| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Virginia's Civil War. Ed. by Peter Wallenstein and Bertram Wyatt-Brown. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. xvi, 303 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8139-2315-8.)
Civil War Virginia, like the war itself, has been about as thoroughly examined as any period and place in American history, to the point that one wonders just how much, especially in the eastern theater, is left to do. This volume is a collection of essays divided into three sections: "Lee," "War," and "After the War."	1
The "Lee" section features some veteran scholars: Emory Thomas, Michael Fellman, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and Charles Joyner. Space limitations allow only brief comments on what these and the several other contributors have to say. Thomas thinks Lee was a flawed but great man; Fellman finds Lee to be a Southern nationalist and white supremacist; Wyatt-Brown agrees with Fellman, noting the irony of Lee "forcing a prolongation of a war that ended in black emancipation and the construction of a new and more liberated republic" and that his "brilliant generalship led to the inexorable ruination of the very land he was defending" (p. 41). Joyner, on the other hand, notes the enigma that Lee made of himself by insisting in postwar testimony before a congressional subcommittee that he had always favored emancipation and was glad to see slavery ended. Did Lee intentionally make himself contradictory and therefore impossible to analyze historically? We may never know, but these four writers certainly give us some angles to ruminate.	. . .

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