Happy Birthday, General Lee!

Robert Edward Lee was born this day in 1807 at Stratford Hall, Virginia.

Regular reader (and fellow Dubyanell alum) Monica sent along this article by Paul Greenberg that captures nicely what made Lee, well, Lee:

Lee's was but the code of the gentleman. But who now can remember what a gentleman was? Therefore we conclude that there never really was such a thing. We assume there had to be some self-interest in Lee, and that we can find it if we just keep chipping away at the marble man. Shard by shard, we will yet explain him, until his spell lies shattered into a hundred different pieces. Instead, it is we who are shattered, revealed as incomplete, broken and, worse, unaware of it.

Modernity, which is another name for the American experience, is incapable of seeing wholeness. And it is his wholeness that explains Lee's emotion without sentimentality, his mythology without fictiveness.

Lee did not exult in victory or explain in defeat. At Chancellorsville, arguably the most brilliant victory ever achieved by an American commander, his thoughts seemed only of the wounded Jackson. As if he understood that losing Jackson would be to lose the war, that nothing would be the same afterward. At Appomattox, he was intent on the best terms he could secure for his men. His own fate did not seem to concern him except for the ways in which it might affect others - his family, his countrymen, the next generation. From beginning to end, his circumstances changed, but he remained the same. And does yet.

If the South is more than a geographic designation, if there is still a South worthy of the name, it is because myth continues to shape her, and Southerners may still be able to imagine what it is to be whole, all of a piece.

When Flannery O'Connor was asked why Southerners seem to have a penchant for writing about freaks, she would say: Because in the South we are still able to recognize a freak when we see one. To do that, one must have some idea of what wholeness would be. In these latitudes, the idea of wholeness has a name: Lee.

As I said last year, Lee was a tragic hero - the best of men who, through one character flaw and a set of horrid circumstances, found himself on the wrong side in the great battle of the times. I think both Shakespeare and the classical Greek authors would have recognized him as such.