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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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The Truth About Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee: He Wasn’t Very Good at His Job
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(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday June 12 2017, @04:37PM
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.