Surprisingly, Robert E. Lee (18071870) did not overwhelm the field of great 19th-century Virginians. Lee, wrote Mayor L. Douglas Wilder, "is thought of by most Virginians as the greatest person during that period of time." Always canny, Wilder never indicated whether he agreed with that view.

Waite Rawls, of the Museum of the Confederacy, summarized the case for Lee's greatness. Lee, he wrote, was "a brilliant and audacious military commander, whose stately bearing commanded the utmost in respect from soldiers and civilians -- both North and South. By war's end, Lee was the Confederacy; and the Confederacy was Lee."

After Lee surrendered at Appomattox, he "clearly saw," as Rawls wrote, "that reconciliation and reunification were the only road to be traveled. From his position as president of Washington College, his model was seen by all of the South to heal the wounds of internal conflict."

"Increasingly," historian and archivist Ervin Jordan wrote, "Lee's reputation is based largely on what he did not do: win Confederate independence, and his refusal to endorse guerrilla resistance against restored federal authority after Appomattox. This transformation into an honorable, vanquished foe helped spare the nation the kind of protracted insurgency now in Iraq."

UVa Center for Politics director Larry Sabato reflected on the meaning and significance of Lee's life and career. "In my view," Sabato wrote, "his cause was completely wrongheaded, but Lee's life was so influential in the life of the nation -- and its saddest moment, the Civil War -- that he cannot be ignored. Lee towers over the post-Monroe Virginians who became president. Lee was a deeply honorable and decent man, though his life is a lasting reminder that good people can lead tragic and destructive enterprises."

Historian Cynthia Kierner wrote more on that same theme. Lee, she began, "was probably as decent and honorable a man as a slaveholder could be. These admirable qualities made Lee an extremely powerful influence in the historical memory and popular culture of post-Civil War America. In certain circles, his influence is arguably still felt today."

Kierner and other historians have noted that the process of postwar reconciliation required Northerners to admit that Southerners had fought for an honorable cause, not solely for the preservation of slavery. Although Lee did not seek to play the role in which postwar history cast him, he became, as Kierner phrased it, "the poster-boy for a romanticized Lost Cause, an American patriot who reluctantly went to war in 1861 to defend his home (Virginia), its traditions, and its rights."

By retiring peacefully to a small college presidency to educate the reunited nation's future leaders, Lee appeared to accept the outcome of the war, and to join his former adversaries in an admirable work. That Lee was a man of unquestioned integrity was an essential element of his appeal.

As Ben Campbell phrased it in his nomination of Lee as most influential Virginian of the 19th century, "His sense of honor and purpose, his love for the men he had led, and his love for America made him witness to the need to establish a complete peace and seek reconciliation after the war."

The quality of Lee's generalship was less prominent than might have been anticipated in the comments that the participants in the survey made. That may be because, as

Times-Dispatch Editorial Page editor Todd Culbertson put it, Lee chose the wrong side in the Civil War. It may be difficult for people these days to heap praise on a general whose army inflicted tremendous casualties on the United States Army.

Lee's military abilities were once as frequently praised as his character. Historian Bland Whitley wrote, "He was a great military leader and an honorable and good man, to boot. That's the problem, though. Without him, Virginia's war effort might well have collapsed during George McClellan's peninsula campaign.

"The war (for Virginia, anyway) might have been more or less over in 1862." Whitley remarked that "the state clung to the Confederacy for three more years, incurring thousands more deaths and a devastated economy that took arguably 100 years to recover."

If Lee was a competent military commander who fully understood his resources and those of his adversary, as several scholarly inquiries in the 1980s suggested, then why did he continue fighting long after he had any realistic chance of winning? That decision calls into question Lee's essential greatness as a general. -- Brent Tarter