In the wake of Richmond, VA removing the monument statue to Confederate General Robert E Lee this week, Trump decided to do one of his favorite things: issue a stupid statement rooted in his gleeful ignorance of just about everything. In this case he managed to max out the stupidity in regard to not only why the statue was put up in the first place, why it is coming down, but also why the US was unable to achieve a successful battlefield termination in Afghanistan. Trump’s statement, of course, has led to a tremendous amount of hot takes on Lee, on Confederate memorials that aren’t on Civil War battlefields, the Confederacy, and just about anything and everything in the US of 2021.
As a result of what I do professionally, I have a few thoughts regarding Lee.
The first is we don’t actually know a lot about Robert E Lee. Before everyone asks if I’ve lost the plot given all of the biographies, military histories, popular histories, historical novels, etc where he is either the singular focus or one of the major foci of the research and analysis, there’s a reason we know very little about Robert E Lee. Specifically, his descendants have restricted a significant amount of his professional and personal writings and those of his immediate family. Critical portions of his journals, notes, diaries, and correspondence have never been properly archived and made available to researchers, as have those portions of his wife’s and children’s concerning him. They’re not available to historians of any type, nor are they available to students of strategy or leadership or the Profession of Arms. As Glenn W LaFantasie, the Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History at Western Kentucky University, recounted in 2011:
It was during the late 1980s that I first encountered how protective the Lee descendants are about their great ancestor. Having gained some previous experience on some historical editing projects, I gave a great deal of thought to the possibility of initiating a Lee Papers project. In those days, I was working in Washington, D.C., and I learned that Lee’s granddaughter, Mary Custis Lee deButts, lived in Upperville, a tony little village in Virginia horse country, not far from the nation’s capital. So I wrote her a lengthy letter spelling out my plans and asking only for her endorsement of my efforts. A couple of weeks went by with no answer, and then those weeks turned into more than a month. I decided to call her, but that phone call proved to be one of the most bizarre I’ve ever had as a historian.
To the best of my recollection, the telephone conversation went something like this: She answered the phone, I explained who I was and mentioned my letter, and she said abruptly, “We are never, I repeat, never, going to let those papers out of the family. They are safe in a bank vault. I don’t even have them here. No one is ever going to see them.” She was polite enough not to hang up on me, but the conversation did not last more than a couple of minutes. It was, of course, the first clue I had that the Lee descendants were in possession of documents relating to Robert E. Lee that no one outside the family knew about.
As it turned out, my plans for a Lee Papers project never got off the ground. Since then, other historians have also attempted to launch such a project and, for various reasons, have failed. When deButts died in 1994, at the age of 94, I figured that the letters in the vault had been passed on to a trustworthy next-of-kin — someone who would also take the Lee family secrets to the grave.
Fast forward to 2002, eight years after deButts’s death. On Nov. 27, the Washington Post reported that after more than 80 years following the death of Robert E. Lee’s daughter, Mary Custis Lee, two steamer trunks full of her papers had been “found” in a bank vault in Alexandria, Va. The trunks “came to light” after E. Hunt Burke, the vice chairman of the Burke & and Herbert Bank & Trust Company discovered them in the silver vault of the bank’s Alexandria branch. Five years later, six Lee descendants, including Robert E.L. deButts and Robert E. Lee IV, formally deposited the trunks at VHS; two years later, two of the descendants, according to a VHS archivist, “donated a quarter share of the title to this collection to the Virginia Historical Society.”
Click across and read the whole essay, it’s fascinating. But Professor LaFantasie’s thesis should inform all attempts to understand Robert E Lee: we simply know too little about him from his own accounts and the accounts of his immediate family to really have a good understanding of him as a person and as a senior military leader.
The second point is that Lee’s reputation as a brilliant general who was both a strategic and tactical genius as well as a great leader of men, as LaFantasie recounts in his essay, is largely ahistorical and was largely made up as part of the creation of the Lost Cause mythology that ultimately becomes the Dunning School of American history. From LaFantasie’s essay:
But something strange later happened concerning the photostats at the Library of Congress (LC). In 1977, Thomas L. Connelly, who had already established himself as a historian with little good to say about Robert E. Lee, published his book, “The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society.” Connelly argued that Lee’s public image had been largely shaped after the Civil War by a “Lee cult” that worshipped the general like a god and rewrote history according to a Southern interpretation of the Lost Cause. In making his case, Connelly quoted the Civil War reminiscences of Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee that revealed her sharp bitterness toward Lincoln and the Northerners who had defeated her husband. Through some administrative error at LC, Connelly had been allowed to see the reminiscences despite the restriction on the document’s use. According to LC records, after the publication of Connelly’s book, Mary Custis Lee deButts wrote again to LC and reiterated her intention and that of her sister that Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee’s reminiscences should be off-limits to researchers. In 1981, LC placed the document in a separate, restricted container, where it has remained ever since.
Despite the purposeful attempts by Lee’s children and descendants to obscure him as both Soldier and person, it is important to remember what we do know about Lee’s military career. That as the slave holding states were reaching the point of no return in their ultimatums regarding slavery, as well as how the entire US should be run to cater to their preferences, Lee was a US Army colonel. He was posted in the New Mexico Territory and he was disaffected and burned out. An excellent historical recounting of this period of Lee’s career, a period where he had basically given up and decided he was done with the Army, can be found in the beginning of Hampton Sides Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West. It was partially because of his disaffection that he was home in Virginia when John Brown raided Harpers Ferry. When the Great Rebellion does finally occur, he was offered a command in the Union army and he turned it down. When Virginia seceded from the Union he was offered a generalship in the newly forming Confederate Army, which he ultimately accepted. His first posting, however, was not as commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia. After a series of lackluster performances commanding Virginia troops in western Virginia and then mixed results in organizing the coastal defenses in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, Lee was brought to Richmond, VA. In Richmond he was placed in charge of the defenses of Richmond and served as a senior military advisor to Jefferson Davis. Lee hated this assignment. It seems that the disaffection and burn out that he had experienced in New Mexico was carried over to his initial service to the Confederacy. He was in an assignment he didn’t like, in a place he didn’t want to be in, and he was convinced he knew better than those commanding armies or parts of armies in the field. In the case of the latter he was most likely right.
But this isn’t the full story, given what we know with the limitations that his descendants have placed on what we can know about Lee, of his military reputation. Lee was a weird, transitional senior military leader during the Civil War. He was wedded to an understanding of the character and characteristics of war and warfare that had largely ceased to exist by the 1860s. So while he had a mastery of the classical literature on strategy and tactics and how to employ them, he was unable to transcend his now obsolete understanding and see what war had become and what it was becoming. This eventually came back to bite him in a big way, especially once President Lincoln was able to find a theater commander – Grant – who would carry out Lincoln’s strategic vision for the eastern theater. Specifically, find General Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, fix them in place, and reduce their capacity to conduct any further operations. It took Lincoln a long time to find a theater commander who could do that. By all accounts LTG Reynolds could have, but he turned down command when his one requirement – that he not be micromanaged by GEN Halleck – was denied. As a result LTG Reynolds was the second general officer in the Army of the Potomac to arrive on the battlefield of Gettysburg where he was killed on the morning of the first full day of battle not far from his home.
Lee was a great leader. Specifically, in the sense that he had an ability to inspire his Soldiers to believe they could do things that they should never have been able to do. At the same time, however, he was also a terrible leader in that he was not a very good manager of talent within his command. This is related to his being a senior military leader stuck in a time that no longer existed. Lee was a general officer out of time and, therefore, out of place. The character and characteristics of war in the 1860s had passed him by. Here too the events leading up to and at Gettysburg bring Lee’s genius and his failings into focus. Prior to Gettysburg Lee relied on two subordinate general officers: LTG Longstreet and LTG Jackson. Jackson was, to be very blunt, nuts. He was a religious zealot, held all sorts of bizarre ideas about food and diet and health, and was a tactical savant. He worked the Soldiers in his command ruthlessly and they responded. Longstreet was different. He was quieter, more methodical. The jokes were that he was slow. The truth was he was deliberate. Jackson may have been a straight to the jaw you never saw. Longstreet was definitely the body blow that you saw, could not stop, and that ended the fight. Longstreet also had a strategic vision that neither Lee nor Jackson had. Longstreet understood that while the nature of war may be enduring, the character and characteristics of it had changed going into and during the Civil War.
