Biographies of robert e lee

Guelzo spends a good amount of time on Lee’s youth, education, and early military career. Following his graduation from West Point, Lee spent decades as an army engineer, working on east coast fortifications like Fort Pulaski and Fortress Monroe or western “improvements,” like a project to redirect the Mississippi in order to prevent the port of St Louis from silting up. A chapter on Lee’s performance in the Mexican War, in which he began as an engineer on the staff of General Winfield Scott but ended up as Scott’s favored reconnaissance officer and military protégé, is especially good, as Guelzo notes what Lee learned by example from the United States’s shameful perfidy toward Mexico and Scott’s high-minded and idealistically honorable conduct of the war.

These chapters, covering approximately the first two hundred pages, are well spent and give proper proportion to the Lee’s life before the Civil War. Throughout, Guelzo takes careful note of Lee’s upright