The New Republic

is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and the
author of A Nation Under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the
Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration.

Toussaint Louverture: A Biography

By Madison Smartt Bell

(Pantheon Books, 333 pp.,$27)

Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private
Letters

By Elizabeth Brown Pryor

(Viking, 658 pp.,

$29.95)

I.

Two hundred years ago, the Anglo-American slave trade was formally
abolished, culminating a struggle that was several decades old.
Slavery was so deeply anchored in the Atlantic world, its defenders
and beneficiaries so formidably placed, that nascent abolitionists
in metropolitan centers such as London, Philadelphia, and Paris set
their sights chiefly on the trade rather than the institution of
slavery itself. If the slave trade were to cease, they imagined,
slaveholders would have to show more concern for the well-being of
their slaves, and a gradual process of amelioration might then be
initiated, resulting at some point in complete emancipation.

Yet by the time the British Parliament and the American Congress got
around to ending their involvement in the slave trade in 1807-1808,
the Atlantic slave system had already been dealt major blows,
principally by abolitionists closer to the ground. During the
American Revolution, thousands of slaves owned by Patriots
(including some owned by Jefferson, Washington, and Madison) fled
to British lines in quest of freedom. And even before American
independence had been won, new states in New England and the Middle
Atlantic--responding to the unrest of slaves and the circulation of
revolutionary ideas--had commenced what turned out to be a
protracted emancipation.

But by far the heaviest and most consequential blow against slavery
was delivered on the island of St. Domingue, the jewel of the
French colonial empire, where in August 1791 slaves launched a
massive rebellion. And unlike slave rebellions that came before and
after in the Americas, the rebellion in St. Domingue succeeded.
Over the course of more than a decade, slaves, in complex alliance
with free people of color, managed to defeat the armies of France,
Britain, and Spain; abolish slavery; kill or drive off their
owners; and establish an independent republic. Their extraordinary
feats during the 1790s and what they achieved by 1804 are known to
us as the Haitian Revolution.

The Haitian Revolution sent shock waves across the Atlantic world.
It struck fear into the hearts of slaveholders, raised hope in the
minds of the millions still enslaved, and reconfigured politics in
Europe and the Americas. Hostile observers from near and far,
including heads of state, viewed the making of Haiti as a contagion
to be contained, if not destroyed, and they would try mightily
through force of arms, economic sanctions, and diplomatic isolation
to do just that. But nowhere were the repercussions of the Haitian
Revolution more profound--and in ways that have rarely been
recognized, let alone appreciated-- than in the United States.

What the slaves did in Haiti intensified the developing conflict
over slavery in the United States, and may have made the Civil War
more likely. These biographies of Toussaint Louverture and Robert
E. Lee allow us to see some of these interconnections, and they
suggest that the fortunes of these men, great military and
political leaders of the 1790s and 1860s respectively--and great
rebels in their distinctive ways--may indeed have been linked. They
also put into rather surprising perspective the historical stature
of each man.

Neither the Haitian Revolution nor Toussaint Louverture is a
household name in the United States, at least outside certain
communities of African descent. They are rarely found in American
history textbooks (at the high school or college level), and even
well-educated high school students will likely go to college--and
perhaps graduate from college-- without having heard of either.
"Toussaint Louverture can fairly be called the highest-achieving
African American hero of all time," Madison Smartt Bell observes at
the outset of his biography. "And yet, two hundred years after his
death in prison and the declaration of independence of Haiti, the
nation whose birth he made possible, he remains one of the least
known and most poorly understood among those heroes. "

Bell's fascinating book may help to remedy this circumstance. Until
fairly recently, there were few works in English dealing either
with Toussaint or the Haitian Revolution more generally, and
historians of the French Revolution, with which events in Haiti
were intimately related, ignored or gave passing reference to them.
C.L.R. James's still-towering The Black Jacobins: Toussaint
L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, written in 1938, for
many years stood virtually alone in the English-language
literature. But owing in good part to a rapidly developing concern
with "Atlantic history," the past decade or so has witnessed
something of a turnabout, with important works on the Haitian
Revolution produced by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Carolyn Fick, David
Geggus, Julius Scott, and Laurent Dubois. Madison Smartt Bell has
himself been a figure in this trend, completing a highly praised
fictional trilogy (he is best known as a novelist) on Toussaint and
the great slave rebellion during this same period. But Toussaint
Louverture is the first substantial biographical account in English
since James's Black Jacobins, and it is a worthy successor.

