Robert E. Lee
The US officer who turned down command of the Union army, kept the Confederacy alive for three years, and was rebuilt after death as a saint of the Lost Cause.
In April 1861, with the country coming apart, Abraham Lincoln had an offer carried to a fifty-four-year-old colonel of engineers with a spotless record and no political enemies: command of the main Union army being raised to put down the rebellion. Robert E. Lee declined. Virginia seceded, he resigned his commission two days later, and a war that might have been short became four years long. Whatever else is argued about him, that is the fact that matters most. His decision cost roughly three-quarters of a million American lives.
The general
Lee took over the Confederacy's main eastern army in June 1862, when Richmond looked about to fall, and immediately attacked. For the next year he outfought a series of better-supplied Union commanders: he drove McClellan back from the gates of the capital, humiliated Pope at Second Manassas, and at Chancellorsville in May 1863 split his outnumbered army in the face of a force twice its size and won anyway. Audacity was his method, and it had a price his side could not pay. Lee's battles cost him proportionally more men than his opponents lost, and the South had no reserves of manpower. Antietam and then Gettysburg, where he sent 12,500 men across open ground into massed artillery and lost more than half of them, spent an army that could not be rebuilt. From May 1864 he could do nothing but hold trenches around Petersburg while Grant extended the line and Sherman burned the interior. He surrendered at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.
The slaveholder
Lee owned slaves, married into one of Virginia's largest slaveholding estates, and administered it. In an 1856 letter to his wife he called slavery a moral and political evil, then argued in the same letter that it was a greater burden on white people than on Black people and that emancipation must be left to Providence rather than to men, which was the standard position of a Virginia gentleman who intended to change nothing. When enslaved people fled the Custis estate he was managing, he had them caught and whipped, an episode documented after the war by one of them, Wesley Norris. His army seized free Black Pennsylvanians during the Gettysburg campaign and sent them south into slavery.
The marble man
After the surrender Lee behaved better than most of his peers. He refused to endorse a guerrilla war, took an oath of allegiance, accepted the presidency of a small Virginia college, and discouraged Confederate monuments while he lived, writing in 1869 that it was wiser not to keep open the sores of war. He also opposed Black suffrage and said little while the Reconstruction South was terrorized back into white rule.
The Lee that most Americans know was assembled after his death in 1870 by Southern writers who needed a war about honor and states' rights rather than slavery. In that story he is the reluctant, flawless Christian soldier beaten only by numbers, and he became its central relic: on courthouse lawns, on schools and army bases, on a hundred feet of pedestal on Richmond's Monument Avenue. Most of those statues went up not in the 1870s but between 1890 and 1920, exactly as Jim Crow was being written into law, and again during the fight over civil rights. That is why the arguments of the last decade, from Charlottesville in 2017 to the removal of the Richmond statue in September 2021, were never really about one Virginian's reputation. Every argument about Lee is an argument about what the war was fought over, which is the argument the Lost Cause was invented to win.