Lee in the Shadow of Washington

"In his thematic biography of the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, McCaslin locates the sources of Lee's devotion to Washington and shows how this bond affected his performance as a general in battle. He argues that Lee used the strategy of attrition to attempt to persuade the North to quit just as Washington had wearied the British. But reliance on Washington as a role model led to tragic irony: in the 1864 campaign it was Lee's Confederates who became trapped like the British in the Yorktown campaign. After his surrender, Lee could no longer emulate Washington the revolutionary, and he became the president of a small college that bore Washington's name and surrounded himself with mementos of his hero."--BOOK JACKET.

First sentence: Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, declared that the "mystic chords of memory" that bound Americans to the Founding Fathers should bind them to support the Union.

Year

2001

Language

English

Publisher

Louisiana State University Press

Editions

3

Pages

272

ISBN

9780807129593

Data source: Wikidata