Lee outside the frame

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag,

that bears a single star.

-- "The Bonnie Blue Flag," 1861

His name conjures up the solemn portraits still to be found in old textbooks, gray as duty, yellowed by time. Or the creased pictures an earlier generation lovingly saved from the rotogravure section of some newspaper no longer published.

The images of that era, even those that depict the death and destruction, invariably seem romantic, heroic, posed. Some of us have known the old photographs since childhood, but the impression they leave changes as we change. By now they are freighted with the associations of a lifetime.

To our children, the adoration of Robert E. Lee must seem another of an earlier generation's eccentricities to be fondly recalled like beaten biscuits and good manners. Charming but of no real relevance.

But the next generation will come to an understanding of its own with the General as his attraction grows on them unbidden. Just as it has grown on us year by year, layer upon layer of Lee's Birthdays. And they, too, will feel the same impulse to advance and be recognized as his heirs.

In perhaps the most popular of Civil War paintings, Gens. Lee and Jackson -- Thomas Jonathan Jackson, better known as Stonewall -- confer on horseback in the misty hours before Chancellorsville, the high noon of Confederate arms. A British military historian, J.F.C. Fuller, called it the most nearly perfect battle ever executed by an American commander. It would end with Lee's Army of Northern Virginia having destroyed a force 2½ times its size and better equipped in every respect.

It was Lee's greatest victory, and his greatest loss: Jackson himself.