Bell could not have had an easy time of it, because Toussaint did
not leave a substantial body of personal papers. And no wonder.
Notwithstanding the heights of power and influence that he
ultimately attained, Toussaint claimed remarkably humble
beginnings. He was born a slave, sometime between 1739 and 1746 (no
record of his birth has been found), on the Breda plantation, not
far from the port city of Cap Franais on the northern plain of St.
Domingue. At an early age, Toussaint Breda (as he was first known)
was put in charge of the livestock, which enabled him to gain
expertise as a horse-trainer and veterinarian, and eventually
renown as an equestrian. Perhaps for these reasons, he was, by
1772, elevated to the position of coachman for Bayon de Libertat,
who had become manager of the Breda estate.

By all accounts Toussaint developed a close personal relationship--a
friendship of sorts--with Bayon de Libertat, which likely played an
important role in his being manumitted in 1776 and gaining a
comfortable footing as a free man of color. Although he continued
to live on the Breda estate, Toussaint came to own several
properties as well as a slave, whom he quickly set free; and while
he could not claim the resources of the wealthy gens de couleur
(free people of color), he soon had, in Bell's words, "a surprising
number of common interests with members of the white planter
class." When the French Revolution erupted in 1789, Toussaint would
seem to have been identified with St. Domingue's slaveholding
regime.

Appearances, of course, can be misleading. We do not know when
Toussaint Breda became involved with those plotting rebellion in
St. Domingue. Nor do we know how Toussaint initially imagined what
he was doing. What we do know is that the Haitian Revolution was a
complex political process, played out on local and international
stages, in which the goals of different groups of instigators moved
in directions that none would have predicted or necessarily
desired.

There were, in fact, few harbingers of rebellion or revolution in
St. Domingue before the 1790s. Unlike much of the British
Caribbean, where the eighteenth century saw a series of maroon wars
and slave revolts, St. Domingue was relatively quiet. Aside from
endemic maroonage and a slave plot in 1757, the political cauldron
was on low simmer, and St. Domingue became the world's leading
producer of sugar and coffee. By 1789, nearly half a million
slaves-- most African-born and survivors of the Middle
Passage--worked on the estates, outnumbering resident whites and
free people of color (about 30,000 each) by at least seven to one.
Many of the wealthiest white planters (grands blancs) were
absentees, living principally in France and drawing their checks,
and many of the men who sat in France's National Assembly either
owned property in the colonies or had ties to the colonial trade.

By the 1780s, however, there were rumblings of discontent both in
Paris and in St. Domingue, and these may have become more explosive
on their own. The outbreak of revolution in France provided
volatile new tinder. The opportunity was seized first not by slaves
but by the gens de couleur, who suffered civil and political
disabilities despite their wealth and service in the colonial
militia. Influenced by the apparently egalitarian sensibilities of
the French revolutionaries, they sought equal standing with
whites--not an end to slavery-- and, when rebuffed by the National
Assembly in 1790, raised a rebellion in St. Domingue that was
brutally crushed.

Slaves on the northern plain were soon looking to press their own
advantage. It was not emancipation but amelioration that they
sought--an end to the use of the whip and three free days a week
rather than two; and when they met secretly in the forest at Bois
Caiman in midAugust, they thought that the king of France might be
on their side, thwarted on the island by their recalcitrant
masters. The conspirators were mostly privileged slaves, many of
them drivers or commandeurs, representing thousands of slaves on
the plantations in the surrounding area. Among them were Boukman
Dutty, Jean-Franois Papillon, and Georges Biassou. A week later, on
the night of August 22, they led the slaves in rebellion.

Bell does not know whether Toussaint was with the conspirators at
Bois Caiman (he doubts it) and is similarly unclear as to
Toussaint's whereabouts during the initial stages of the rebellion
(he surmises that Toussaint remained at the Breda plantation for
about a month). But he regards Toussaint as "a deeply secret
co-conspirator," and claims that sometime during the fall of 1791
Toussaint left the Breda estate and headed into the mountains, where
he joined a band of rebel slaves led by Biassou. There he first
served as Biassou's secretary (he was able to read and write) and
then gained the title of medecin general (general doctor),
obviously combining his veterinary skills with a knowledge of
herbal medicine. All the while, he maintained communications with
the rebellion's other leaders with a confidence suggesting he was
one of them.

