Reviews

The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee: The Forgotten Case Against an American Icon by John Reeves

liberrydude's review against another edition

4.0

An interesting, informative, and thorough read that will hopefully educate people on the Lost Cause. Reeves has resurrected a lot of history that has fallen into the cracks. Legal history mostly. The North might have won the war but they lost the peace. Reeves explains President Johnson’s motivation towards holding the top tier leaders of the South accountable for treason. It mirrors today’s same dilemmas over military or civil prosecutions of terrorists. Lincoln’s assassins and the commandant of Andersonville were all tried in military courts as the Civil War had not been declared over with martial law in much of the South. That took one year. Nor could the legal minds of the North agree on where the trials of Davis or Lee should occur and who should be the judge. Justice Samuel Chase deserves much of the blame for delaying the trials which never occurred. That took another two years. Johnson meanwhile was a racist and not about to grant freedmen equality. Frustrated by the long delays and mired in his impeachment proceedings Johnson realized it was too late. Davis and Lee weathered the storm and were pardoned and freed out of a momentum to move on. Never having paid the price for their treason they were glorified as heroes. Reeves explains the Lost Cause objectively with the book ending with the dedication of Lee’s statue in Richmond in 1890.

frances_chan's review against another edition

informative tense slow-paced

4.5

Growing up in the South, I’d absorbed a lot of the Lost Cause narrative that painted Lee as an uncomplicated, heroic, exemplary moral figure. While I’ve moved well past that view, I had no idea that he was actually indicted for treason after the Civil War and came close to being tried for his crimes against humanity. Definitely recommend this book for a balanced, factual view of his actions during the war and subsequent legal issues that he and other Confederate leaders faced after the war. I wish the author had written more about the rise of the cult of personality surrounding Lee and how it still thrives today; he touches on it briefly in the last chapter, but it could probably be a book-length topic on its own.