Unfortunately for Lee, Jackson was killed prior to Gettysburg and Longstreet’s frustration with Lee’s inability to grasp what seemed to be intuitive to Longstreet placed them more and more at odds. Lee replaced Jackson with two other generals, neither of whom could perform at the corps commander level. But they were loyal men, Lee believed them to be good men, so no matter how badly they failed, he didn’t remove them. And at Gettysburg, they failed him miserably. Lee’s personal and professional understanding of loyalty and honor prevented him from managing his talent effectively. This is why JEB Stuart was never properly disciplined for leaving Lee functionally blind in regard to intelligence and information in the summer of 1863. It was also at Gettysburg where the head butting with Longstreet fully bloomed and bore tragic fruit for the Army of Northern Virginia. The mentee had finally outgrown his mentor.
There’s one final point I want to make about Lee and it is, frankly, somewhere between pure speculation and an informed guess. By 1863 Lee was at times erratic and this carried on throughout the war. It is well documented that he’d had some health issues and while there are professional medical disputes about what they were, it appears these included some form of cardiac condition. Whether it was angina and hypertension, just angina, or even something else is still in dispute and there will probably never be a settled history because almost none of the things we do to check for hypertension or angina or other cardiac conditions were done in the 1860s. I’m not a medical doctor, but in terms of the history, I’m in the camp of those that think that the description of Lee’s illnesses in 1863 and throughout the rest of his life seem to be cardiac related. If that is the case and he was experiencing they effects of cardiac problems, it would help to explain some of the decisions he made beginning in the spring of 1863 and carrying on through to the end of the war.
Until or unless his descendants finally make the bulk of his personal writings and those of his immediate family available to scholars and researchers, we will never have a comprehensive understanding of him as a person or as a senior military leader. What we do have is based on his and his family’s incomplete primary materials that have been made available, primary and secondary sources of those that knew him, the myth of Lee as a general par excellence created as part of the Lost Cause mythology and then put to use to fight Reconstruction, ultimately overturn it, and institute Jim Crow in its place. All of it filtered through the Dunning School of American history, which was itself created to institutionalize the Lost Cause mythology as the real and actual history.
We do, however, know some things about Lee that are not in dispute. He was an unrepentant and often cruel slave owner. That for all the tales of his vaunted personal and professional honor, when presented with the options of either upholding his oath of service or breaking it, he chose to break it. He did so in service of preserving the power to keep other humans as chattel slaves. That once he broke his oath he then willingly took up arms and led other oath breakers against his own former countrymen. That his understanding of the character and characteristics of war had been surpassed and made irrelevant by the reality of the changed character and characteristics of war in the 1860s. And that while he did have an amazing ability to inspire those under his command to do things as soldiers and as an army that they should never have been able to do, he was also a terrible manager of personnel. He was also blessed for three years with Union commanding generals who were not up to the tasks they had been assigned. Once Lee faced a commanding general of the Army of the Potomac who both understood and had the ability to execute Lincoln’s strategic vision, his ability to inspire his soldiers was simply no longer adequate to the task he had been assigned. From that point on Grant and the Army of the Potomac slowly and methodically chewed up the Army of Northern Virginia. We also know that after the war, despite being hailed for calling for reconciliation, Lee vehemently and publicly opposed Reconstruction. Finally, it is important to note that if it were not for the intervention of Grant, Lee would have been prosecuted for treason and most likely executed as a traitor to the United States. Instead, his citizenship was stripped – he was allowed to reside in the US until his death, though he was officially stateless – and it was not restored until 1975! The Richmond, VA monument erected in Lee’s honor was erected to memorialize him in 1890, twenty years after his death and twenty-five years after his citizenship as an American was revoked and purposefully not restored by President Johnson despite Lee’s signing the amnesty oath.
Open thread!
Miss Bianca
Fascinating, Adam!
Meanwhile, speaking of treason, the chairman of the Board of County Commissioners in my county, a RWNJ Air Force veteran, rammed through a resolution that “We the People of Custer County” were accusing President Biden of treason. So take *that*, all you nattering nabobs of negativism who think that treason means taking up arms against the United States!
Get me out of here.
Roger Moore
I find the whole thing about hiding his papers to be deeply suspicious. It’s hard to believe his family would keep them hidden if they believed they would shine a positive light on his career.
dmsilev
My understanding, as a complete amateur who has done just a bit of reading on the subject, is that Lee primarily viewed himself as fighting for Virginia, and only secondarily for the Confederacy as a whole, and he had a serious case of strategic tunnel-vision as a result. Hence, the Army of Northern Virginia invading Pennsylvania for no really good reason at exactly the same time that Grant was basically winning the war at Vicksburg by completing the Union conquest of the Mississippi river. Grant, and Winfield Scott before him, had a vision of the entire war as a connected whole; Lee never did.
Eunicecycle
This is so interesting. It belies the belief that the winner gets to write the history. Of course the Lost Cause adherents have worked for over a century to change the narrative. And they’re still at it today.
Scott P.
This itself is a bit of a retcon. Lincoln asked Grant to defeat Lee’s army and take Richmond. It was the other simultaneous offensives in Georgia and Louisiana that were meant to fix those armies and prevent reinforcement being sent to Lee. From reports and Grant’s records, it’s clear he expected to be in Richmond relatively quickly. Even after initial reverses, Grant wrote to Lincoln: “I will fight it out on this line if it takes all summer”. Well, it took a lot more than the summer. By early August, the Army of the Potomac was so worn down that it was incapable of further offensive operations. That was not true of the Army of Northern Virginia, which launched offensives against both Maryland and the Army of the Potomac; the latter, a corps-level attack that the AoP was not able to perform at that time, led to a significant Union defeat.
It’s true that the Confederacy didn’t possess the resources to launch a decisive attack in 1864; though that was equally true in 1862 and 1863. But Lee denied Grant his stated objective, and kept his army in better condition than his opponent while doing so.
The decision to tie Lee down and wear down the Confederacy elsewhere was a Plan B that was born of Grant’s failure in Virginia, not the intended outcome.
NeenerNeener
@Roger Moore: yeah, it looks like there are shameful things in those papers that they don’t want the public to know.
Adam L Silverman
@Roger Moore: Exactly.
Geminid
Lee was 54 years old at the start ogf the Rebellion. Effective generals including Grant, Sherman and Longstreet were in their early forties. Lee was not up to the rigors of a long war, and it showed in his generalship, especially at Gettysburg.
Lee also tried to run his Army with a minimal staff. This was problematic because while his generals respected him they had had a lot of antipathy towards each other. Longstreet and Early, for example, hated each other’s guts. Lee usually gave his corps commanders a lot of latitude. He lacked staff with enough stature to advise him otherwise.
Lee’s biggest problem might have been his commander. Lee was deferential to Jefferson Davis, who probably did more to destroy the Confederacy than any man besides Lincoln, Grant and Sherman.
Mokum
The name of the guy is LaFantasie? That seems not very helpful professionally for a historian.
Cervantes
For those who didn’t know, Arlington National Cemetery is the confiscated estate of his wife. That is very fitting. (It’s an interesting story, the estate was originally acquired by George Washington’s adopted son, who was Mary Custis Lee’s father.)
Barbara
@Roger Moore: Well, certainly, they should not be able to maintain that he was a great man while refusing to disclose the full record. If Lee had been more of a private person, or if his public persona were not used to perpetuate the myth of the Lost Cause and Southern “ideals,” I doubt if it would matter. But the record of a person whose importance to certain people’s world view is nearly overwhelming should not be hidden.
@NeenerNeener: Most likely they would show what would now be considered very unflattering maybe even shocking views on race and slavery. They might also show family conflict, alcoholism and a whole host of other things that a lot of people hate having in their family tree.
Old Man Shadow
They should have hung the man and most of the Confederate leadership and high ranking officers with him.
