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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 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]

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