Initially, the slaves fought the military forces of their masters
and of France with a fury more reminiscent of rioting than of an
organized campaign. Boukman was a Vodou priest, as Biassou and many
other leaders were alleged to have been (but not Toussaint, who was
Catholic). Bell describes their early forays as "jihadlike
onslaughts." Yet as the rebels' casualties mounted, they
increasingly embraced--apparently with Toussaint's
influence--guerrilla tactics common to West African warfare
(Toussaint's father was born in West Africa, of elite status,
before being enslaved and shipped to St. Domingue), bewildering
French troops used to battling on open fields.

By December the rebellion seemed to have run aground. Boukman was
killed in battle and decapitated, his head displayed in the public
square of Cap Franais, and the other leaders, including Toussaint,
looked to sue for peace and to save their skins. In exchange for
their own freedom, for the abolition of the whip, for one extra
free day each week, and for a general amnesty, they offered to
return their rebel troops to the plantations as slaves. It was a
move that reflected not only their desperation, but also the
limited aims of their rebellion thus far. Had the slaveholding
authorities in St. Domingue agreed to the deal-- and there was
precedent for doing so--the episode might have been over, and
Toussaint relegated to one of history's very minor supporting
roles.

Instead the authorities rejected the rebel offer with contempt, and
the rebel leaders had little choice but to go back on the
offensive. Within a year, they had come to embrace as their goal
liberty for all of the enslaved, and Toussaint had emerged as
general of their army. At the same time, the revolutionary
government in France finally decided to extend civil and political
equality to the gens de couleur, and sent a group of commissioners
to St. Domingue, led by Leger Sonthonax, to enforce its decree.
Before long, Sonthonax had his hands full, not only with
disgruntled whites who despised the prospect of racial equality,
but also with the security of St. Domingue and its institutions.
For in early 1793, following the execution of Louis XVI, both
Britain and Spain declared war on France, and the Spanish, from
their base in neighboring Santo Domingo, hoped to attract the armed
slave insurgents to their side by offering them freedom.
Jean-Franois, Biassou, and Toussaint, along with ten thousand
troops, quickly took them up on it, and while Jean-Franois and
Biassou would hold superior military rank in the Spanish army,
Toussaint began to develop some autonomy there, too.

The Spanish offer of freedom in return for military service now
forced the hand of the French officials in St. Domingue. Sonthonax
and his commissioners first agreed to manumit any slave who would
fight for France, and then, by late summer, moved toward a general
emancipation accompanied by the rights of French citizenship.
Suspicious of Sonthonax's authority, the rebel leaders remained
loyal to the Spanish and their king, but as if to steal Sonthonax's
thunder Toussaint issued his own proclamation on August 29, 1793,
two years after the rebellion had commenced: "I am Toussaint
Louverture; perhaps my name has made itself known to you. I have
undertaken vengeance. I want Liberty and Equality to reign in St.
Domingue. I am working to make that happen. Unite yourselves to us,
brothers, and fight with us for the same cause."

Toussaint Breda's self-transformation into Toussaint Louverture
("the opening") has been the subject of prolonged, and unresolved,
speculation. Bell, who considers Toussaint a "master manipulator of
layers of meaning," claims that Louverture has a "Vodouisant
resonance," invoking the spirit of gates and crossroads. At all
events, Toussaint as Louverture truly took history's stage.

Perhaps the greatest strength of Bell's biography is his attention
to the political and military dynamics of revolutionary St.
Domingue. Readers who might think (as most would) that slaves and
people of African descent more generally were outside the arenas of
formal politics and military affairs in the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Atlantic will have to re-evaluate their views.
In Bell's account, the slaves and the gens de couleur of St.
Domingue emerge as political actors every bit as significant as
those who owned the plantations or made policy in European and
American capitals. And Toussaint Louverture comes to us as a
political and military genius--formally untutored though he
was--and a remarkably modern man.

The challenges that Toussaint faced would have confounded, and
likely defeated, the most skilled, experienced, and cosmopolitan of
leaders. We probably will never fully know how he managed to meet
them. But by drawing upon the available sources, Bell gives a
meaningful, and largely convincing, sense of this, one that
emphasizes Toussaint's hunger for power and confidence in wielding
it, his extraordinary political intuition, his ruthlessness, and
his vision for the future of St. Domingue that lent coherence to
many of the things he tried to do. The only figure of the age with
whom Toussaint could have been compared was the one who ultimately
brought him down: Napoleon.

