Last May,  American Heritage published a collection of assessments of who or what is under-and overvalued in fields that ranged from cars to presidents to movie stars. We drew on the goodwill of a great many people to do this, and thev came through nobly; the results exceeded our expectations. So did the responses they generated.

Roger J. Spiller chose as most overrated general Robert E. Lee, describing him as “a truly tragic figure, a man who by everyone’s agreement epitomized high character and soldierly honor but who also was a traitor to his country, a man of formidable military skill whose strategic and operational sense nevertheless was deeply flawed and who led his side from calamity to calamity.”

American Heritage has published some fairly controversial material over the years, but nothing has ever come close to igniting the fire that this did. Angry letters started sleeting in immediately; then, just days after the issue mailed, during a White House news briefing on May 5, the beleaguered presidential press secretary Michael McCurry got a momentary break from the topic of the year when a reporter asked him this: “ American Heritage has just published a contention by a professor at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College that Robert E. Lee was a ‘traitor to his country.’ Does the president, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, believe this?” (Mr. McCurry said he had “never discussed that issue with the president”; pressed further, he promised to “see if he has anything he’d like to say on the subject.”)

The president doubtless moved on to other concerns; not I. Mail kept coming in, the stream dwindling sometimes, then refreshing itself, almost like those famous long-ago epistolary debates in the London Times, with their successive spasms of renewal as the topic reached some ever more remote outpost of Empire.

Oddly, it was not the aspersion on Lee’s generalship that most rankled; readers were far angrier to have him called a traitor (although one might not think the term a wholly whimsical description of a man who led a four-year armed insurrection against the government he had vowed to defend). J. E. Reardon of Rockville, Virginia, wrote: “I honor Lee, Jackson, my great-grandfather—who surrendered at Appomattox—as well as two great-uncles lost in the war. As a U.S. Marine Corps veteran during the Korean War, who displays the American flag daily, does that also make me a traitor?” And of course plenty defended Lee’s military prowess, among them T. R. Connally of Mount Crested Butte, Colorado, who said that Spiller’s judgment “brings to mind the definition of a great football coach: ‘He can take his’n and beat your’n and take your’n and beat his’n.’” The Floridian Homer Hirt told of the “young Billy Yank who, while sitting at a campfire with a grizzled veteran of the Army of the Potomac, stated, ‘I sure have a lot of faith in General Grant,’ and was