Roger Moore
@dmsilev:
Part of Lee’s strategic tunnel vision is that for most of his time he was only in command of the Army of Northern Virginia, not in overall command of Confederate forces. That naturally encouraged him to focus on what his army was doing in his theater rather than thinking about the bigger strategic issues. That probably played to his personal predilections, of course; Grant didn’t let his status as commander only in the West keep him from thinking about the overall strategic picture, so he was ready to take over on day one of being given overall command.
Chief Oshkosh
Ty Seidule’s seminar about his transformation from Lee worshiper to Lee debunker is interesting to me:
https://youtu.be/NleEmBZyvVI
David Fud
Very interesting, Adam, thanks. Maj. General George Thomas gets some folks worked up as an overlooked genius of the Civil War. Do you agree with those writings, if you have had the opportunity to read them (e.g., Broadwater’s biography)?
Ken
@NeenerNeener: For Lost Cause values of “shameful”.
boatboy_srq
Is it just me, or does this not sound like every entitled MAGAt ever discovered? “I don’t like it here; I should be doing something important not [insert mundane occupation] and my management/gummint won’t let me.”
Roger Moore
@Geminid:
It’s not as if Grant was in a radically different position; he managed to run things just fine with an absolutely skeletal staff. And, bluntly, managing the personalities of one’s subordinates is as important a job for a general as tactics or logistics. Blaming failures on subordinates, people’s inability to understand orders, and whatnot are excuses made up by losers to shift the blame.
Chief Oshkosh
@Old Man Shadow: Don’t know about hanging ’em all, but I’ve always thought that all property of any combatant who had deserted the US Army in order to join the CSA forces should have been confiscated permanently, and no CSA volunteer (enlisted or officer) ever allowed to vote or hold public office.
Obviously just navel-gazing, but I think we should learn from the effects of going too easy on the current MAGAts, anti-vaxxers, and other clowns.
Geminid
@Scott P.: Grant hoped to destroy Lee’s army in the field. He was close to succeeding on the second day of the Wilderness battle and when Grant’s army overran the “Mule Shoe” salient at Spotsylvania. Both times Lee started to lead counterattacks, the famous “Lee to the rear!” episodes. He knew it was do or die for his army.
Grant did not succeed in his first goal. But his second goal was to wear down Lee’s army in the field, so it that it could not send reinforcements to the Georgia front. Outmaneuvering Lee so as to force him into fortified Richmond at full strengh would have been the failure.
Jess
Should we consider taking down the statue of Gen. Sherman as well? It’s true that the winners write the history books, and his bloody march through Georgia was to the benefit of the side we identify with, but should we be glorifying him for the destruction of our fellow Americans, as much as we disagree with them? I’m not advocating for its removal, but I think its an idea worth considering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman_(Saint-Gaudens)
boatboy_srq
@dmsilev: That’s the archetypal Confederate mindset: My State first, last and always, and if the others can’t carry their own share of the burden that’s too BLEEPing bad so long as My State wins. It’s why the Articles of Confederation were such a colossal failure. One wonders what success the Confederacy thought they would have keeping the seceding states together given the catastrophe the Articles only just avoided.
oldster
@Eunicecycle:
“It belies the belief that the winner gets to write the history. ”
The hopeful story is that they got to write the history, for a while, despite having lost.
The cynical story is that they got to write the history because they won.
We had victory at Appomattox, and let it slip from our hands during Reconstruction.
It took 18 years for the Taliban to go from being chased from the battlefield in tatters, to reentering the cities as victors. It took the Southern Taliban fewer years than that.
Roger Moore
@David Fud:
Gen. Thomas was certainly a very fine general. He knew what to do with his army and was a key figure in the fighting in Tennessee. He absolutely earned his sobriquet “Rock of Chicamauga”, his Corps’s attack on Missionary Ridge at Chattanooga was the capstone of the Union victory there, and his defeat of Hood’s army at Nashville was absolute. That said, I don’t think he ever had Grant’s strategic vision or his tactical daring.
Mousebumples
Interesting stuff, thanks as always, Adam.
Plenty to speculate on what’s in the papers. Whether objectively terrible, or subjectively shameful (e.g. Mental illness or other physical issue), or would in some way reduce his stature as a military strategist… I’d like to think someday we’ll know, but probably not. ?
geg6
I was so happy to see that traitorous piece of shit’s statue came down. I have been to Richmond, a lovely city, many times and those statues drove me nuts every time. Now that avenue only showcases the deserving, the great Arthur Ashe.
Chief Oshkosh
@Jess: I’m a light reader on the subject, but I consider that Sherman was practicing real, actual, realpolitik. It seems that he calculated that by causing targeted, maximal pain for the shortest amount of time, the war would be concluded as quickly as possible with least loss of life. He then executed on that. Again, I’m no scholar on this, so please correct me if I’m off base.
PJ
@Jess: Yeah, we need to take down all the statues and memorials to Lincoln and all those Civil War generals celebrated in DC while we’re at it, after all they engaged in a terrible war against their fellow Americans who were only defending states’ rights to continue the enslavement of other Americans.
ETA: War is a terrible thing, always. If you were to make an argument that no one who ever fought in a war, or supported a war, should be celebrated ever, no matter the cause, it would at least be consistent, but to single out Sherman for his tactics is simply to reiterate the pleas of the Confederates that they were the only real people who suffered in the Civil War (nevermind the slaves, the ex-slaves, the Union soldiers, and the Union civilians they killed.)
SFAW
@Roger Moore:
Well, I can understand why: not many people know this, but Robt. E. Lee was the inspiration for “The Lumberjack Song.” Not that there’s anything wrong with cross-dressing, but in the 1860’s, well ..
ETA: On a more serious note: I thought I heard/read somewhere that Lee was responsible for Pickett’s Charge, despite the objections/concerns registered by other Traitor generals. (Longstreet, maybe?) Any truth to that?
Joe Falco
@Jess:
SATSQ: No
And I say that as a Georgian.
Alison Rose
@Mokum: Maybe not, but it’s now my burlesque name.
SFAW
@Jess:
Writing as a non-Georgian, I think they should erect a bigger statue of Sherman.
geg6
@Old Man Shadow:
This. Should have hung them all.
Mike Furlan
From 1996, a discussion with James McPherson (via fax, he had no email account, all typos are mine) on a long extinct usenet newsgroup. We discussed the issue raised in the OP.
Full transcript: https://web.archive.org/web/20030417024920/http://www.agoron.com/~furlanm/archive.txt
From: [email protected]
Newsgroups: soc.history.war.us-civil-war
Subject: What They Fought For
The Nature of Historical Evidence
In a letter to me you (James McPherson) wrote: “…memoirs are not going
to mention slavery as part of the “Cause” for which Confederates fought.
Slavery was a dead and discredited institution when they wrote these memoirs, and naturally
they were not going to say that they fought for a discredited institution.
Memoirs are the least reliable form of primary sources, for the
distortion of memory and the passage of time lead to romanticized,
sanitized versions of the past. Personal letters and diaries written
during the immediacy of experience are the best kind of historical
evidence…”
Is there any way to tell if the archives of letters were also “sanitized?”
Certainly, the letters of Civil War soldiers that survive are but a small
fraction of those which were written. Would not a widow (for one example)
going through her husbands letters be less likely to donate them to a
library if these letters contained an outspoken defense of slavery? And
in this way, over the years, the “politically correct” letters would more
likely be preserved while the embarrassing ones were “lost.”
A similar case are the letters from freedmen to their former masters
praising the masters for their kindness during “slavery days.” Evidence
to the contrary is unlikely to exist. Even if a freedman had written to a
former master to tell him how much the slave hated slavery, would the
former master have taken the trouble to preserve a letter detailing his
sins?
Can you recommend any book that discusses how historians deal
with historical evidence.
