Duty, says one of the biographers I've been reading, was the primary determinant of his course in life. And his loyalty to Virginia was part of his duty, and in turn made it his duty to fight for the Confederacy.
He was heartsick at all the destruction that the war caused. But I have come across no evidence that he felt any guilt or remorse over sending so many young men to their deaths, nor for inflicting such horrendous losses on the Army to which he'd devoted more than three decades of his pre-war life, nor for prolonging the war with his brilliant generalship. He was doing his duty. (He would have understood well, I expect, the lesson taught Arjuna by Lord Krishna, if I remember --and understand-- my BHAGAVAD GITA.)
Interestingly, Lee said late in his life that his choice as a youth to get a military education was a great mistake. And he also proved, again late in his life, to be a surprisingly innovative and (in some ways) liberal educational leader (as president of Washington --later to become Washington and Lee-- college).
But fundamentally, Lee was a deeply conservative man-- born into a "Federalist" family, attached to a hierarchical view of society, socialized in the aristocratic culture of manners, structured psychically around traditionally established cultural and moral norms.
He was also, in the terms used in the non-Virginian culture of my immediate ancestors, a real mensch.
I do not have the feeling, as I did with Goethe, that had I only had a chance to know him we would have become good friends. He was too circumspect and circumscribed and measured in his manner of interacting with the world for him and me to have done together the dance of relationship as I like it done.
But as I read accounts of his many encounters with the world --in a huge variety of situations, with a great many issues and feelings and values at stake-- I am quite taken with this man.
He was not perfect, but as life sounded him again and again, he seems hardly ever to have given off a wrong note. In almost every instance, as if by a reliable "instinct" that grew organically out of his well-integrated character, he was like a bell without flaw, giving forth a pure vibration. I am hard-pressed to think of another historical figure who was, in this sense, so "true."
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