Toussaint began to disentangle himself from the Spanish and his
rebel allies early in 1794. It may have been the behavior of
Jean-Franois and Biassou, who had begun to trade in slaves, and it
may have been that the Spanish military did not show him sufficient
favor; but the official embrace of emancipation and citizenship by
the government in revolutionary France in February 1794 undoubtedly
played an important role, and by mid-April Toussaint was fighting
for France. With him came Henry Christophe (who, like Toussaint, had
been free), Moyse, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines (both of whom had
been slaves). With a series of impressive moves, Toussaint made
relatively quick work of the forces under Jean-Franois and Biassou.
By the summer of 1795 the Spanish had signed a treaty of peace with
the French, and Jean-Franois and Biassou had retreated to Spain and
Florida, respectively. Their followers then joined Toussaint, who,
for his successes, was promoted to brigadier-general by France.

It was a rather stunning accomplishment for a man who had not even
served in the colonial militia. Bell recounts that Toussaint became
notorious for such rapid movements that at times he and his troops
seemed to be in several places at once. His maneuvering was so
adept that he was able to achieve bloodless victories, and his
preference throughout was to win by means of diplomacy rather than
force of arms. But, if necessary, he pressed on, cleverly and
relentlessly. Soon he sent the British forces packing as well, and
became commander-in-chief of the French army in St. Domingue. In
admiration, French General Etienne Laveaux called Toussaint "the
savior of the constituted authorities" and "a black Spartacus, the
negro Raynal predicted would avenge the outrages done his race."

A Spartacus though he may have been, Toussaint did not seek a world
turned upside down. While he remained resolutely committed to the
freedom of St. Domingue's slaves, he also believed that their
emancipation could be secured only if the island were able to
prosper and to defend itself. And that, for Toussaint, meant
restoring the plantations and the staple economy, proving "to
France and all the Nations" that "Saint Domingue would recover all
its riches with the work of free hands." He wanted the freedpeople
to return to the sugar and coffee estates and work steadily for
wages, and he was ready to use the iron hand of the military to
keep them at it and even to encourage the return of grands blancs
estate owners, who had fled into exile, to help rebuild plantations
destroyed or damaged by the rebellion.

Toussaint's rise to power and his desire to have St. Domingue fully
involved in the Atlantic economy quickly made him a political
figure of international consequence, and established the basis for
a developing relationship with the United States. It was not a
relation of ideological affinity, but of economic and political
selfinterest, which nonetheless promised genuine cooperation.
Toussaint hoped to maintain a longstanding and substantial trade,
and he offered protection to Americans and their ships; the
Federalist administration of John Adams looked to cater to their
merchant constituents and weaken the French. Indeed, St. Domingue
was allowed to evade the embargo that the United States had imposed
on French shipping, and Toussaint was quietly encouraged to declare
independence from France--which he resisted. It was, Bell writes, a
"risky game--but Toussaint was playing it with consummate skill."

Toussaint's skills and power would be further tested within St.
Domingue itself. Although the gens de couleur, led by Andre Rigaud
and based chiefly in the island's south and west, shared
Toussaint's economic vision and had been allied with him for some
time, they feared his steady empowerment and intention-
-correctly, as it turned out--to extend his authority over all of
St. Domingue. But when growing tensions exploded into a brutal
civil war in 1799, Toussaint humbled his new adversaries. He
rallied his black troops by warning them that "the mulattoes ...
want to make the rest of you go back into slavery," escaped several
ambushes, and enlisted support from the French, the British, and
the Americans. By the summer of 1800, Rigaud had taken flight.
Toussaint announced an amnesty, but he left Dessalines to inflict
more lethal reprisals.

Toussaint celebrated his victory over Rigaud by marching into Santo
Domingo and later by writing a new constitution that formalized the
abolition of slavery, declared St. Domingue both free and French,
outlawed racial discrimination, and made Catholicism the only
officially recognized faith. But the constitution also imposed a
draconian labor regime and made Toussaint governor for life (which
Alexander Hamilton, in correspondence, had urged him to do). This
was not, to be sure, the sort of freedom that most former slaves
had in mind (none were involved in writing the constitution); they
wanted plots of land to farm on their own account. Thus, in the
fall of 1801 rebellions swept the northern plain--organized with
the aid of Moyse--which Toussaint, along with Dessalines and
Christophe, mercilessly suppressed.

