Robert E. Les and the Southern Confederacy, 1S07-1870. By Henry
Alexander White, M.A. , Ph.D., D.D. (G. P. Putnam's Sons.)— This book, with its excellent series of portraits and maps, con- tains a full and interesting account of the American Civil War, having for its central figure the beaten but heroic leader of the South, who, rather than Grant or Lincoln, was in so many respects the true descendant of Washington. Englishmen of all parties will always feel a greater interest in Lee than in Grant, even though politically their sympathies may be with the Union. No more truly heroic figure than Lee exists in modern history ; but it must be admitted that, like Washington himself, he was essentially of the aristocratic type. There is a singularly pathetic side to his career, which arises from the fact that this brilliant and devoted son of Virginia was, if not at heart a Unionist, yet one who saw all the evils in secession and in slavery, which he was doomed to spend his grandest energies in upholding. This volume of the "Heroes of the Nations" series by an American professor of history, displays absolutely no bias ; it is a singularly fine estimate of the man, and gives a fair and impartial account cf the great military campaigns which have made the names of Lee and Stonewall Jackson even mom world-famous than any of the eventually successful Northern leaders. In his private life Robert Lee was everything that we understand by the term " gentleman ; " and as such he might meet with defeat, but never with disgrace. He was a profoundly religious man, of the high Puritan type. After Petersburg and Appomattox, when he ex- claimed to his beaten soldiers,—" Men, we have fought through the war together. I have done the best I could for you. My heart is too full to say more—" down to his later semi-retired life as the worthy President of Washington College, we note in every recorded word or action a man of whom we, as well as our American kinsfolk, may be proud, as a true Anglo-Saxon worthy of the type of Cromwell and Hampden.
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