Dennis Prager Show - Timeless Wisdom - Understanding Robert E. Lee

Nov. 26, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show

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Timeless Wisdom - Understanding Robert E. Lee

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	November is National Family Caregivers Month.
	One in four Americans is stepping up to help older loved ones with everything from meals to bills.
	Family caregivers spend thousands out of their own pockets each year, and too many have to quit their jobs to keep providing care.
	Working families can't afford to wait.
	It's time to care for America's caregivers.
	Learn more at aarp.org/slash care for caregivers.
	Paid for by AARP.
	Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
	Here are thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
	And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
	So today's subject is my favorite way of learning history, and that is through biography, because then you get both the personal, which I love, and the macro or social, which I love.
	And there is a brand new biography of Robert E. Lee, the general of the Confederate Armies, the lead general.
	What was his actual title?
	General Robert E. Lee.
	That was it.
	So it was just general.
	Exactly.
	Okay.
	So general of the Confederate Army.
	The voice you just heard is the author.
	He has written any number of books.
	How many books have you written?
	You know, I've never stopped to count, but I know, but I think it's more than 25.
	Okay, that's fair enough.
	And he is a New York Times best-selling author.
	And this time he has written about Robert E. Lee.
	It's titled Clouds of Glory, The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee.
	And the book, of course, is up at dennisprager.com, and it's just been published by HarperCollins, which is totally coincidental that that's my publisher, too.
	I have no allegiance to the authors of any given publisher.
	I just want people to, people are so cynical sometimes.
	Ah, you must be having a HarperCollins author.
	It's not related.
	I didn't even realize it until I just looked at it now.
	Anyway, Michael Cordon, it's great to have you on the show, and thank you for doing this.
	And thank you for writing the book.
	My concerns are your concerns.
	You have a lot.
	You think morally, and I love that.
	And that's how I think.
	There are great moral questions.
	He is a living moral question.
	How does a man who loved the United States take on, and who did not love slavery, take on the generalship of the slavery part of the country's army?
	How do we answer that?
	Well, I think it's important to keep in mind a couple of things.
	That in the first place, Lee, even in 1859 and 1860, could tell that the country was in danger of splitting apart.
	And he drew for himself what is now called, but was not then called, a red line that he would not cross.
	And that red line was that he would take arms if the federal government used force against his home state of Virginia.
	It's difficult for us to understand the degree of state nationalism that existed in the mid-19th century.
	I mean, you know, throughout the United States, of course, people say, you know, I was born in California.
	I love it.
	I was born in New York.
	I'm glad I don't live in New Good.
	More and more, in our century, you can't tell what state you're in except by the license rights.
	And for most people, they move from one state to another without any great thought about it.
	In the mid-19th century, however, it was possible for Virginians to feel about Virginia as their first loyalty.
	And that was the feeling that Robert E. Lee had, that his first loyalty was due to Virginia, only secondly to the United States.
	Yeah, you're right.
	That's an excellent explanation, and it is very far from our mentality.
	Yes, it is.
	So his loyalty to Virginia was not only greater than his loyalty to America, but greater than his loyalty to his moral code.
	Am I right?
	I don't want you to assent if I'm not right.
	No, I don't think you are right, frankly.
	You understand, I'm neither pro-Confederate nor pro-slavery.
	Neither am I, obviously.
	I understand that.
	But I said moral code in that in your book, you make it clear, I think, that he was anti-slavery.
	Lee disliked slavery intensely and called it a great misfortune in any country where it existed.
	So it was a great misfortune in the South, coming to that.
	That does not necessarily mean that he wanted the slaves to be freed or to live as equals with whites or to have the same right to vote as white people did.
	He made that position very clear before the war and after the war, before Congress.
	But I think it's important to bear in mind about Lee that from Lee's point of view, the United States had attacked his own state of Virginia.
	And he was therefore defending what he took to be American constitutionalism and the rights of Americans against the force of the federal government.
	Lee's morality would never have permitted him to do it had he not felt that.
	He was a very strongly morally driven personality.
	But we have to, in some way, penetrate and accept the confusion of moral points of view and of opinion that existed in mid-19th century America.
	They were much more complicated, and Lee was a much more complex person than we generally recognize.
	Right.
	So let me make a ledger here and tell me if I have it right, not in terms of argument, but in terms of clarity.
	On the one hand, he had a deep love and allegiance to the United States of America.
	After all, Lincoln had asked him to be put in charge of the Union Army.
	November is National Family Caregivers Month.
	One in four Americans is stepping up to help older loved ones with everything from meals to bills.
	Family caregivers spend thousands out of their own pockets each year, and too many have to quit their jobs to keep providing care.
