Robert E. Lee, Version 200

Robert E. Lee was born Jan. 19, 1807, at Stratford Plantation on the Northern Neck of Virginia and was the fifth child of Revolutionary War hero Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee. He attended West Point and never received a demerit. By all accounts enormously handsome, tall, charismatic and humble, he had a long and illustrious career in the U.S. Army. In 1861, as Southern states contemplated secession, Lee privately ridiculed the idea. Still, when he was offered command of the Union Army, he turned it down once Virginia -- his "country" -- seceded.

During the Civil War, Lee's troops were often vastly outnumbered but managed to win or fight to a stalemate for years. Once the war ended, Lee resisted calls to continue the fight in the hills as a guerrilla and instead encouraged his soldiers to go home and begin rebuilding the nation. He retired to what was then Washington College, where he set about innovating the offerings, including the first classes in the country in business and journalism.

In other countries, leaders of failed civil rebellions are often reviled. But a strange thing happened to Lee after he died. He became beloved by many. Over the years, he has been praised by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had a picture of Lee hanging in his office.

Northerners, seizing on Lee's early ambivalence about the war, his gentlemanly sense of honor and duty, and his distaste of slavery -- he once wrote that it was a "moral and political evil" -- embraced the Confederate general as a way to foster reconciliation, said John Coski, a historian at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. In 1901, he was one of only 29 Americans inducted into New York University's Hall of Fame. Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the lyrics for the Battle Hymn of the Republic, composed a poem in Lee's honor.

At the same time, his former generals wrote of him as so perfect and his cause so noble that Lee became fixed as the tragic hero of a romantic "Lost Cause" and that cause became synonymous with white Southern identity.

"There's an old saw in the South of a little girl asking, 'Mommy, is Robert E. Lee from the Old Testament or the New?' " Coski said. "Lee has been so praised and distorted that they made him more than human, and in so doing, made him less than human. He's a complex figure. If we want to understand history in its complexity, we have to understand Robert E. Lee."

The loud and public culture war continues. A Richmond-area Boy Scout troop created a furor over "craven surrendering to political correctness" when it decided recently to strip Lee from its name and logo. The NAACP has protested the use of almost $500,000 in state funds to refurbish the towering Lee statue on Richmond's Monument Avenue. And when the Virginia General Assembly created a special commission last year to plan a year of events to commemorate the Lee bicentennial, the panel wanted Lee license plates and more lessons about Lee in the public schools. Instead, after intensely emotional debate -- one African American delegate said Lee's likeness reduced him to tears -- all that was given was a $5,000 grant to publish a tourist brochure on Lee-related events in the state.

But take a walk inside Arlington's Washington-Lee High School for a look at the New South. Inside the front door, a "diversity quilt" is displayed with symbols of the countries and cultures represented at the school. A map of the world and a photo mosaic of students show them in all colors and hues. The assistant principals are Latino and black. Students pass by the portrait of Lee in the library shrugging. "No one really notices him," 16-year-old Andrew Gilbert said.