No other general in American history has attracted the attention and adoration accorded to Robert Edward Lee, the peerless chieftain of the Confederacy. Indeed, in all of history, only Napoleon can vie with Lee for the hold he maintains on the imagination of students and admirers around the globe. Succeeding generations have invented and reinvented Lee, trying to make him a man for their own times, and year after year the writings of worshipers and revisionists—and occasionally even revilers—continue to come out.

It is time for a step back, to take a reflective look at Lee through neither the eyes of adoration nor iconoclasm, and that is what eminent Southern historian Charles P. Roland does in Reflections on Lee: A Historian’s Assessment. One of the country’s most distinguished students of the South and the Civil War, Roland used the accumulated wisdom of a long career to draw a fresh picture of Lee—the man, the soldier, the symbol.

Reflections on Lee is not a conventional biography, though the outline