Matthew Karp

Matthew Karp is the author of This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy.

Robert Edward Lee​ was, in the universal judgment of his contemporaries, a beautiful man. Few Civil War generals inspired such commentary: ‘He stands fully six feet one inch in height,’ a New York Herald reporter wrote, ‘and weighs something over two hundred pounds, without being burdened with a pound of superfluous flesh.’ He was an ‘unusually handsome...

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