Like Lee at the Appomattox Court House in 1865, they lost the battle and the war.
Many generals consider Lee “the best strategist of all”
Trump is right in saying that President Abraham Lincoln wanted Lee, then a U.S. Army colonel, to help lead the north and he refused, then told his sister that he could not “raise his hand against my place of birth, “Virginia (who had separated the day before Lincoln’s offer).
It’s also true that in a handful of Civil War battles, Lee won praise, but the superlative used by Trump ignores Gens ’historic careers, highlighted by military experts. John Pershing, George Patton, William Sherman, David Petraeus, and Douglas MacArthur all defended the United States instead of rebel revolts.
Despite loyalty to the country, Lee’s tactics have been extensively examined, most notably his leadership style on the battlefield and his propensity for unnecessary aggression. According to the former, Lee was quoted in a conversation with Prussian army captain Justus Scheibert as saying, “I believe and work with all my might to bring my troops to the right place at the right time, and then I have fulfilled the my duty, while I command the battle for them, I leave my army in the hands of God. “
Like other Confederate leaders, he suffered from poor maps and untrained personnel, but he also made his own problems, wrote historian Joseph Glatthaar, who has written numerous books on the army, including two on Lee.
“His most egregious problem was repeating a mistake that appeared in his initial campaign: Lee tried to coordinate too many independent columns. He overloaded himself and his staff. … What Lee achieved with plan audacity. and combating aggression diminished by its ineffectiveness. command and control, “Glatthaar wrote in” Partners in Command: The Relationship Between Civil War Leaders. “
“Except for Gettysburg, (Lee) would have won the war”
Lee’s army in northern Virginia gained many notable victories, even when it was inferior to the battles of Second Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, but lost nearly 30,000 soldiers in those campaigns, in part because of its aggressive tactics.
Gettysburg, where nearly 40% of its troops fell, was far from its only defeat. He also lost to Malvern Hill before hesitating in the last days of the war at Five Forks and the Appomattox Court House, where he surrendered.
Lee was “perhaps the greatest unifying force after the war”
Trump is right that Lee was “ardent in his decision to bring the North and the South together through many means of reconciliation,” but those efforts were limited to white Americans.
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Adam Serwer, who write for The Atlantic, are two of many who have dismantled the mythology and hagiography of a Lee “kindly” who expressed his opposition to human servitude while refusing to end the his participation in the institution before the Civil War. .
Yes, he described Chattel slavery as “moral and political evil,” but he also wrote, “I think it is a greater evil for the white man than for the black race, and while my feelings are strong recruited on behalf of the latter, my sympathies are stronger for the former. “
He went on to say that black men and women had better slavery in the United States than in their homeland and described the relationship between master and slave as paternalistic, Christian, and necessary.
“Blacks are unbeatably better here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically. The painful discipline they are subjected to is necessary for their instruction as a race, and I hope it prepares them and leads them to better things. How long his subjection may last may be necessary, is known and ordained by a wise Merciful Providence.His emancipation will be the result of the gentle and melting influence of Christianity than the storms and storms of fiery controversy. though slow, it is safe, “he wrote in 1856.
The patriarch of one of the richest and most famous families in Lee’s hometown, Westmoreland County, freed his slaves decades before the war, but this did not move the general to do the same. By inheriting the slaves from his father-in-law George Washington Parke Custis, Lee was told he could release them immediately if Custis’ estate was in good condition or within five years.
Lee chose the latter, and historical documents indicate that he was a much more cruel task leader than the Custises were.
Wesley Norris was born on the Custis plantation and said in an abolitionist newspaper that he would flee with his cousin and sister after learning that Lee intended to keep them enslaved for another five years. After being captured, the trio was returned to Lee, who demanded to know why they had fled. Norris said:
“We told him frankly that we considered ourselves free; then he told us that he would give us a lesson we would never forget; he ordered us to the barn, where, in his presence, he bound us firmly to the places of a Mr. Gwin, the our supervisor, whom General Lee ordered to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, except my sister, who received only twenty.
“As a result, the supervisor stripped us to the skin, which, however, had enough humanity to refuse to whip us; as a result, Dick Williams, a county agent, was called in and gave us the number of lashes. ordered.
“Meanwhile, General Lee stood by and frequently asked Williams to do it right, a court order he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, General Lee went order the supervisor to wash our backs with brine, which is over.After that, my cousin and I were sent to prison in the Hanover courthouse, and my sister was sent in Richmond to an agent to be hired “.
It has been recognized “as a beautiful piece of bronze sculpture”
Apart from aesthetics, public odes in the Confederacy were recognized as an affront to a healing nation by none other than Lee himself, who died 20 years before his statue was erected by those who wanted to promote the narrative problem of lost cause of the Civil War.
“Lee feared that these reminders of the past would preserve fierce passions for the future,” historian Jonathan Horn wrote in a 2016 publication. “These emotions threatened his vision of rapid reconciliation. divided justified the abbreviated history in some places “.
Lee wrote to a fellow former general in December 1866: “As to the erection of a monument as contemplated; my conviction is that, however grateful the feeling of the south may be, the attempt in the present condition of the Country, would have the effect of delaying, rather than accelerating its realization; & of continuing, if it is not added, to the difficulties in which the people of the South work. “
The year before his death, Lee declined an invitation to a conspiracy of former Union and Confederate officers who had served in the Battle of Gettysburg, which a newspaper reported was partly aimed at discussing “enduring granite memorials”.
“I couldn’t add any material to the existing information on the subject,” Lee wrote. “Furthermore, I think it is smarter not to keep the wounds of war open, but to follow the examples of those nations that tried to remove the marks of the civil struggle, to commit to forgetting the feelings engendered.”
For what it’s worth, descendants of Confederate luminaries Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson, whose likenesses have also been removed from Monument Avenue, told CNN after the deadly 2017 protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, that they believed these monuments were no longer suitable for public display.
“We cannot ignore his decision to own slaves, his decision to go to war for the Confederacy and, ultimately, the fact that he was a white man fighting alongside white supremacy,” the descendants wrote. of Jackson. “While we are not ashamed of our great-grandfather, we are ashamed to benefit from white supremacy while our black family and friends suffer. We are ashamed of the monument.”
CNN’s Chris Boyette contributed to this report.
