor of 15 previous books and the editor of Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor. Lee, the reluctant, tragic leader of the Confederate Army, who died in his beloved Virginia at age 63 in 1870, five years after the end of the Civil War. Lee Memorial Association, Stratfordįew figures in American history are more divisive, contradictory or elusive than Robert E.

'Light-Horse Harry' Lee fought in the Revolutionary War.

Heroes and generals best us weapon