	Working families can't afford to wait.
	It's time to care for America's caregivers.
	Learn more at AARP.org/slash care for caregivers.
	Paid for by AARP.
	November is National Family Caregivers Month.
	One in four Americans is stepping up to help older loved ones with everything from meals to bills.
	Family caregivers spend thousands out of their own pockets each year, and too many have to quit their jobs to keep providing care.
	Working families can't afford to wait.
	It's time to care for America's caregivers.
	Learn more at aarp.org/slash care for caregivers.
	Paid for by AARP.
	Is that correct?
	Right.
	Right, so it shows how much Lincoln thought he loved that he, Robert E. Lee, loved America.
	So just let me make this ledger and tell me if I'm right.
	So you have on one side, row A, love of the United States of America, antipathy to slavery, despite not being an abolitionist in the terms of giving freedom to all slaves.
	We'll put that aside, but a morally opposed.
	On the other hand, a love of Virginia that overwhelmed his love of America and a belief that it was the Union that the United States government had attacked his state.
	So those, it's two versus two.
	Was there a fifth consideration I missed?
	No, no, there's no other consideration.
	Lee would not, I think, have fought for slavery.
	He disliked the institution.
	He was very critical of secession and remained very critical of secession.
	He called it silly and felt that secession was the equivalent of anarchy and was enormously concerned about the consequences of secession, which, first of all, he knew would lead to war.
	And secondly, he felt would destroy the work of the founding fathers in building a new nation.
	His father, you must bear in mind, had been Washington's favorite cavalry commander, Lighthorse Harry Lee, and very close to Washington.
	And Lee himself married the daughter of Washington's adopted son, Washington Park Custis.
	So it's difficult to even express the degree to which the breakup of the Union and the secession of the southern states was enormously disturbing to Lee.
	And he was far from joining in secession.
	He was pushed into it unwillingly and gradually and very much hoped it would not happen.
	I'm speaking to Michael Corda, who has written this brand new biography of Robert E. Lee titled Clouds of Glory, The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee.
	And it's a great introduction to the whole Civil War era, aside from being a biography of Robert E. Lee, the head general of the forces of the Confederate states.
	We'll be back in a moment.
	The book is up at dennisprager.com.
	If ever one person embodied moral-wrenching, it would be Robert E. Lee, it would seem to me.
	We'll make that clearer when we come back.
	This is a History Hour on the Dennis Prager Show.
	Hi, everybody.
	Dennis Prager here.
	This is a history hour.
	Periodically, I devote an hour to a great new work of history.
	Clouds of Glory is such a work, the life and legend of Robert E. Lee, the general of the Confederate Armies in the Civil War.
	Michael Corda, the very, very widely read biographer and historian, is my guest, and he is the author.
	We're talking about, of course, Robert E. Lee, the general of the Confederate forces.
	At the very end of the last segment prior to the break, I said if there was ever a man who had a moral tear in him, he would be, he's like a Greek legend or Greek tragedy in that way.
	Is that a fair summation?
	Absolutely fair.
	In 1861, Lee wrote, as the Great Division approached, he was reading a biography of George Washington and wrote to his wife how his great spirit would be grieved if he could see the wreck of his mighty labors.
	And the Union was for him what he had given his life to, as a United States officer.
	As he said, he wished no other song than Hail Columbia and wished no other flag but the stars and stripes.
	However, he had drawn long before 1861 a very firm red line, and that is that if the Union is dissolved and the government disrupted and his state was attacked, in that case, he would defend his state.
	Now, but his state, of course, was attacked because his state seceded and he was against secession.
	What did he expect the Union to do, the U.S. government to do?
	He expected the Union government to negotiate and was mightily disturbed when Virginia finally did secede.
	Everybody was, everybody in Virginia and everybody in the South was celebrating secession.
	Lee remained extremely critical of it.
	He said when the Virginia Convention finally voted in favor of seceding, and the Virginians themselves voted on that proposition, and Virginia therefore seceded, Lee said, I must say that I'm one of those dull creatures that cannot see the good of secession.
	And the cheering and the celebrations left him not only cold, but deeply disturbed.
	Having, however, reached the point where his state had voted to secede, Lee offered an accepted command of the Virginia forces, and when those Virginia forces were blended into the forces of the other states as the Confederate Army, he accepted the rank of general in the Confederate Army.
	Interestingly enough, Lee never wore a general's insignia in Confederate uniform.
	He wore the three stars, small stars, of a colonel, which was his substantive rank in the United States Army before the Civil War, and said that he would not wear any of the marks of a general until the war was won.
	And therefore, never did.
