Duty Faithfully Performed: Robert E. Lee and His Critics.

Duty Faithfully Performed: Robert E. Lee and His Critics. By John M. Taylor. Foreword by Rod Paschall. (Dulles, Va.: Brassey's, c. 1999. Pp. xvi, 268. $27.95, ISBN 1-57488-158-2.)

John M. Taylor has written about William H. Seward, Raphael Semmes, and other people and topics, including his own father Maxwell Taylor. In Duty Faithfully Performed Taylor attempts to analyze and answer the revisionist critiques of Lee--to write in effect the last word about the Confederate general and southern icon. Sooner or later a book with that purpose and this subtitle will be interesting and important, but that book will have to come later. The bulk of Duty Faithfully Performed is a review, based upon secondary sources, of Lee's life. Taylor does pause briefly in his narrative to consider some of the issues raised by revisionist scholars about both personal and professional aspects of Lee's life. The author generally dismisses discouraging words, however, and presses ahead with his story.

Taylor begins his work with Lee's death--ironically, just as Thomas L. Connelly began The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image In American Society (New York, 1977). In his first chapter, "The General and the Historians," Taylor attempts to summarize the Lee literature. He begins by invoking Lee's contemporaries and then discusses the views of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Gamaliel Bradford, Charles Francis Adams, Douglas Southall Freeman, Burke Davis, and Clifford Dowdey. Finally, he discusses recent (since 1977) revisionists. In this list he includes Connelly, Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson (co-authors of Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage [University, Ala., 1982]), John Keegan, Alan T. Nolan, and the 1993 film Gettysburg. Taylor does all of this in nine pages, and he overlooks some significant revisionism in this thin summation. Taylor fails to acknowledge, for example, critiques offered by J. F. C. Fuller, T. Harry Williams, Russell F. Weigley, and others. He places Gary Gallagher, William C. Davis, and Albert Castel among historians who have contested recent Lee revisionism, but he ignores Charles P. Roland's Reflections on Lee: A Historian's Assessment (Mechanicsburg, Pa., 1995). Taylor may not know, since he mentions no other works of fiction, that the film Gettysburg was actually an adaptation of Michael Shaara's novel The Killer Angels (New York, 1974).

In his concluding chapter, entitled "Meet General Lee," Taylor claims that "Robert E. Lee was the ablest commander of the Civil War and perhaps the greatest to come out of North America." His final words in the book are a comment on Benjamin H. Hill's judgment of General Lee: he was, Hill says, "Caesar without his ambition, Frederick without his tyranny, Napoleon without his selfishness, and Washington without his reward." "Small wonder," Taylor responds, "that the defeated South chose Robert E. Lee as its symbol" (p. 236). With this one-sentence fragment paragraph, Taylor completes his work. Taylor's judgments may be valid. I agree with them. But to assess the literature of Lee and to render enlightened judgment requires considerably more time, knowledge, and work than Taylor has devoted to Duty Faithfully Performed.

EMORY M. THOMAS University of Georgia