From: James McPherson
To Mike Furlan, on nature of historical evidence. You raise a good
point about whether some collections of soldiers’ letters might have bee
“sanitized” by removal of letters that contain expressions or viewpoints
that decendants believe might reflect badly on the writer. This probably
happened in some cases. Some collections are missing many letters. and
perhaps this is one reason–though I think the main reason is their loss
from the ravages of time. But on the other hand, I have used many collec-
tions in which it is clear that _all_ the letters have been preserved, be-
cause they contain the kinds of expressions, viewpoints, informantion,
etc., that _do_ reflect badly on the writer, and that would have been re-
moved if someone were trying to sanitize the collection. Many of these
collections found their way into research libraries without any family
member having gone though them, so they survive whole for the historian.
For books on historians’ techniqes of handling evidence: Jacques Barzun
and Henry F. Graff, THE MODERN RESEARCHER; Norman F. Cantor and Richard I.
Schnieder, HOW TO STUDY HISTORY; and a newly published book, Don E.
Fehrenbacker and Virginia Fehrenbacher, eds., RECOLLECTED WORDS OF ABRAHAM
LINCOLN.
James M. McPherson
Tarragon
Can anyone point me a good reference to Adam’s point:
I’d like to read more and initial searches aren’t turning up relevant info.
Cacti
Why yes. Yes we should.
JoyceH
It may sound trite, but I genuinely believe that a good part of the mythologizing of Lee as this great kind and wise leader was due to the fact that he looked the part. As Trump would say, straight out of Central Casting.
Jess
@Joe Falco:
@PJ:
@Chief Oshkosh:
Thanks for weighing in! This was an issue that came up in one of my classroom discussions last fall about the removal of various monuments, and I was curious to hear what people outside the classroom thought.
swiftfox
Don’t want to impugn Western Kentucky U, but it is not exactly the hotbed of Civil War research. I’d put a lot more stock in the opines of a professor from Virginia Tech, University of Virginia or Gettysburg College.
Cacti
@JoyceH: Agree with that.
He was treason Santa Claus in terms of physical appearance.
Jess
@SFAW: LOL
Anoniminous
Lee is a great example of how it is better to be lucky than good.
Lee “won” the meeting engagement at Gettysburg because Ewell was at Hanover and by “marching toward the guns” brought him down the Carlisle and Hammburg Roads directly into the flank of Howard’s XI Corps. Until then the ANV was getting its ass beaten to a standstill. I say “won” because the point of Buford/Reynold’s Union line along McPherson/Oak Ridge was to protect Cemetery Ridge, Cemetery Hill, and Culp’s Hill. Doubleday with the usual incompetence of the AoP’s generals set-up the defeat by (1) not correctly reading the purpose of the battle and (2) not having reconnaissance out to the north.
Over the next two days Lee botched the battle so badly that even if he had won the ARV would have had to withdraw due to causalities and a lack of logistics, e.g., they were out of cannon ammunition after Pickett’s Charge.
Adam L Silverman
@Scott P.: No, it is a simplification as I didn’t want to get into a four or five paragraph digression on what happens after July 1863.
It is important to remember that at almost the same time that Lee is losing a battle he shouldn’t have fought at Gettysburg, the Union is winning the entire western theater. Once that happened, the Confederacy had lost even if it refused to admit it. Which is exactly what happened. Lee refused to recognize the strategic reality facing him, which is that no matter what he might be able to do or accomplish in his theater, the Confederacy had lost. Rather than do what he should have done, he instead insisted to his civilian leadership back in Richmond and to his subordinates that all was not, in fact, lost and that he could win the entire war by winning in the eastern theater. Yet he had no real ability to win the eastern theater after summer of 1863.
He was no longer facing punching bags as opposition commanders. The professionalism gap, for lack of a better term, in how the Union and Confederate soldiers fought had closed by mid 1863 as well. And at that point, facing decent, effective opposition commanders and a far more effective and capable opposing army, the deficits the Confederacy came in to play. The limits they had on the ability to provide resources in both men and material to the war effort. The fractious nature of the Confederacy’s politics. And time. Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan had time. They had time because they had resources. Lee had neither.
Instead Lee was able to drag the war on for another two years killing thousands more of his own soldiers, as well as Union ones, in what was an actual lost cause. A fantasy that the southern honor and religious fervor and rectitude of Lee and his subordinates and their soldiers could defeat the degenerate, impious north at a single decisive battle in the eastern theater and that, as a result, despite having one the entire western theater and having more resources, somehow Lincoln would just give up and give in to the Confederacy’s demands. Davis and Lee were delusional. Lincoln and Grant and Grant’s subordinates Sherman and Sheridan were not. As long as Lee refused to surrender. As long as he continued to move his army looking for just the right battlefield where he could somehow miraculously concentrate Grant’s army into an asymmetric position of weakness and win the entire war in one decisive battle, Grant had no choice but to chase and attrit with one part of the Army of the Potomac. Which he did. But he also allowed Sherman and Sheridan to operate their subordinate commands in a way that enhanced Grant’s ability to achieve a successful battlefield termination, not hinder it.
msb
@ Geminid
Right. And Lee acknowledged that a siege, which Grant forced him into, would result in defeat. As it did.
@Jess
Sherman fought for the USA – Confederates fought against it and killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. The USA should celebrate its champions, and should not celebrate its enemies.
@ Chief Oshkosh
Yes, indeed. Seidule’s lecture is excellent – so is his book “Robert E. Lee and Me”. Interestingly, he is on the commission choosing new names for the 10 US Army bases currently named after Confederates. I hope one is named after George Thomas, a Virginian who honored his oath and fought for the US.
geg6
@Jess:
A big nope here. A huge nope. More good than bad, much more. He was a man of his time, better than most of that time, and he saved this country. That overshadows any critiques in my mind. He is, for the most part and for his time, a man worth looking up to.
Adam L Silverman
@David Fud: I’m a fan of Thomas’s. It is a shame that despite Thomas being a Virginian who was in Carlisle when Virginia seceded and immediately went and found a Federal magistrate to renew his oath of allegiance to the United States, there is nothing at Carlisle Barracks dedicated to his memory. There are, however, seminar rooms dedicated to Lee and Stonewall (they were the seminar rooms for my seminars) and an entire building, Ely Hall, named for one of Lee’s daughters.
cain
@Jess:
I’m ok replacing Gen Sherman with this kid : https://rockyandbullwinkle.fandom.com/wiki/Sherman
Adam L Silverman
@Jess: While there were certainly still those loyal to the Union living in the Confederacy because they had no where to go, the majority were not Americans. They stopped being Americans when their states seceded. They had engaged in open revolt against the United States and taken up arms against their former country. Sherman was right, they were wrong. You should be thankful he left any Confederates alive at all.
Chetan Murthy
@Jess:
They weren’t “our fellow Americans”: they were literal traitors, who had taken up arms against our country. Literal. Traitors. Sherman was a great hero who fought to preserve our country. As was
Lincoln, Grant, and every Union soldier.
karen marie
Thank you for this. It’s the kind of content I most appreciate here.
Adam L Silverman
@boatboy_srq: South Carolina kept trying to secede from the Confederacy every time the latter did something it didn’t like.
Anoniminous
@SFAW:
Longstreet thought Pickett’s Charge would be a failure and a blood bath, he argued against it, he tried to shift command of the charge to A.P. Hill, and finally he attempted to have his commander of artillery Col. Edward Porter Alexander call off the charge because the artillery bombardment wasn’t working — which it wasn’t. Another story.
Lacuna Synecdoche
Adam Silverman @ Top:
I prefer generals who don’t lose wars. And haven’t committed treason against the US.
Spanky
@Chief Oshkosh:
I point you to General Sherman’s thoughts on that matter encapsulated in his letter to the City Council of Atlanta, of September 12, 1864.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I’ve seen lot of descriptions of Lee as a bit of idiot who got lucky that McClellan was bigger idiot. I guess that says something about war. Supposedly Lee got more troops killed in 1862 in futile frontal attacks than he ever had under his command at one time.
It sounds like Lee’s heath broke earlier if he was having chronic depression or at lest the blues.
Every thine I read about Halleck he comes accross the original DC Blob.
