Inside Lee’s Mind

This is an invitation to fantasy—to see the unseeable, to witness the unwitnessable, to summon the past into the present. Since we are entering an imaginary world through the looking glass, why not go for broke? Why not choose to recover what no one has ever seen, not even the participants, not even the protagonist? Many of the most important events of history never had any witnesses, were in fact invisible. Yet they happened, and historians are always writing about them. They were the decisions, the fateful commitments, and they took place entirely within the mind and heart. If we may enter the mind as we enter the looking glass, many temptations present themselves. No accounting for choices in such matters. Forced to pick one, I would look in on the mind of Col. Robert E. Lee on being offered the command of Union forces in 1861.