Last of Lee

R. E. LEE (Vols. Ill & IV)--Douglas Southall Freeman--Scribner ($7.50).

Volumes III and IV of Douglas Freeman's four-decker definitive life of Robert E. Lee carry on from the aftermath of Chancellorsville and the death of "Stonewall" Jackson (TIME, Oct. 22) to the old age and final illness of the Confederate generalissimo. When the South collapsed at Appomattox, Lee was already suffering from a complicated heart and artery disorder that was never properly diagnosed. But he had a living to make, and he set out to make it. The Northern victory had wiped out his $20,500 in Confederate and Carolina bonds. His lot in Washington had been sold for taxes in 1864; his estate at Arlington had gone the same way; the $40,000 due his daughters from the Custis estate could not be raised. So the old soldier took on the job of president of Washington College in Lexington, Va., where he had an offer of $1,500 a year, plus the use of house and garden, plus one-fifth of the revenues to be derived from the tuition fees of $75 per annum for each student. Lee might have anticipated Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover by entering the insurance business, but he refused a $10,000-a-year job as supervisor of agencies of an insurance company. He knew business was not his field, and it was not in his nature to fake.

Washington College, in 1865, was a hollow shell. David Hunter's Yankee raiders had passed that way in 1864, and its library had been gutted, its laboratory equipment smashed or looted. When Lee took charge at Washington, part of the campus was being used for farm land. Although not a first-rate "academic beggar," Lee administered what money he had to good effect. To the old-time classical curriculum, so beloved of the Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamars, Lee, who had spent four years defending the planters' leisure-class culture, soon added vulgar practical courses of agriculture, commerce and applied chemistry, thus anticipating Nicholas Murray Butler's Columbia by some decades.

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