The other thing that the popular narrative misses that seems like a big deal is the US Navy seized almost every Southern Port in a six month period in 1862 and since the South was dependent of Europe weapons that meant the war over lost already because they could only get imports threw three ports that were much easier to blockade. And Lee the so called military genies never tried to do anything about it.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@PJ: Thank you for beating me to this, and for being direct about it as well.
Cmorenc
For all his flaws, robert e lee was by far the better commander of an army at war than anyone the north had until gettysburg and grant – and grant saved the western us army from near-destruction at shiloh and pulled off a brilliant attack on vicksburg via a swampy approach the confederates thought would be prohibitively difficult. Grant was the best general on either side during the civil war
Adam L Silverman
@SFAW: Correct. Longstreet vehemently opposed it. Especially as the charge Lee ordered the previous day also failed. Longstreet had wanted to send several of his brigades around the Union on day 2, flank them, and attack them from the rear. Lee vetoed that and ordered a charge that failed despite some amazing tactical stupidity by a specific Union general. When Lee proposed another charge, this time using Pickett’s division, Longstreet argued they could not win at Gettysburg and that it was time to get out of the battlefield and head back to the Confederacy. Lee again overruled him.
topclimber
Like Lee, after the Mexican War Grant was disgusted with army life in the boonies (California in his case) and it showed in his drinking. Didn’t he resign over it?
Lee got more glory headlines from that war than Grant, who mostly worked as a quartermaster but saw action as well. He put his logistical talents to great use in the Civil War’s Western campaign, avoiding long supply lines via riverboat haulage and by living off the land, a technique his subordinate Sherman perfected. He thus counteracted the Confederate advantage of short supply lines and more substantial resources within short marching distance all along the Mississippi.
Maybe he listened to that old-fashioned guy Napoleon, 50 years earlier in military technique, who wrote that “An army travels on its stomach.”
Geminid
@Roger Moore: The Army of the Potomac had a very extensive and efficient staff. In his Virginia campaign, Grant directed Meade, whose staff did good and thorough work. In his Personal Memoirs* Confederate artillerist E. Porter Alexander expressed a lot of respect for the efficiency of the Army of the Potomac’s staffwork, and compared it favorably to that of Lee’s army in which he served.
Alexander wrote his Personal Memoirs in the 1900s for his children and grandchildren while he served on an arbitration commission sorting out a dispute between (I think) Nicaraugua and Costa Rica. He had recently written a history for the public. Alexander was very candid in his personal memoir, which was discovered and edited by Gary Gallagher when he was at Penn State. Alexander was close to his boss Longstreet, and knew a lot of other officers both in the eastern theatre and in the west where he served with Longstreet at Chattanooga and Knoxville. Alexander is fairly dispassionate in his analysis, often writing of strategy in chess terms- good play, bad play, etc. Overall, I think this is one of the most informative Civil War books out there.
Adam L Silverman
@Tarragon: You’ll have to work your way through these:
https://www.amazon.com/Making-Robert-Lee/dp/0679456503/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=robert+fellman&qid=1631210551&sr=8-1
https://www.amazon.com/Robert-E-Lee-Emory-M-Thomas-audiobook/dp/B00DE1C06O/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=emory+thomas&qid=1631210565&sr=8-2
geg6
@Cmorenc:
Which just goes to show how incompetent every Union commanding general until Grant was. It does not, in any way, make Lee a brilliant general. Just smarter than a bunch of idiots.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Roger Moore: Yes, makes me wonder if they are like McNamara private weeping about how Vietnam is unwinnable considering all the stuff that’s out about Lee has a horndog and a racists.
Chief Oshkosh
@Adam L Silverman: Too small to be a country, too big to be an insane asylum.
Another Scott
Thanks for this.
You mention some of Lee’s cruelty – (repost) – Adam Serwer at TheAtlantic has receipts – The Myth of the Kindly General Lee. (As you’re no-doubt aware. ;-)
Also, too:
:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Anoniminous
It is often over-looked Grant’s 1864 plan was to have Sigel’s Army drive south through the Shenandoah Valley and Butler’s Army of the James strike west to cover the main thrust by Meade’s Army of the Potomac through the Wilderness. The idea being to spread the Army of Northern Virginia so it couldn’t concentrate on the AoP. Sigel blew it. His replacement Howard blew it. Butler blew it. And we know what happened.
My feeling is if Sherman was in charge of the Shenandoah campaign the Civil War would have ended in 1864. The commissary supplies from were essential to keep the ANV in the field.
opiejeanne
@dmsilev: Grant got to Vicksburg a few months too late for my great great grandfather, who died of wounds acquired during the Yazoo Expedition. Grant’s forces who were to attack from the east of Vicksburg were cut off by the Confederates, but the soldiers below the bluffs on the western side were ordered to attack anyway. That battle lasted only 2 days before the Union soldiers were recalled. The battle began and ended just after Christmas, 1862. Great great Grandpa Green was 36.
ETA: That page of Wikipedia seems to have disappeared. Glad I printed it out when I was doing research for my book. It’s now being referred to as the Battle of Chickasaw Bayou; it was General Sherman who ordered his men into the swamp below the bluffs.
Another Scott
@Adam L Silverman: I thought that Lincoln argued that they didn’t successfully leave the union? That (my words) it was an insurrection/rebellion.
Cheers,
Scott.
Tarragon
Will do. Thanks.
Roger Moore
@Adam L Silverman:
I think the core Confederate strategy was always to try to drag the war out long enough that Northern voters would get sick of it, kick the Republicans out of office, and agree to some kind of peace agreement. It wasn’t a completely ridiculous idea. If they had somehow managed to win a big battle in the months leading up to the 1864 election, it might have been enough to win over the Northern voters. Of course that didn’t happen; Grant trapped Lee at Petersburg and Sherman took Atlanta. But if Grant had been less determined in the Overland Campaign and had retreated after his army got roughed up, or Hood had managed to defeat Sherman, it might well have resulted in a Confederate victory in the 1864 election.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Cmorenc: Eh, look who Lee was against;
McClellan, enough said about that luzer.
Pope, who got screwed by McClellan.
Burnside who never saw a frontal attack over bad ground he didn’t like.
Hooker, who choked during a crises. Something other officers suspected about him.
Mead won at Gettysburg, So it didn’t take some freak of nature to beat Lee.
Grant’s big insight was going into a fight meant you were going to get hurt, so just focus on the pain your inflicting on the other side.
Geminid
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: The Union took New Orleans, the South’s biggest city and seaport, in the spring of 1862. Some of the smaller seaports in North Carina were captured also, and Port Royal Sound was captured and turned into a base for blockading fleet.
But the most important Southern port, Wilmington, was not captured until February of 1865. Up until then, huge amounts of supplies were shipped from Wilmington up the Weldon Railway to Petersburg and Richmond beyond.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: Did I write they successfully left the Union? I wrote they seceded. That they were in open revolt against the US and that they had taken up arms against their former countrymen. The former here is because the Confederates believed they were successfully or at least constitutionally now separated from the United States not because they actually were.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
Not too dissimilar from the McConnell strategy of obstruction to frustrate our voters.
Spanky
@geg6: Hey, how about some love for Meade? Put in command of the AotP just 3 days before Gettysburg, he had to manage a group of prima donna generals and forge an agreement on the Union strategy. Did pretty well in that role, I think.
Miss Bianca
@Jess: No. YMMV, of course.
@JoyceH: I’ve always thought that might be a part of it, myself.
msb
@ Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yep, the Anaconda Plan, made by Winfield Scott, a loyal Virginian.
coin operated
@Old Man Shadow: Seconded, Thirded, Forth’d (or whatever number I am with this sentiment)
Spanky
@Baud: Frankly, that was the strategy of the Founding Fathers. Eventually the British Parliament got sick of supporting a war on the other side of the ocean that wasn’t winning hearts and minds.
Spanky
One medical issue that Lee did have was piles. A true blessing when you spend your life in the saddle, I’m sure. So since it would be irresponsible not to speculate, how was that pain managed? Could Uncle Bobby have been an opium addict? Since the family records are sealed, we’re left with pure speculation, I guess.