Even more serious trouble was brewing in other parts of the
Atlantic. Napoleon Bonaparte, who had become ruler of France in
1799, was not amused by Toussaint's initiatives. Although Toussaint
insisted that he would remain part of the French commonwealth,
Bonaparte saw Toussaint's invasion of Santo Domingo and
proclamation of a constitution as dangerous moves in the direction
of independence. When Thomas Jefferson, who was adamantly hostile
to Toussaint's regime, defeated the Federalist John Adams in 1800,
Napoleon got the green light to act. He sent a very large
expedition to St. Domingue under the command of his brother-in-law,
Emmanuel Leclerc, with secret orders to re-impose slavery and to
arrest and deport all black officers, including Toussaint.

Neither Toussaint nor his lieutenants initially understood what was
in store for them, but they mounted an impressive defense, which
Bell chronicles with a fine military eye. Indeed, while Leclerc won
a series of victories, those victories were not secured, and his
troops began to succumb to the tropical diseases that had long made
the Caribbean a white man's grave. Still, his woes were not obvious
to Toussaint and his comrades, who instead came to believe that
their time was running out. In April 1802, Christophe suddenly
submitted to French authority in return for the maintenance of his
military rank, and before long Toussaint rode into Cap Franais with
Dessalines and three hundred of his horsemen ready to surrender so
long as his generals would be incorporated into the French army and
he could go off to live quietly on his property at Ennery.

It is not at all clear what kind of future Toussaint imagined for
himself and his revolution as he rode off to Ennery. Resistance
continued, French soldiers remained on the move, and, savvy as he
was, Toussaint could hardly have felt that his safety or the
prospects of a free and French St. Domingue were assured. Perhaps
that is why he agreed to meet with a French officer, ostensibly
about troop placements, hoping to find a diplomatic solution to the
continuing crisis. It was a big gamble, and he lost. Toussaint
showed up for the meeting with a small guard; he was seized and
quickly put aboard a vessel sailing for France. Once there, he was
transported to a mountain fortress where, on August 22, 1802,
almost eleven years to the day after the slave rebellion in St.
Domingue erupted, he began a miserable imprisonment. He died the
following April in his frigid cell, never having received the trial
he desperately wanted.

But the revolution that Toussaint had come to lead did not die with
him. When word reached St. Domingue of the French restoration of
slavery in neighboring Guadeloupe, the officers who had served
Toussaint--Christophe and Dessalines chief among them--deserted the
French and re-ignited rebellion. Increasingly decimated by disease,
the French army quickly collapsed, Leclerc along with it. Soon they
would be sailing out of Cap Franais, paltry remnants of the 80,000
who had arrived less than two years earlier, another great European
power humbled militarily by lowly slaves and free people of color.
On January 1, 1804, Dessalines, appropriating the Indian name
"Ayiti" for the island, proclaimed the independence of Haiti, the
second new nation in the Americas.

II.

Robert E. Lee was born, in 1807, into a world that Toussaint
Louverture and the Haitian Revolution had helped to make. In the
early 1790s, exiles from the slave rebellion in St.
Domingue--grands blancs, wealthy gens de couleur, and some of their
slaves--began arriving in Lee's native Virginia, as they did in
Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans, and
influencing the cultural life and political discourse. In 1800,
Gabriel, a slave blacksmith in Richmond, organized a large
rebellion, aborted at the last minute, that revealed knowledge of
what had occurred in St. Domingue. Most significantly, in 1803
Napoleon, having abandoned dreams of a colonial empire in the
Americas after his disastrous defeat in St. Domingue, sold the huge
territory of Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson and opened a new phase
in the developing struggle over slavery's future in the United
States.

