War & Peace Quote by Robert E. Lee

A soldier’s plainspokenness turns into a moral alibi here, and that’s the line’s quiet power. Lee frames surrender not as political collapse but as an exhausted, almost sacramental act: “as long, and as well as we know how” recasts four years of carnage as dutiful labor completed to the limits of competence. It’s a rhetorical audit of effort meant to settle the account. If we tried our best, the implication goes, history can’t indict us too harshly.

The key maneuver is the phrase “as a Christian people.” Lee doesn’t argue strategy; he invokes identity. Christianity becomes a solvent that dissolves questions of responsibility into the language of humility, acceptance, and order. Defeat is admitted, but the cause is not examined. The sentence turns from “we have been defeated” (passive, almost weatherlike) to “there is now but one course,” a move that narrows the future into obedience. It’s not just guidance to soldiers; it’s a script for collective memory.

Context sharpens the stakes: these are surrender-era words, designed to stop the bleeding, prevent guerrilla chaos, and manage the psychological shock of a slaveholding republic collapsing in real time. Lee’s intent is stabilization. The subtext is preservation: if the Confederacy can’t survive as a state, its self-conception might survive as a story - honorable effort, noble loss, Christian resignation. Acceptance, here, is both peace offering and narrative control.