JustRuss
@Spanky: Dang, that’s a heck of a letter.
topclimber
@Adam L Silverman: The Southern strategy post-Vicksburg counted on Union troops and the Northern public to get sick of all the blood. That was not an unreasonable idea since much of endless carnage was now justified by freeing slaves that many whites cared about a whole lot less than they did preserving the USA.
Keep the casualties coming and maybe a “reasonable” Unionist like General George McClellan runs as a Democrat in 1864 and beats Lincoln (he did the first, not the second). The South gets peace with slavery, er honor, and the union is restored. Sherman taking Georgia took the air out of that strategy, but that was not a foregone conclusion. Lincoln sure worried about it.
After Atlanta, WTF were the Confederates thinking?
ETA Roger has Moore better typing speed.
JoyceH
I live right up the road from Stratford Hall Plantation. When I moved here thirty years ago, the plantation was marketed as ‘birthplace of Robert E. Lee’. Now it’s the ‘home of the Lees of Virginia’ and ‘boyhood home of two signers of the Declaration of Independence.’
But when I toured the place back in the 90s, it was really striking how many people, mostly men, would be just overwhelmed with emotion, like they were at a shrine of a religion that they firmly believed with all their hearts. A docent told me about one tour group where she indicated the room where RE Lee was born, and a fellow just burst into tears.
That southern mythology was a real thing. Still is, I’m sure, but a lot less now.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jess: No. And fwiw the March through Georgia was nowhere near as bloody as Lost Cause fans describe it.
Cermet
Really? No word on Antietam? Lee’s “brilliant strategic” and tactical move into the Union early in the war? Where even the stupid Mcclellan (only general who could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory!) easily defeated him even as he kept one hand tied behind his back! That the war should have and nearly did end right then and there.
Lee showed all his innate brilliance by causing his somewhat outnumbered forces (that luckily for him, not nearly as out numbered on the battle field as it should have been) to be out maneuvered and manhandled by Union forces. This battle proved beyond a doubt that Union soldiers could easily handle the confederate forces when their Generals didn’t lose the battle before it started.
Dagaetch
Adam, your write up largely matches what I remember from reading The Killer Angels so long ago, which sticks in my head more than the non-fiction books I’ve read. Do you have any thoughts on that book? It plays up Lee to an extent, but it also somewhat shows him making boneheaded mistakes.
Geminid
@Anoniminous: Franz Sigel took his time advancing from Winchester up the Valley to his defeat at New Market. Like many eastern Union commanders, Sigel probably expected Lee to thrash Grant. Then, Sigel feared, Lee would send a force into the Valley to crush his army. Sigel wasted enough time for the Confederates to scrape up an army much smaller than his. Breckinridge then caught Sigel by surprise at New Market. Sigel fled to Winchester, retracing the march that had taken him weeks in just three days.
Adam L Silverman
@Cermet: How many more paragraphs would you like me to have written?
Just because I didn’t cover everything, including the things that you find the most interesting, doesn’t mean they’re not important or interesting. What it largely means is that when I was drafting this at 4 AM because I couldn’t fall asleep for some reason, I decided I didn’t need to recount everything.
Cermet
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Don’t overlook that Grant had a few brilliant campaign strategies in Virginia against Lee that failed thanks to either mistakes by a General or incompetence of a General. Underestimating Grant’s Potomac campaign is a common mistake many historians have made – much of his approach was designed to minimize casualties but the nature of communication and mistakes by lesser Generals often defeated his plans.
Adam L Silverman
@Dagaetch: It is an enjoyable piece of historic fiction. But it is historic fiction. If you want a definitive, fact filled account of the Great Rebellion, now d/b/a the Civil War, read Catton’s centennial history of the Civil War. It is overstuffed with facts and analysis and a bit of a hard slog, but it is well worth.
geg6
@Spanky:
Agreed. Meade has a big statue honoring him both in DC and in Gettysburg.
Cermet
@Adam L Silverman: Apologies; your coverage was excellent and I shouldn’t have phased it so disrespectfully.
Alce_e_ardillo
@Cermet: The Union had a bucket load of generals who could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The quote itself came from Lincoln’s dry summing up of Ambrose Burnside’s performance at the battle of the Crater. Hooker, Pope Burnside, and Rosecrans each took turns losing winnable battles for the Union. But by 1864 Grant, Sherman, Thomas, and Sheridan were running the show.
Roger Moore
@geg6:
He is also the namesake of a major military base, best known as the home of the NSA.
Roger Moore
@Cermet:
Blaming stuff on a subordinate’s failure is still a loser tactic. Grant was General in Chief and could have selected better subordinates to carry out critical missions. It sucks that his plans didn’t come to fruition as he intended- it would have saved a lot of lives by bringing the war to an earlier conclusion- but his strength as a general is that he was able to win in spite of being let down.
zhena gogolia
In JL Cauvin’s version of TFG’s statement, if only Abe Lincoln had called Lee “sir,” he would have switched to the side of the North and they would have won right away with Lee’s great leadership.
Nate Combs
Pickett’s Charge would have been successful if JEB Stuart had managed to follow his orders and attack the rear of the Union lines with cavalry in the morning – instead, his 3 brigades of cavalry were repulsed by dismounted Union cavalry holding the roads, and Pickett had to charge into a line that was not softened in the least.
Lee, the racist bastard that he was, is best eulogized in Grant’s Memoirs:
“I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
Searcher
@Roger Moore: No wonder Trump likes him so much. A traitor, a loser, and his family will do anything in their power to avoid revealing how bad it actually was.
Searcher
@PJ: I’m completely fine taking down every statue of a general from every public space, and replacing it with a Vietnam-style memorial listing the names of those who died fighting the wars the general led.
The Lincoln Memorial stays, because it is not glorifying war or a military leader.
bbleh
@zhena gogolia: just like the time Abe Lincoln — big guy, Abe Lincoln — came up to Trump with tears in his eyes and said “Sir …”
A Ghost to Most
.My father the racist wanted my first and middle names to be Robert Lee, after the traitor. My mother finagled a different first name, but not the middle name. I’ve been stuck with that asshole all my life.
cmorenc
Among the most poignantly fascinating battlefields of the Civil War is among the very last in 1865 at Averasborough, NC in March, 1865, where a Confederate army of 5k+ soldiers attempted to block Sherman’s march from Wilmington toward Goldsboro and Raleigh. Despite some paved roads and a scattering of more modern farmhouses, the area looks remarkably the same as it did 150 years ago, and there is a driving tour loop outfitted with signs that articulately describe the action that took place there such that you can clearly envision the clash that took place there. One such place is where confederates charged across a 500 foot open field trying to attack union forces set up in the woods on the other side – it’s hard to understand how southern commanders could motivate men to make such a lethally dangerous open charge at a time when it had to be obvious to the most gung-ho reb soldier that the war was hopelessly lost, and that the battle was at best a temporary holding action against a vastly superior force in numbers (5k confederates, 10k union with more arriving as the battle progressed).
Andrya
Adam- Thanks for posting this, it’s wonderful!
I do have one question- you said “He was wedded to an understanding of the character and characteristics of war and warfare that had largely ceased to exist by the 1860s”. Could you expand on this a bit? Do you mean changed since classical times or since the wars of the early 19th century (War of 1812, Napoleonic wars)? What were the changes?
This is extra fascinating to me because when I was a child/teenager I had long talks with my grandfather who served in the British army in WWI. Even 50 years after the fact he expressed great anger that the British generals had ordered mass charges over no-man’s-land toward the German trenches. Such charges were possible (though bloody) in the 19th century, but futile in 1915. Grandpa pointed out that the British generals were so stupid that they hadn’t noticed the invention of the machine gun.
Roger Moore
@Searcher:
Practically every town in the eastern US, or at least every town that was founded before 1860, has a monument listing the names of the locals who died in the Civil War.
andy
@Miss Bianca: right wingers LOVE throwing around the word treason because they know the penalty is often death, it’s their typical lazy and gutless way to signal who they want killed.
JoyceH
@Andrya:
I read a history of WWI recently that posited that this war was such a bloodbath because the WEAPONS had changed so significantly since the last major European war, but this was the first time that those weapons had been used by both sides – in the previous decades, Europeans had been using those slick new weapons in faraway lands against people who were less technologically advanced.
