The committee directed Dickinson to show the Confederate Lee at the height of his glory without specifying what that meant. If asked, Lee’s biographer would probably say that the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863 was Lee’s glory. But Dickinson didn’t pick this moment. Instead, he used a picture taken by the photographer Mathew Brady two weeks after Lee’s defeat at Appomattox in April 1865. Lee’s glory, the artist seems to say, came when he ordered his soldiers to go home instead of continuing the war as a guerrilla force. In 1951, Dickinson tweaked the Lost Cause legend. When Freeman saw the
...more