Unlike Toussaint, Lee is a household name, the subject of many
hundreds of volumes, a cultural and political icon. What other
historical figure waged war against--committed treason against--his
own government, met with defeat, escaped punishment for his
offenses, and was then lionized by foe and friend alike, eventually
regarded in many quarters (at least among the white folk) as a
national hero? Scholars, even those of northern birth and undoubted
Union sympathies, have celebrated Lee's integrity, commitment,
creativity, military genius, and his ability to battle against
great odds, as well as the reverence of his troops for him. Most
historians have overlooked, excused, or denied his involvement with
slaves and slavery, and have avoided blaming him either for
political irresponsibility during the secession crisis or for the
bloodbath that the Civil War became. Their views have been
influential, especially with the public. "History," one of Lee's
biographers solemnly writes, "needs Robert E. Lee whole."

Elizabeth Brown Pryor proposes to give us just that. Reading the Man
may have the feel of a postmodern study, but it is rather a series
of what Pryor calls "historical excursions" driven by a collection
of Lee's private letters that she inadvertently stumbled upon. The
book's chapters begin with lengthy excerpts from some of those
letters (not as many as you might expect), and they frame,
thematically, what follows. Pryor is interested in mixing the
private Lee and the public Lee, and her book reads more like a
conventional biography than an exercise in hermeneutics.

But do we really need another huge life of Robert E. Lee? There is
not very much in Reading the Man that will be new to specialists,
or to the many devotees of Lee who have pored over myriad
biographical accounts and, especially, studies of his Civil War
exploits. For its first hundred pages or so, I myself wondered what
the point of this book might be, not because it was poorly done but
because it seemed so familiar. Then Pryor moves onto important
historical and interpretive terrain with a far more discerning and
critical eye than most of her scholarly or popular predecessors,
and forces readers to confront a series of troubling issues. Given
her largely sympathetic perspective on Lee, the result is all the
more devastating.

Robert E. Lee's origins could not have been more different from
Toussaint Louverture's. Toussaint was born into slavery, Lee into
one of Virginia's (and America's) prominent slaveholding families,
with as impressive a set of social and political connections as
could be had. Lee's father, "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, was a
Revolutionary War hero, close to George Washington, who served in
Virginia's House of Delegates, the Continental Congress, and as
governor of the state before he married into the famous, and
fabulously wealthy, Carter clan. But by the time Robert was born,
his father's many financial adventures had begun to backfire, thus
initiating what Pryor calls the family's "downward spiral." Before
Robert was two, Light-Horse Harry had gone to jail for debt, and by
the time his son was seven Harry had fled home, never to return.
Robert seems to have been deeply affected.

The Lees' slide left Robert's mother with income chiefly from a
Carter family trust, and although Robert knew that their
circumstances were insecure, he did manage to receive a splendid
education and effectively followed in some of his father's
footsteps by enrolling at West Point (against the wishes of his
mother). There he made a number of lifelong friends-- including
P.G.T. Beauregard, Leonidas Polk, and Albert Sydney Johnston--and,
owing to his mathematical gifts and to West Point's cutting-edge
science curriculum, he ended up in the Army's Corps of Engineers,
with assignments taking him to important projects west and south.
Along the way he married Mary Custis (a distant relation),
granddaughter of George Washington and daughter of George
Washington Parke Custis, a wealthy, slaveholding planter who grew up
at Mount Vernon and owned an 1,100-acre estate on the Virginia side
of the Potomac that he chose to call Arlington.

Pryor uses Robert E. Lee's extant letters, which begin in 1824, to
paint a picture of him as husband, father, companion, physical
presence. He and Mary were studies in contrasts--he "patient,
painstaking, and often passive," she "quick, creative, and
volatile"--but, as if using his own father as a negative reference,
he was intensely devoted to and emotionally involved with his seven
children. (Overly so, it seems: none of his four daughters ever
married.) He was also tall and handsome, and relished the female
attention that he regularly attracted (apparently without ever
straying). Most important, perhaps, we learn that the Mexican War
proved to be a seminal event in Lee's life, when he first felt the
"seduction of warfare" and "became a warrior."

Although the Mexican War is generally regarded as one of our
"little" wars, quickly concluded and often overlooked, such an
impression is incorrect. The war was a first trial by fire not only
for Robert E. Lee but also for Ulysses S. Grant, William T.
Sherman, Jefferson Davis, and a host of other West Point graduates
who would gain fame during the Civil War. It was a major theater of
conquest, as the United States laid claim to a large portion of
northwestern Mexico--what is now our Southwest--including
California. And much as the acquisition of Louisiana did, it
shifted the great political question of the day away from the issue
of slavery in the states (over which there was considerable
agreement as to constitutional interpretation) to the issue of
slavery in the federal territories (over which there was much
confusion and increasingly deep division).

