The Lees of Virginia

THE MAN of the MONTH

[Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $3.75]

OF the great American families, the Lees would by common consent be pronounced second only to the Adamses. But as a family they differed strikingly from the Adamses, the Bayards, the Blairs, and other distinguished American lines. Though John Quincy Adams was doubtless the greatest of his surname, he does not tower too markedly over John Adams, Henry, or even the first Charles Francis. The three Blairs, Francis P., Montgomery, and Frank, were fairly matched in ability and renown; and so were the two best-known of the Bayards. But the Lees, after producing many men of mark, suddenly rose to a climax with the great Confederate leader, whose fame has all but obliterated that of his predecessors. Most Americans know that it was a gifted family; but how many could tell precisely for what Arthur Lee or even Richard Henry Lee stood in his day?

Mr. Hendrick tells us. He does so in a fascinating, an opinionated, a shrewd and scholarly account, which runs swiftly down through two centuries of history. It was a patrician line, wealthy from the outset, proud in each generation of its lands, its fine country seats, its old-style education, and its political leadership, asking much but giving the state much. Beginning with robust Richard Lee, who came over in 1640, bustled between England and America, and cut a figure in Williamsburg and London alike, it spread rapidly out over half the South. One branch gave us a President in Zachary Taylor, another branch a Chief Justice in Edward D. White. But the family came to flower at the time of the Revolution. The ‘six sons of Stratford’ adorned that stirring epoch. Richard Henry Lee suggested the colonial committees of correspondence, and moved ‘that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.’ Arthur Lee helped arrange the treaty of alliance with France. William Lee negotiated the plan of a treaty with Holland which brought her into the war. Francis Lightfoot Lee helped draw up the Articles of Confederation. ‘Light-Horse Harry,’a cousin of these just named, was at the surrender of Cornwallis.

To these ‘six sons’ Mr. Hendrick naturally and rightfully gives most of his admirably written volume. We say rightfully, because the author presents the Lees primarily as representatives of a unique type of society and of public life: the old Virginia aristocracy, with its wealth, its culture, its snobbery, its occasional arrogance. The period when this aristocracy counted for most was the late colonial and early national period. During the lifetime of the ‘six sons’ (‘Light-Horse Harry’ lived until 1818) it gave America its finest gifts of statesmanship. With their leisure, their sense of responsibility, their consecration to government as a special task, their love of social amenities, they made a caste we shall never see again. By the time of Robert E. Lee the old Upper South was passing away; Virginia was in decay. Mr. Hendrick allots some fifty pages of his book to the planting of the Virginia line; he allots only as much more to Robert E. Lee, in a division significantly entitled ‘The End of the Lee Clan.’ The last and greatest Lee was in his way an eighteenth-century Virginia gentleman. He gave his devotion to the lost cause of the Confederacy precisely as the first Lee had given his devotion to the lost cause of the Stuarts. But the world which had made the Lees what they were vanished utterly at Fort Sumter, not at Appomattox; and the record of General Lee’s resplendent, career hardly belongs to the dominant theme of the book.

This rich story, with its varied chapters and with all that is commonplace cut away, offers numerous picturesque scenes and episodes. Particularly in writing of the Revolutionary Lees does Mr. Hendrick make much that was colorless glow again, as a skillful artist restores the pristine hues of a painting. His account, of Richard Henry Lee and the great alliance of Virginia and Massachusetts which converted a movement for redress of grievances into a movement for a new republic is stirringly told. More wryly moving is the history of the proud-hearted, bitter-tongued Arthur Lee, who suspected everybody and was his own worst enemy; who quarreled with Franklin, who saw his patriotic labors frustrated by the corrupt Silas Deane and the traitorous Edward Bancroft, a British spy whom Franklin hired as secretary, and who has waited till recently for his full vindication. Mr. Hendrick rather overdoes the vindication, but the pendulum may well swing too far in poor Lee’s favor for once. Still more poignant is the story of ‘Light-Horse Harry,’Robert E. Lee’s father, which Mr. Hendrick here tells with greater fullness than it has ever been told before. It is a book not without some irritating features, particularly in Mr. Hendrick’s occasional digressions and dogmatic moralizing; but it is an addition not merely to history but to literature.

ALLAN NEVINS