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The Truth About Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee: He Wasn’t Very Good at His Job

posted by cmn32480 on Monday June 12 2017, @12:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the south-shall-rise-again dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

In the June 1969 issue of Civil War History — Volume 5, Number 2, pages 116-132 — a renowned Southern historian attacked the legacy of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

"No single war figure stands in greater need of reevaluation than Lee," wrote Thomas L. Connelly, the late University of South Carolina professor. "One ponders whether the South may not have fared better had it possessed no Robert E. Lee."

Connelly's essay was among the first academic musket shots fired on Lee's standing as an outmatched but not outwitted military genius presiding over a Lost Cause — a reputation celebrated in fawning biographies and monuments like the one removed Friday in New Orleans.

Was General Lee overrated? Get your armchair historian on...

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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday June 12 2017, @02:10AM (2 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday June 12 2017, @02:10AM (#524089)

    Not only that, but I think there's different degrees here. For instance, should a statue of General Lee, installed not long after the Civil War by defeated Confederates be removed? Now, should an obelisk built in 1891 to honor a white supremacist group who fought against integration in the New Orleans police and militia be removed? I can see reason for disagreement of the former, but for the latter, no way: honoring a bunch of violent white supremacists who fought many years after the end of the Civil War is something entirely different. At least you can say the War itself was instrumental in shaping this nation's history, and Lee, whatever your opinion of him, was a big part of that history. But these other fools? I never even heard of them until last month's flap in New Orleans. They sure as hell weren't instrumental in our nation's history the way the Civil War was.

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 12 2017, @06:02AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 12 2017, @06:02AM (#524143) Journal

    Agreed. I never heard of those insurrectionists, until recently. They mean nothing to me, and I can't even be assed to do the minimal research that might make them mean something. Trash the obelisk, I don't care. No one outside of New Orleans - certainly no one outside Louisiana cares about it.

  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday June 14 2017, @05:37AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Wednesday June 14 2017, @05:37AM (#525284) Journal

    The New York Magazine article that I had linked said that the attempted coup was important:

    The Battle of Liberty Place was a major incident in the white southern terrorist resistance to postwar Reconstruction. The battle occurred in 1874, and although it was a bit of a standoff from a military point of view, its violence fed the exhaustion of northern (and Republican) willingness to defend the gains of the Civil War, leading to the abandonment of Reconstruction a few years later, followed by white supremacist rule and ultimately Jim Crow.

    -- http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/new-orleans-removes-monument-to-white-terrorism.html [nymag.com]