Chris T.
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. –Not Mark Twain
Maybe this is better put as: “We know lots about Robert E Lee. The problem is, it ain’t true.”
Adam L Silverman
@Cermet: No need to apologize, but let’s just be realistic. It’s a blog post, not a journal article.
billcinsd
@Jess: I think Sherman’s barbarous conduct of the Indian Wars would necessitate the tearing down of his statue if it were celebrating him generally and put up after the 1870s. If it is specifically about the Civil War then it is probably OK.
JoyceH
And just as an aside, this thread is a good example of something that’s always interested me, and that’s the abiding fascination so many people seem to have for the military history of the Civil War. Just mention the war or a specific battle, and you’ll have a whole bunch of just regular people who aren’t historians jumping in with encyclopedic detail about all the troop movements and generals’ decisions etc. And you just don’t see that with the Revolutionary War, which was the other war fought here within the United States. Anybody have a notion of why that is?
billcinsd
@Roger Moore: Grant and Sherman did not really get along with Thomas and talked poorly about him after the war. In addition, Tomas’ family disowned him and burned his papers (IIRC), so perceptions of Thomas are maybe more biased than most generals.
Adam L Silverman
@Andrya: He was wedded to Napoleanic concepts and couldn’t give them up. In fact part of what had changed in its character and characteristics was the use of trench warfare. Longstreet actually conceptualized a very specific type of trench and its application for warfare. Lee hated the idea.
Just as, in your grandfather’s example, by World War I it had once again evolved in a way that made the earlier prevalent forms no longer advantageous. The senior leadership, if it realized it at all, realized it too late.
Adam L Silverman
@JoyceH: Part of it is that the dungeon master and the 20 sided die hadn’t been invented for the Revolutionary War, but both were in place for the Civil War. So everyone has played the game, at least once…//
Chris T.
@boatboy_srq:
It’s not just you.
Instead of whining, they should quit and go out and do something important. I know some people who found themselves in such situations, and did that, and some of them succeeded. That’s the real test: if you think you can do better, go try.
Andrya
@JoyceH: Could you post the name of the book? I’m a highly amateur military history buff.
Chief Oshkosh
@Andrya: Even worse among bad peers, the British generals uniquely (by my reading) espoused and slow march in these “charges”, at least early in the war, so that the troops would remain calm and so calmly advance!
A general or three should’ve been executed for that kind of thinking.
Roger Moore
@Andrya:
War changed massively between the Napoleonic era and the Civil War. The biggest tactical change was the introduction of the rifled musket. In the Napoleonic era, soldiers were armed with smoothbore muskets that had a maximum practical range of something like 100 yards and were frequently used at much closer range than that. The introduction of the rifled musket massively increased the effective range- trained marksmen could shoot over 1000 yards, and ordinary troops could shoot effectively to at least several hundred- which completely revolutionized tactics. It made cavalry all but vanish from the battlefield and made the kind of infantry charges across open ground that were a mainstay of Napoleonic era battles practically suicidal.
A secondary effect was to force troops to entrench more and to spread out. Both of those things tended to make battles drag out. In Napoleon’s era, most battles took place over a single day. So did battles early in the Civil War. But by the end of the Civil War, battles tended to take several days, to the point that they looked a little bit more like sieges fought around improvised defenses than like traditional battles.
On top of that, railroads and telegraphs completely revolutionized things off the battlefield. Railroads made something closer to modern logistics possible, at least where they were well maintained, and telegraphs made communication and coordination across long distances practical in ways that just couldn’t be done with messengers. Part of what made Grant so effective was his grasp of how rail and telegraph changed the nature of war.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: Napoleon was a military genius who revolutionized warfare in his time, but even in his time technology was changing in ways that would make his methods obsolete. Rifles replacing muskets for one. Effective mobile artillery replacing the old and devastating grand battery was another. Being able to quickly move artillery to changing pressure points on the battlefield was huge. It is no coincidence that the British Rifle Regiments and the the Royal Horse Artillery date from the 1790s.
Andrya
@Roger Moore: Thanks so much!
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Andrya: As JoyceH says a little below your post, the weapons had improved (i.e. were more efficient at killing over a farther distance). For example, guns had become rifles. “Rifling” turns out to be a technical term referring to putting grooves inside the rifle barrel. These grooves put a spin on the bullet and enable it to fly farther and more accurately (like throwing a football spiral). So massed frontal charges which worked well during the Napoleonic wars now failed since rifles could accurately hit attacking soldiers from much farther away than the guns of the Napoleonic era, ETA: Roger Moore at #117 got here a lot sooner and with much better detail and explanation.
OT: as I get older, I am amazed at how many terms turn out to be technical. Guns and rifles are not just two names for the same thing. In terms of herbivores, “grazers” and “browsers” also mean different things. Grazers eat grass, browsers eat twigs and leaves.
redoubtagain
Ulysses Simpson “Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics” Grant had been with the Quartermaster Corps.
Msb
@ Dagaetch
i’d recommend James McPherson’s one-volume history, Battle Cry of Freedom (though I’m not a pro like Adam). I’ve read Catton, but his story is almost all white and entirely all male. McPherson’s book includes USCTs, abolitionists, etc., and a range of women. It’s packed with facts and reads as thrillingly as a novel.
JML
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks for the endorsement of Catton’s works; I inherited these out of dad’s library and haven’t had a chance to tackle them, while frankly wondering if they were particularly good.
sdhays
@Roger Moore: They aren’t just bad. They’re so bad that pro-Confederate people in the mid to late 19th century saw them as so bad they needed to be suppressed.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Spanky:
Basically his “You fucked around, now you’re gonna find out” letter.
Mark in Algarrobos
@Jess: No. He was on the right side.
Alce_e_ardillo
@Andrya: I think it may be The Donkeys
The Pale Scot
Calling a slave whipping traitor “great”
Oy
billcinsd
@geg6: Meade was fine at Gettysburg
billcinsd
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: To be fair to Burnside, he did not think he was up to the overall command, so he did no his limitations
billcinsd
@Roger Moore: As does Braxton Bragg, who was probably the 4th best commander for the Union in the West, even though he was technically a Confederate
boatboy_srq
@Eunicecycle: Considering that Reconstruction was an abysmal failure compared to the original intent, that civil rights took another century just to get legal reinforcement of the 13th-15th Amendments, that Black business districts were repeatedly laid waste decades after the war’s end, and that equity is still an ongoing battle, it’s arguable that the Civil War was at best a stalemate – and possibly a victory for the South who sacrificed their independence for the privilege of oppressing Those Other People for an additonal 140 years.
Msb
@billcinsd
“Atticus said that naming people for Confederate generals (like Bragg) made for slow, steady drinkers.”
The Pale Scot
In any other organized country at the time, Britain, France, the German principalities, Belgium, Siam, China, Latin America; the officer class would have been hung, probably flogged first, the family wealth confiscated. Continued resistance would have resulted in the countryside and population being reduced by famine and genocide. A la the Thirty Year war. The US missed it’s window
Geminid
@Roger Moore: Although he was not the first, British historian W.F.C. Fuller did a good job explaining the impact on Civil War tactics of the conical Minie ball, which made rifled fire more rapid and deadly, and the percussion cap that made fire certain, rain or shine. Fuller’s The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant (1929) is very pro-Grant, but he does fault Grant some for not adapting his tactics to the new battlefield conditions. As Fuller points out, though, European generals were making the same mistakes on a much bigger scale 50 years after the Civil War ended.
Interestingly, Fuller points to Grant’s good friend James Longstreet as a commander who was learning to adjust tactics to the new battlefield. But Grant was commanding whole armies early on, and was more distanced from the battlefield than corps commander Longstreet.
Kent
Sherman’s bloody march through Georgia freed a LOT of enslaved peoples and likely brought the war to a faster conclusion. There were crimes against humanity actively happening in Georgia up until Sherman arrived.
Ending the war without military occupation of the south would have been an utter fiasco. We had to send armies there.