	Never did.
	Right.
	So did he consider himself a member of the U.S. Armed Forces?
	Was that his point?
	Once he had become an officer in the Confederate forces, he considered himself no other than a Confederate officer.
	But so why wouldn't November is National Family Caregivers Month?
	One in four Americans is stepping up to help older loved ones with everything from meals to bills.
	Family caregivers spend thousands out of their own pockets each year, and too many have to quit their jobs to keep providing care.
	Working families can't afford to wait.
	It's time to care for America's caregivers.
	Learn more at AARP.org/slash care for caregivers.
	Paid for by AARP.
	November is National Family Caregivers Month.
	One in four Americans is stepping up to help older loved ones with everything from meals to bills.
	Family caregivers spend thousands out of their own pockets each year, and too many have to quit their jobs to keep providing care.
	Working families can't afford to wait.
	It's time to care for America's caregivers.
	Learn more at AARP.org/slash care for caregivers.
	Paid for by AARP.
	Then where the symbols of generalship?
	I think, first of all, out of modesty and humility that the only not because he hadn't risen to general in the U.S. Army.
	Yeah, the only valid ranks for him was.
	Did he have any contact with Lincoln after the secession?
	No.
	He had no contact with Lincoln before the secession.
	Okay, okay.
	The command of the army was offered to him by Francis Blake.
	Did he have close friends in the North?
	Lee, yes, indeed.
	His sister lived in Baltimore and was a pro-Northerner.
	And her son became a colonel in the United States Army and actually was almost captured by Lee's army at the Second Battle of Banassas.
	So Lee had not only many friends, but had lived extensively in the North.
	He lived in New York for some years while he built the series of people.
	Right, so this is part of the Greek tragedy of this man.
	Yeah.
	How did I have read conflicting reports on this?
	How did the Confederate Army treat Union prisoners?
	Well, in general, there was an attempt made during the Civil War to exchange prisoners, and those who were lucky were exchanged.
	In short, for every the attempt was that for every northern prisoner held by the Confederate Army, the Federal Army would exchange a Confederate prisoner.
	That system worked sporadically, but there were many examples, particularly in the South, of great cruelty towards prisoners of war.
	In the first place, the South had almost nothing with which to feed its own armies.
	So the starvation of prisoners of war was a horrible extension of the Confederacy's own increasing poverty as the war went on.
	It's difficult, again, for us to understand with what few resources the Confederacy fought the war.
	There was no, for example, there was no existing factory for producing blankets in the South.
	And yet, a blanket is almost as important to a soldier as a rifle.
	And there was at first no factories for producing rifles.
	There were no factories that would produce boots in large numbers.
	So Lee, among other things, created the Confederate Army, found the arms, found the ammunition, attempted to find the boots, even allowing for that.
	More than a third of Lee's soldiers at the Battle of Gettysburg were barefoot.
	So The poverty of the South as compared to the North and the slender industrial resources of the South as compared to the North are a striking part of Lee's story.
	Did Lee think that the Confederacy could win?
	It's difficult to know exactly what Lee thought.
	He did not think, for example, that a single great victory would make any difference.
	In 1861, almost everybody in the South believed, wanted to believe, that there would be one big battle and that Southern steel and southern courage would break the Union Army and that the war would be over.
	Lee never had that impression at all.
	He built up the army knowing that it would be a very long war.
	He did not think that a victory or any of his victories would necessarily bring recognition of the Confederacy by the French or the British government, which would have been very valuable, of course.
	But he was not a believer in that, as Jefferson Davis was.
	He felt that...
	All right, hold on.
	Hold that thought.
	Hold that thought because I want to restate.
	I'm speaking to Michael Corda, author of the brand new biography of Robert E. Lee.
	This is a history hour on the Dennis Prager Show.
	Hello, my friends.
	Dennis Prager here.
	I continue with our periodic History Hour, featuring a brand new work of history, major work.
	In this case, it is a biography of Robert E. Lee, the general of the Confederate Army in the Civil War.
	The book is Clouds of Glory, the Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee.
	The author is Michael Corda.
	And I had asked you if Robert E. Lee thought if the Confederacy could win, and you were saying.
	I'm not at all sure that Lee ever thought that the Confederacy would win.
	Many, many Southerners thought that one great battle, one single big battle in 1861, would have won the war.
	Lee did not.
	He spent most of 1861 painfully building up the Army and supplying it and getting it ready for what he knew would be a long and difficult war.
	He certainly felt about the Battle of Second Manassas and about the Battle of Gettysburg that if he could invade the North, feed his army in the North and defeat a Northern Army decisively, that that might bring the Union to the negotiating table.