Lee was extremely reticent about his political views. His father was
a Federalist, and he appears to have been a Whig (both parties
favored a strong and activist central government) until around
1850, when, according to Pryor, he began to sympathize with the
Democrats (who favored state rights). But we do not know how he
ever voted, and we have no evidence of his participation in party
politics. In some respects, Lee's ideals--in good part a product of
his experience as an engineer--seemed close to those of an emerging
middle class: he appreciated innovation, self-advancement, and
self-control. In other respects, they reflected the worlds of the
military and the landed gentry, with emphases on order and
hierarchy. He was very much a nationalist as well as a Virginian.
Although he appears to have found slavery distasteful, his
attitudes and behaviors fit in well with those of many other
slaveholders.

Lee, in sum, was a muddle of contradictions; and he resolved most of
them badly. He owned or had an interest in slaves for about as long
as he could hold onto them. He believed that black people were
better off as slaves in the United States than they would have been
had they remained in Africa, and that they should appreciate their
circumstances. He thought that slavery was far more of a burden to
white people than it was to black people, and he especially
disliked slavery's inefficiencies and messiness. He detested
abolitionists and blamed them for the country's woes. He was a
white supremacist. And when he was instructed to emancipate nearly
two hundred slaves as executor of his father-in- law's estate, he
did everything possible to postpone it.

Lee's contradictions were most consequential in the secession
crisis. During the 1850s, he appeared to symbolize what was left of
national cohesion: he served as an officer in the military arm of
the federal government of the United States, and even did a brief
stint as superintendent of West Point. He enjoyed the fruits of
what government largesse had to offer, benefited from a federally
sponsored education, and helped to advance the nation's imperial
designs; and, although he embraced President Franklin Pierce's
bitter denunciation of abolitionism in 1856, he also described
secession as "anarchy," as "nothing but revolution."

Why, then, did he resign his post in the U.S. Army, even after the
newly elected President Lincoln offered him command of all Union
forces, and join the slaveholders' rebellion against the federal
government? The answer is that Lee's loyalties to the United States
conflicted with his loyalties to Virginia, and he always said that,
if required to choose, he would choose his home state. While most
scholars recognize this dilemma and regard it as a matter of
political principle that they can respect, Pryor is a much tougher
critic. Lee, she argues, had several options open to him. He could
have stayed in the United States Army, as about 40 percent of
Virginia's officers did (including Winfield Scott); he could have
sat the war out, supporting neither side, as some other officers
did; or he could have made an effort to keep Virginia in the Union
or broker a peace, as both statesmen and relatives pleaded with him
to do. Instead he "fell back on his old passivity" and "remained
resolutely out of the discussions"; when the time came, he threw
his lot in with the Confederacy. Whereas Toussaint Louverture
became a rebel against slavery, Robert E. Lee became a rebel in its
defense, in close accord with the reactionary secessionists, Pryor
tells us, on most everything save secession itself.

The misgivings about secession and the Confederacy that Lee may have
harbored were jettisoned very early in the war when the Union Army
seized and occupied Arlington, the Custis and Lee family estate.
"It is hard to overstate the effect the seizure of Arlington had on
the Lees," Pryor writes. "From this time forward their
identification with the fate of the South never wavered." Indeed,
when he assumed command of what would come to be called the Army of
Northern Virginia in June 1862, Lee displayed an aggressiveness, a
combativeness, and an intent to destroy his enemy that would remain
hallmarks of his military disposition.

The price of his bellicosity would be very high. As commander of a
rebel army that was outmanned and outgunned by the Union side, he
might have taken a page from Toussaint Louverture's playbook (or,
for that matter, from George Washington's) and waged a defensive
guerrilla-style war, a war of attrition, hoping to wear the Union
down and force it to recognize the Confederacy. Instead, he looked
to go on the offensive and to inflict a decisive defeat on the
enemy's armed forces, imagining that northern morale would then
quickly deflate. Thus, he chose to invade the North twice and,
rather inauspiciously, to attack at Gettysburg, only to be driven
back after suffering immense losses. Lee was so confident in his
leadership, so self-assured, so taken with the smell of battle,
that he often ignored the advice of his generals (he was quick to
censure subordinates) and plunged ahead. What the Confederate
general D.H. Hill said of the Seven Days could well apply to Lee's
entire tenure at the helm of the Army of Northern Virginia: it was
"not war--it was murder."

