Christopher Caldwell Reviews the life and scholarship on one our nation’s great men. A man who fought for one of the worst causes that ever stirred the souls of men. To deny his position in the country, or his greatness as a man, is to whitewash history and thereby misunderstand and lose its lessons.

As modern interweb pieces go, it is a long piece. I encourage you to click over and read it.

There Goes Robert E. Lee

“Human nature will not change,” Lincoln said shortly after his re-election in 1864. “In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to avenge.” That is the spirit in which Americans have tended to remember, and should remember, Robert E. Lee, one of the bravest and most principled among them, even if his bravery is of the sort they cannot always match and his principles of the sort they cannot always honor.