Lee Takes Command

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With no personal stake in slavery and no belief in secession as a political remedy, Robert E. Lee nonetheless rose to become the very symbol of the maverick Confederacy. He was one of the last products of colonial Virginia's "golden age,'' a generation of post-Revolutionary Southerners trained for leadership and raised in an atmosphere of noblesse oblige. And as a professional soldier and a Southern aristocrat, he accepted the end of the 71-year-old Union with deep regret but no real choice. He did not want his region of the Old America to exist in a Union which, as he said, had to be held together by bayonets. Originally published in 1964 as The Seven Days: The Emergence of Lee, this definitive account of Lee's emergence as a leader shows how he gained the trust of his men by an ego-free inner confidence that did not need constant bolstering. The author demonstrates conclusively how the great leader's aggressive military strategy ("the best defense is a good offense'') made the Seven Days Battle the single most significant military engagement of the Civil War.