With a brilliant combination of military and diplomatic tactics, the
rebel Toussaint defeated three national armies; but the rebel Lee,
intent on achieving military victory even at the cost of staggering
casualties, failed to defeat one. It was in defeat, of course, that
Lee seems to have left his greatest mark. He laid down his sword at
Appomattox and told his men to do the same, to go home, and to take
the oath of allegiance to the victorious Union. He showed them "a
way," as Pryor puts it, "to carry on with self-respect" and to
avoid more bloodshed. Although a federal judge in Norfolk
recommended that Lee be indicted for treason, no such indictment
came and he finished out his life as president of Washington
College in Virginia. Arlington had become a Freedmen's Village and
then a national cemetery.

Yet the thoughts and the doings of the post-Civil War Lee are often
obscured in the cloud of his ostensibly dutiful retreat and
reconciliation. Pryor seeks to smoke them out. Lee's conservatism,
she shows, may have hardened, and his distaste for African
Americans and for majority politics may have intensified. In
private writings that "throb with controlled rage," he justified
"complete" state sovereignty, advocated restrictions on the
elective franchise, thought blacks incapable of managing on their
own and feared their potential political power, and backed the
policies of conservative Democrats. Sponsoring a meeting of former
Confederate generals and other leaders at White Sulfur Springs, he
joined their call for an end to the "oppressive misrule" of
Reconstruction and a return to the "kindness and humanity" of
slavery. Chillingly, he would claim that the war had settled only
the question of power, not the question of principle. Lee's
students at Washington College seem to have thought so, too: they
organized a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

From his exile on St. Helena, Napoleon Bonaparte reflected on his
decision in 1802 to subdue Toussaint Louverture and the slave
rebellion in St. Domingue. "It was a great mistake," he conceded.
"I should have contented myself to govern it through the
intermediary of Toussaint." Indeed, Napoleon insisted that he
believed this all along but had yielded "to the opinions of his
State council and his ministers, dragged along by the howling of
the colonists, who formed a large party in Paris." Perhaps. Yet in
raising the might-have-beens of history, the exiled emperor
nonetheless allows us to appreciate the significance of the
moment.

It is, in fact, difficult to imagine Napoleon permitting something
of a co- partnership with Toussaint Louverture. It is easier to
imagine, historically, that he would have succeeded in defeating
Toussaint and re-instating slavery in St. Domingue as he did in
Guadeloupe and Martinique, or that the slave rebellion would have
been defeated much earlier, weeks or months after it exploded on
the northern plain. In either case, Atlantic slavery would have
been rejuvenated and France would have held on to Louisiana, leaving
the United States to satisfy its ambitions within far more
confining borders or to wage war against France to enlarge them.
Without western territories for slaveholding and non-slaveholding
interests to compete over, emancipation might have unfolded
throughout the entire country as it did in the northern states:
very gradually, with compensation of varying sorts for slaveowners
and limited civil and political standing for freed slaves. And
Robert E. Lee might have been left redirecting river currents with
the Army Corps of Engineers, as he was doing in the late 1830s.

As it happened, Napoleon's failure to destroy the Haitian Revolution
and his sale of Louisiana simultaneously energized American
expansionists, who were especially prominent among slaveholding
Democrats--every piece of territory conquered or otherwise acquired
by the United States between the Revolution and 1850 came under the
auspices of a slaveholding president--and reminded southern
slaveholders of the risks of political weakness. The stage was set
for an intense struggle over who would control the American state,
and for a slaveholders' rebellion once that struggle seemed lost to
them. It was set, too, for the emergence into history of Robert E.
Lee.

Had Toussaint managed to evade Napoleon's trap, it is
possible--though hardly likely, given the forces arrayed against
him--that Haiti's (or St. Domingue's) future might have been put on
a more stable and promising basis. At all events, Toussaint
Louverture and his revolution cast a giant shadow over the history
of the Americas and marked a road, however difficult and
treacherous, from slavery to modernity. Next to Toussaint, Robert E.
Lee seems rather modest in historical stature, and getting to know
him whole alerts us to the dreadful road down which he wished to
lead us.

By Steven Hahn

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