	And by the way, let's say that could have happened.
	What would the negotiations have been?
	Why would they have resolved?
	We'll come back into the Union if you let us keep slavery.
	Well, you know, I think the question of slavery is an obvious one, but was not necessarily what every Confederate was fighting for.
	Most of the Confederate Army did not own slaves, after all.
	Lee could have conceived coming back into the Union after some form of negotiation in a form that would leave what he referred to as Southern institutions untouched.
	And that's, I think, the important thing, that the federal government should not be in a position to dictate to the states how they should administer their own state.
	Well, other than slavery, other than slavery, what did the federal government want to control in the South?
	Three great issues that concerned Lee were abolitionism.
	He did not want to see slavery abolished, even though he disliked it.
	The second was the ability to for southern states to have slavery extended to the territories as America moved westwards.
	And finally, he wanted a federal government that could not change by force the habits and the social institutions of the southern states.
	Slavery was not something that Lee himself liked, but like a great many people, he was unable to conceive of the South as a place in which blacks and whites could live on equal terms.
	Was that because he was so used to slavery and rape and or because of his view of black human beings?
	I think it's because he grew up as a landowning and slave-owning aristocrat of Virginia, surrounded by slaves.
	November is National Family Caregivers Month.
	One in four Americans is stepping up to help older loved ones with everything from meals to bills.
	Family caregivers spend thousands out of their own pockets each year, and too many have to quit their jobs to keep providing care.
	Working families can't afford to wait.
	It's time to care for America's caregivers.
	Learn more at aarp.org/slash care for caregivers.
	Paid for by AARP.
	November is National Family Caregivers Month.
	One in four Americans is stepping up to help older loved ones with everything from meals to bills.
	Family caregivers spend thousands out of their own pockets each year, and too many have to quit their jobs to keep providing care.
	Working families can't afford to wait.
	It's time to care for America's caregivers.
	Learn more at aarp.org/slash care for caregivers.
	Paid for by AARP.
	In which slaves were simply an invisible reality, always present, but not necessarily anything that intruded upon people's politics.
	Secondly, early in his marriage, when he was living at Fort Monroe, he was not far from Nat Turner's revolt.
	And so he saw slave revolt as a genuine danger.
	But I think that it's important to understand about Lee that he was willing to do things that nobody else was willing to.
	For example, it's a very touching scene at the very end of the war in Richmond in church, an entirely white church, Episcopalian white church, when a black man comes into the church and there's this hush of silence in the church as they see him come down the aisle to the communion rail.
	All right, you'll tell me what Robert E. Lee did in a moment.
	Clouds of Glory, Biography of Robert E. Lee, Michael Korda, A History Hour, Dennis Prager.
	Dennis Prager here with the continuation of A History Hour, periodically featuring some major new work of history, this being Clouds of Glory.
	the life and legend of Robert E. Lee, the general of the Confederate armies in the Civil War.
	The author is Michael Korda, K-O-R-D-A.
	The book is up at dennisprager.com.
	So you were telling a story of Robert E. Lee doing things that others might not.
	He was attending church.
	Now, this was after the Civil War.
	I don't remember.
	During the Civil War.
	During the Civil War, at the very end, and a black man entered the church?
	Entered the church and walked down the aisle.
	Well, wait, a black slave or a black free person?
	By that time, there were no black slaves, in fact, because Lincoln had emancipated the slaves.
	Okay.
	They were still living in the virtual equivalent of slavery, of course, in the states that it seceded.
	But it was, in any case, it inspired total silence in the audience.
	And Lee got up, walked to the communion rail, knelt down beside the black man, and prayed with him.
	Now, Lee's view of life and his own view of himself was that he treated everybody with the same courtesy and the same generosity of spirit.
	On the other hand, he was somebody who was not willing to see, as he said very specifically, to Congress after the war.
	He did not think that blacks should be voting on an equal basis with whites.
	So you have, on the one hand, a man of enormous nobility and tremendous moral force.
	On the other hand, you have a man who did not share the ideas that we share today.
	One of the points that I make very strongly in my book, by the way, is that I don't think we can judge the major figures of the past by the standards of the present.
	If we do that, then we sort of, for one thing, have to write both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson out of American history, both of them slave owners.
	And we will all be written out of history for some reason.
	Maybe everybody will be a vegetarian in 100 years, and we'll be looked at as thugs for eating meat.
	Yes, of course.
	That's possible.
	It is possible.
	We will be judged by the standards of people 50 years or 100 years from now who think very differently from ourselves.
	Now, that's not to say that we necessarily have to be sympathetic with the standards of the past.
