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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   
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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Original Submission

• Re:The headline isn't very good at its job Re:The headline isn't very good at its job (Score: 2) by tekk on Monday June 12 2017, @05:40AM (1 child)

  by tekk (5704) on Monday June 12 2017, @05:40AM (#524136)

  >But that's completely different from saying "he wasn't very good at his job" The allegation in the actual article was that Lee was a failed strategist, and it's hard to disagree given the strategic choices laid out (namely making it an offensive war). Tactically yes, Lee was good; there was a reason that he graduated second in his class at West Point, but he graduated in the 1820's. He was a damn good tactician, but a damn good tactician for the war of 1812. He wasn't prepared for the changes in warfare which were to come with the Civil War and he never was, leading to reckless decisions and assaults against fortified positions. The American Civil War, if you look at the right parts, was remarkably prescient with regard to World War 1, featuring at various points proper trench warfare and, on the Union side, the first usage of machine guns in warfare. The tactics you used with smoothbore ball guns, the sort of thing that was still in standard use when Lee was learning, simply don't apply with the advent of accurate guns, at least not without heavy, heavy bloodshed, as Lee learned. Basically Lee was good tactically, and he had great success where his rivals were idiots or where the conditions of the battle favored outdated tactics, but many of those glorious battles of his should never have been fought to begin with. The war would've been won in the Appalachians of Virginia and North Carolina, in the swamps of the coasts, and the forests in between. He should've made it, in other words, into the American Revolution: a slow slog of an occupation that was more trouble than it was worth. Incidentally it worked out better for both governments that the Union won; Great Britain was loaning the CSA industrial goods with the intention that it'd just sweep in and take those rebellious colonies back when they'd both beaten eachother bloody to the point of exhaustion and an armistice.

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• Re:The headline isn't very good at its job (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday June 12 2017, @04:37PM

  by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday June 12 2017, @04:37PM (#524480) Journal

  I don't disagree with a lot of what you said, though I don't claim to be a military historian, so I'm not really going to weigh in on the details.

  My objection was primarily with the overall tone of the article (specifically its headline and conclusion). Yes, a lot of the concerns about strategy in the body of the article are broadly legitimate. But the main point of the article overall doesn't seem to be debating nuances of campaign strategy: it wants to portray Lee as "not very good at his job" and therefore not deserving of the monuments in his name (see conclusion of TFA). That element of the argument is definitely overstated, given how many less competent and less prominent soldiers from the Civil War have been memorialized on both sides.

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