"In his thematic biography of the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, McCaslin locates the sources of Lee's devotion to Washington and shows how this bond affected his performance as a general in battle. He argues that Lee used the strategy of attrition to attempt to persuade the North to quit just as Washington had wearied the British.

But reliance on Washington as a role model led to tragic irony: in the 1864 campaign it was Lee's Confederates who became trapped like the British in the Yorktown campaign. After his surrender, Lee could no longer emulate Washington the revolutionary, and he became the president of a small college that bore Washington's name and surrounded himself with mementos of his hero."--BOOK JACKET.