	No, no, but you judge people according to their standards.
	You judge people according to their standards and according to their times.
	Their times.
	Yes, exactly.
	I meant their times, not their standards.
	That's exactly right.
	I just want to say, because I'm a big fan of the Bible, when Noah, who is the only person, of course, Noah and his family, that God saves because Noah's decent, it says Noah was a righteous man in his generations.
	Yes.
	And it doesn't say he was a righteous man.
	So it's a statement.
	You compare people to their time, not to your time.
	I think that's absolutely true.
	You have to do that.
	Now, you can't lose your own standards.
	No, exactly.
	Exactly.
	And the Lee's were, in any case, extraordinary.
	They had when Lee's father-in-law Died.
	He left in his will instructions that his slaves, he had 200 slaves, which was a considerable amount for the day, be freed after five years.
	And the Lee's went to extraordinary lengths to make that possible.
	They established a school to teach them to read and write.
	Even though teaching a slave or a freedman in Virginia to read and write was against the law.
	Nevertheless, they set up a school to teach them to read or write.
	They did everything possible to free the slaves within the five years specified by Mrs. Lee's father's will.
	And Lee took a great interest in these things.
	But to judge him by the standards of today is to be able to discharge him.
	Did he, in your view, prolong the war?
	I think it can be argued that had it not been for Lee, the war might easily have ended after the Union victory at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in the summer of 1863, and that some of the worst fighting and a huge amount of deaths that occurred between 1863 and 1865 could have been avoided.
	On the other hand, we can hardly expect Lee to have surrendered when he didn't have to.
	He would fight to the very end.
	That was part of his code.
	There was no way for Lee to surrender until he was surrounded and unable to continue the war.
	Time goes so fast in these hours.
	Let's go to Robert E. Lee post-Civil War.
	Was he a broken man?
	Was he at peace with himself?
	How would you describe him?
	It's very difficult to say that anybody as religious as Lee is ever at peace with himself, but he was certainly not a broken man.
	Lee went to Congress to testify.
	He went at the invitation of Grant when Wratt became president to the White House and met with Grant.
	He became president of what was then Washington College.
	It is now Washington and Lee University.
	He was an active administrator and college president after he'd been the commandant of West Point for many years.
	And above all, and it is hugely to his credit, at the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, when one of his officers suggested that the men should be dispersed to fight what in essence was a guerrilla warfare, Lee would not hear of it.
	He insisted on surrendering his army intact with his weapons in perfect order.
	And the moment that was done, he worked hard for the reunion of the southern states and the northern states.
	This is big.
	This is big.
	Was he a great man?
	is my next question, and I have one other.
	Coming up with Michael Korda, author of Clouds of Glory.
	I'm Dennis Prager.
	This is the final segment of this edition of A History Hour, periodically devoting an hour to a major new work of history.
	This time it is Clouds of Glory: the Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee by Michael Corda.
	The book, of course, is up at dennisprager.com.
	So I take it that we owe a debt of gratitude to Robert E. Lee for ending the fighting at the end of the Civil War.
	Is that fair?
	I think we do, yes.
	I think that's fair.
	Yep.
	So here's the question.
	And I know you could spend an hour, because I know you think about this, but A, is he a great man in your view?
	And B, can you be a great man fighting for an immoral cause?
	Oh, I think Lee has earned the status of being a great man.
	There is almost no other military figure as respected in the United States as Robert E. Lee, even though he fought against his own country.
	The United States warship named after him.
	He's appeared on a federal stamp.
	There are probably more statues of Lee spread throughout the South than of any other person, surely more statues.
	But even in the North, Lee is regarded with great respect.
	Right.
	So that brings me to part two.
	How are you great if you fought for an evil?
	I'm not disputing you.
	I'm exploring that question.
	I think you have to see the Civil War as a terrible tragedy that was bound to take place from the moment the compromise was made over slavery in the very founding of the country.
	And Lee took the side that he had to.
	As he said, he could not raise his sword against his family, his children, and his neighbors.
	So he chose the side that he had to choose, but with great reluctance.
	But had that side won, a great evil would have continued and spread.
	That's possibly true, though somebody like Lee would have helped, would clearly have hoped that slavery might be slowly ameliorated and changed rather than abruptly.
	But Lee's greatness lies, first of all, in his incredible skill as a general.
	And secondly, in his ability to represent, I think, those qualities which almost everybody in the South aspires to.
	All right.
	We'll have to leave it at that.
	Michael Corda, it was riveting, as is the book.
	Thank you so much for your time.
	The book, of course, is up at dennisprager.com.
	Thank you, sir.
	Thank you very much for having me.
	This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.

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