TO THE EDITOR:
I have no wish to extend the dialogue with Chase Hawisher. He and I are firmly opposed on the subject of Robert E. Lee and slavery.
But I will offer a brief comment on Elizabeth Pryor’s “Reading the Man.” Hers is a prodigious and valuable work, for which we are in her debt.
It was she who published Lee’s humanizing personal letters in extenso. It is, however, important to note that the disturbing scene she cites, and Hawisher repeats, of an angry Lee egging on a subordinate in a cruel whipping of three runaway slaves, rests on the narrative of one of the victims, Wesley Norris, published in the antislavery press of 1859.
Pryor’s extensive discussion of this episode is nuanced, although she is inclined to credit Norris’ account over Lee’s denials in personal letters.
She does concede that Norris boasted of unverified scars. Generally, she tends to view those who take Lee at his word as “apologists.”
Ultimately, historical truth-telling obliges us to form careful judgments of contentious accounts of the past, and this is among the most contentious.
While Norris’s narrative is full of circumstantial detail (which in Pryor’s view tends to confirm it), the picture of an angry Lee cheering the cruel chastisement of a young woman is inconsistent with all that I know and believe about Lee’s character.
