Gen. Robert E. Lee (1807-70), “the Southern Joshua of the Civil War,” was a god among mortals, a man who held nothing but the loftiest thoughts and ideals. So believed generations of Southerners in the years following the Civil War, their conviction reinforced by Douglas Southall Freeman’s four-volume biography, R. E. Lee(1934-35). Emory M. Thomas, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, has seen a new generation of historians challenge Freeman’s thesis, and in his opinion they have gone too far in questioning Lee’s character and command. He has therefore produced a “post-revisionist” history, based on primary sources. The result, Robert E. Lee, is a convincing compromise between the traditional view and the revisionist.

As Lee’s ancestry was unusually important to his character and career, the book opens with the wedding in 1793 of his parents, Henry (Light Horse Harry) Lee of Revolutionary War fame and Ann Hill Carter of a prominent Virginia family. It was a lavish affair, held at the stately Shirley Plantation on the James River in Virginia. The marriage, however, was disastrous for Ann. Harry Lee turned out to be profligate and irresponsible. He dissipated his wealth, abandoned his family, fled to the West Indies and never returned. Robert’s older half brother, Black Horse Harry Lee, was equally irresponsible. This family legacy caused Robert to spend a lifetime extolling the virtues of restraint and control, striving to overcome what Mr. Thomas describes as the “birth defect” of being Light Horse Harry’s son.

Mr. Thomas describes Robert Lee’s own marriage to Mary Custis — the daughter of George Washington Parke Custis, grandson of Martha Washington — as “safe and acceptable.” It was not, however, satisfactory to either partner. Lee’s bride, “loved and pampered” by her father, was never robust and became an invalid in later years, remaining at Arlington with her parents for long stretches. She bore seven children, but Mr. Thomas calls her a liability to Lee. Mary also had problems with her husband. Lee tended to lecture his wife, and warned prospective guests of Mary’s “laziness and forgetfulness in her housekeeping.”

Lee sought emotional compensation in close, flirtatious correspondences with attractive women throughout his life. A young cousin of his wife’s, Martha (Markie) Williams, was one of his favorites. Lee was not, technically, being unfaithful to Mary Lee — his letters were written with her knowledge. They are interesting today because in them he opened his thoughts as he never did in conversation.

Lee met success early. He graduated second in the West Point class of 1829 and was outstanding as a young officer of the Army Corps of Engineers. His performance with Gen. Winfield Scott during the Mexican War earned him Scott’s respect and even devotion. He disappointed Scott, however, by resigning his United States Army commission in 1861. He quickly emerged as the foremost general of the Confederacy. His Army of Northern Virginia fought aggressively, sometimes brilliantly. After the Confederacy’s defeat, Lee became the South’s symbol of everything a Southerner should be.

Despite these accomplishments, Lee remained a troubled, frustrated and surprisingly insecure man. He suffered an unreasonable compulsion for perfection — “finishing up,” as one of his professors described it. Control, both of himself and of others, became an obsession, expressed constantly in his letters, especially to his children. He shared his formula for survival in a cruel world: “There is nothing stable on earth,” “Live in the world you inhabit” and “turn . . . your affliction to your own benefit.” His aversion to personal confrontation, however, became his greatest weakness as a military commander.

Lee’s views on slavery and race reflected his times and his station in life. While calling slavery “a moral and political evil,” he contended that African slaves were “immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically.” Their bondage was “painful discipline . . . necessary for their instruction.” Despite his popularity in the South, Lee was no populist; he staunchly believed in government by “the rich, the well-born and the able.”

The battles of the Civil War constitute only about a third of this book, and Mr. Thomas’s accounts of them will disappoint those readers who expect dramatic descriptions of such moving episodes as Stonewall Jackson’s fatal wounding at Chancellorsville, Va., in May 1863. But the battles are deftly described, with no mincing of words. And the author is perceptive. He justifies Lee’s decision to retain Jackson after the latter’s failure in the Seven Days Campaign of June 1862 very simply. “Jackson,” he writes, “was a killer, possessed of the same sorts of aggressive instincts which obsessed Lee.”

This is a book that improves as it progresses. The most vivid depictions of Lee appear in the chronicles from the last months of the Civil War to the time of his death in 1870. His losses on the battlefield and in his personal life had been severe. A daughter, two grandchildren and a beloved daughter-in-law had died, a son had been captured for a time, his wife was crippled with arthritis and his own health was rapidly failing. When Lee’s army was bottled up in Petersburg, Va., these losses had an effect on him. He became testy, sometimes grossly unfair with devoted subordinates. But he still refused to give up his mission.

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