| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 100.3

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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 100.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

Lee's Last Retreat The Flight to Appomattox

By William Marvel

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xiii, 308. Illustrations, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, sources, index. $29.95.)

According to Webster's, a revisionist is simply "one who favors revision." Customarily, the term describes a historian who alters previously accepted interpretations of a historical event. In this sense, William Marvel is surely one of the most effective and reliable revisionists in a field—Civil War history—long marked by romance and legend and greatly in need of cleansing. Marvel takes on the tough ones, too: in the past he has considered Ambrose Burnside and Andersonville prison; in this volume he reconsiders Robert E. Lee's storied final campaign. In a foreword, Marvel states that "no episode of the war (perhaps not even Gettysburg) has been so particularly affected [by mythology] as the retreat that ended at Appomattox" (pp. ix-x). After identifying the prior romances, Marvel follows Lee and his beaten Army of Northern Virginia from the fall of Richmond and Petersburg to William McLean's Appomattoxhome, where Ulysses S. Grant courteously protected the dignity of his adversary while accepting Lee's surrender of what remained of his army.

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