Journal of American History
- Russell F. Weigley
An analysis of the mind and character of Lee looking outward on his world... Well written, persuasive, and, in [its] marshaling of evidence, authoritative.
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
- Richard B. McCaslin
Fellman has produced as thought-provoking an attack on Lee's character as [Thomas L.] Connelly ever wrote on Lee's generalship, and about as well researched.
New York Military Affairs Symposium Newsletter
- Albert A. Nofi
A valuable work for anyone interested in the Civil War.
Journal of American History
An analysis of the mind and character of Lee looking outward on his world... Well written, persuasive, and, in [its] marshaling of evidence, authoritative.
— Russell F. Weigley
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Fellman has produced as thought-provoking an attack on Lee's character as [Thomas L.] Connelly ever wrote on Lee's generalship, and about as well researched.
— Richard B. McCaslin
New York Military Affairs Symposium Newsletter
A valuable work for anyone interested in the Civil War.
— Albert A. Nofi
Max Byrd
Michael Fellman, a professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, begins with the familiar facts of Lee's unstable choldhood, including its two examples of male self-indulgence and indifference to duty. As one of its many strengths, The making of Robert E. Lee provides, if not an explanation, at least a wonderful series of slow motion pictures of that evolution from sociable, even ebullient young man to marble hero.
—The Wilson Quarterly
KLIATT
While Michael Fellman's biography of Robert E. Lee should not be the only book on Lee one reads—Emory Thomas's would be a good balance—this is a thought provoking if somewhat overly focused work. In Fellman's writing, the self-contained, self-controlled leader of legend is an inwardly tortured man, burdened by his born-again Christian beliefs and the Stoic principles he derived from a constant reading of Marcus Aurelius. A book about Robert E. Lee will never please every American. Fellman, however, is a Canadian professor who seems not to suffer from the American ambivalence about the Southern hero. What this relatively brief, mostly psychological biography offers to the reader is, through an intense study of Lee's letters, a glimpse of an inner Lee, perhaps a view of what was in his mind as we see him standing so straight in grey. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2000, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 360p. illus. notes. index., Moore
Library Journal
The subject of numerous studies, Robert E. Lee has proven as elusive to biographers seeking to comprehend and explain the inner man as he was on the battlefields of Virginia. Fellman (history, Simon Fraser Univ.), author of a pungent and controversial study of William T. Sherman, does as well as anyone has in exploring the inner tensions that bedeviled Lee, who was always conscious of the image he projected and the man he wanted to be. Struggling to subdue his ambitions and passions in a peacetime military career whose monotony was only momentarily breached by the Mexican American War and at Harpers Ferry, Lee found in the Civil War a chance to express himself fully. In a study rich with discussions of Lee's religious beliefs and political opinions, the author skewers previous efforts to detach Lee from slavery, racism, and the mentality of the Lost Cause. Sure to arouse debate, this book challenges and delights, and no one will come away from reading it thinking of Lee in quite the same way. Recommended for public and academic libraries.--Brooks D. Simpson, Arizona State Univ., Tempe Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A brisk, thoughtful analysis of the character, temperament, and social philosophy of the Confederate general. Fellman (Citizen Sherman, 1995) only briefly sketches Lee's martial exploits, focusing instead on the interplay between historical events, domestic demands, and the general's inner life. This presents some difficulty for the psycho-historian, for, as the author acknowledges,"[a]lmost nothing is known" of Lee's childhood (generally the richest resource for character studies), and the future lion of the Confederacy does not really begin to roar on history's stage until 1824, when he enrolled at West Point. Accordingly, Fellman can only infer from Lee's later life (and from the lives of his coevals among his beloved Southern aristocracy) what his boyhood must have been like. Nevertheless, he proceeds in steady chronological fashion to create (with the help of many primary documents) a convincing portrait of Lee as a devout, teetotaling Christian (who was"convinced that God rode with him"), an adherent to"the timeless code of the gentleman," a stern disciplinarian, a stoic who disdained personal comfort, a loyal husband and dedicated father who dispensed advice to spouse and offspring in prodigious amounts, a brilliant military strategist (Pickett's Charge notwithstanding), and a racist slave-owner who"never questioned his belief in the inferiority of blacks." Fellman effectively conveys—often in Lee's own words—the general's fluctuating moods, demonstrating, for example, how the melancholy occasioned by his defeat at Gettysburg"never again entirely lifted." Of special interest are thepostwarchapters dealing with Lee's five-year tenure as president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee), where he attempted to put into practice his belief that"education meant moral education." Fellman is not a great stylist—his words are rather more dutiful than lyrical—but he does accomplish his stated task:"to rescue the human from the marble."