Quiltingfool
Adam, I learn so much from your essays. Thank you!
Morzer
The reason that Lee was ultimately a upper-tier second-rate general, while Grant was a first-rate general is that Lee didn’t learn from his mistakes, but Grant did.
Andrya
This discussion has been so interesting that I thought I would post a theory of mine and invite comment from everyone.
My theory is: the Civil War could not have been effectively ended, only paused, by anything other than a Union victory. If McClellan had been elected in 1864, and had told the Confederacy “OK, you can have your separate country, we won’t bother you anymore” there would have been ongoing conflict, similar to the Kansas/Nebraska conflict, over Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, and possibly Nebraska. (None of these were states in 1865.) Almost certainly both the Union and the Confederacy would have sent troops.
Any comments?
Kent
The General Meade statue is actually standing in front of the US District Courthouse in Washington DC where many of the 1/6 insurrectionist mob will be, or are being tried. That seems very appropriate to me. Here is a photo of the statue with the courthouse in the background. It is a nice statue too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gordon_Meade_Memorial
The Pale Scot
@Adam L Silverman:
A fantasy that Japanese honor and religious fervor and rectitude of
Lee and his subordinatesthe IJN and IJA command and their soldiers could defeat the degenerate, impiousnorthAmericans at a single decisive battle in the Home Waters and that, as a result, despite having won the entire Pacific theater and having more resources, somehow FDR would give up and give in to Imperial Japan’s demands.Those that ignore history yada yada
The Pale Scot
@Adam L Silverman:
If it had happened 50 yrs later, the north would have used war gases. I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
gene108
@oldster:
What won and allowed the Lost Cause myth to flourish is the inherent racism built into American society.
Northerners did not want blacks migrating to their cities or sitting next to them in Congress. Anything that promotes the primacy of white people was appreciated.
AxelFoley
@Jess:
Fuck no. If anything, we should put statues of him in every Southern capital as a reminder of what happens when you fuck around and find out.
Geminid
@JoyceH: The difference in coverage between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars may be due in part to the increase in the speed and breadth of communications. News traveled slowly in 1770, but by 1863 battles like Gettysburg were reported almost as they happened. And the scale of the war was vastly greater, as were the number of combatants, and they and their descendents had a real appetite for stories about their war.
opiejeanne
@Quiltingfool: This whole thread has been an education, but I want to thank Adam for writing the OP, which was excellent.
Roger Moore
@Andrya:
My gut feeling is that an independent Confederacy that didn’t have a war with the Union as a unifying force would have been ungovernable and probably would have disintegrated in fairly short order. Even during the war they had problems with South Carolina refusing to go along with the central government. Without the war, the rest of the states would have done the same. They couldn’t have held together as a functioning country.
It’s a fundamental problem with the arguments for secession: there’s no logical stopping point. Once you’ve accepted that a state can drop out because the central government has done something they don’t like, there’s no reason why they can’t do it any time they don’t get their way. You wind up with a government that can only do things with unanimous agreement among the states, and that just isn’t going to cover enough ground to function. They would either disintegrate completely or find themselves back where they had been in 1787, with a government that was so disfunctional it absolutely had to be replaced.
opiejeanne
@Andrya: Kansas was made a state in January, 1861. I seem to remember that that was the tipping point, as well as Lincoln’s election to the Presidency.
Geminid
@msb: Winfield Scott’s plan was to capture or neutralize the South’s major ports, while methodically reducing it with ground offensives. Ultimately, that is how the U.S. conquered the Confederacy.
But at the time, the press dubbed this stategy “the Anaconda Plan,” and derided it. The common complaint was, “But this would take years!”
When the Civil War began, there was a common belief that it would be over in a matter of months. In his memoirs, Ulysses Grant said that he believed this for a while. After the fierce Confederate assaults at Shiloh, Grant took a different view of the matter.
Andrya
@opiejeanne: Oops, my bad about Kansas. However, the question remains about the other territories.
Roger Moore’s point is well taken too- although I’m not sure if greed for land (stolen from Native Americans) or unwillingness to cooperate with other Confederate states would have prevailed.
Roger Moore’s point reminds me of the famous line from “To Kill a Mockingbird” that when Alabama seceded from the Union, Winston County tried to secede from Alabama.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Andrya:
I agree.
And there’s no reason to stop there. If the Confederacy still existed in 1936, is there any reason to doubt a slave-owning white supremacist South would have joined the Axis and waged war on the Union?
Once the South seceded, the war had to be fought, and the Union had to win. Otherwise wars would have continually flared up, particularly given the South’s expansionary goal of implementing slavery everywhere – Latin America, the Caribbean, the border states like Kentucky, and so on. Eventually they would have wanted the North as well.
And they certainly would have wanted, and fought for, all the territories you name.
Subsole
@Andrya: To be fair, they hadn’t noticed the invention of barbed wire or breech-loading artillery, either…
More seriously, from what I have read, a large part of the priblem was not that the generals were stupid, but that the officer corps of most European armies were essentially a thoroughly inbred good old boys’ network stuffed with minor aristocrats. So firing the incompetents was marginally less difficult than picking fern flowers.
I mean, the Austro-Hungarian and Tsarist Russian armies were just obscenely incompetently led.
Seriously. Go look up Conrad von effing Hotzendorf.
H-Bob
Why didn’t the Confederates try to shoot the moon by trying to capture Lincoln and/or Congress? Virginia was across the river and the Confederates could have tried to block the Maryland approach and preoccupy the Union forces. The constant threat to DC could have provided some relief and possibly they could have succeeded in shooting the moon.
Geminid
@Morzer: A theme of Fuller’s The Generalship of Ulysses Grant (1929) was how Grant learned from experience. He learned about the value of a reserve at the battle of Belmont, and the value of entrenchments at Shiloh.
The most important lesson Grant learned may have been from an earlier, bloodless encounter. Grant commanded a regiment in Missouri, and was ordered to track down guerrilla leader Jeff Thompson. As Grant’s command approached Thompson’s camp, he felt his heart rise in his throat, and wanted to turn back. When he reached Thompson’s camp, Grant found it deserted. Grant realized then that Thompson had had as much to fear from his forces as he feared from Thompson’s. That was a view he had not taken before, Grant wrote in his memoirs, but one he never forgot.
Andrya4
@Subsole: Thanks for the reply, and good points.
About barbed wire: my grandfather also told me that at night, under cover of darkness, the Germans would sneak into no-man’s-land and deploy barbed wire to force charging British troops to charge RIGHT IN FRONT OF MACHINE GUNS. And, the orders to the British troops were, THOU SHALT NOT USE WIRE CUTTERS to cut the barbed wires. He told me that that order precipitated rebellion among the troops- they defied orders to cut the barbed wire.
Your comments about the officer corps is well taken too. My grandfather- working class, born in Scotland- was 26 years old in 1914, and had been self supporting since his parents had died in 1902. He also told me that the junior level officers were upper class teenagers just out of the British equivalent of high school, and that they knew nothing about anything and were totally unqualified to be officers. (For the record, Christian apologist CS Lewis wrote in his memoirs that he was one of those 18 year old unqualified officers, and that he only functioned as an officer because his working-class sergeant told him what to do.)
Subsole
@Adam L Silverman: Didn’t part of Tennessee do the same?
ET
I assume that whatever is in those papers is unflattering to him or contrary to the myth that southerners are so attached to. If it supported the myth and made him look good, they would go out of their way to make it public or at least have gotten some sympathetic historian to write something using the papers.
Adam L Silverman
@JML: They’re factually jammed packed. As @Msb: states, they are written from the point of view of the major white subjects of Catton’s work. Remember, they were prepared for the centennial of the war in 1963.
It took me three attempts to get through them.
Adam L Silverman
@Roger Moore: It was largely ungovernable during the war.
AliceBlue
Before we bestow sainthood on General Sherman, please remember that he was a major player in Native American genocide. As were a number of other Union generals (looking at you, Custer and Sheridan).
Adam L Silverman
@Andrya: As I’ve written here many times, the Union won the war and lost the peace. We already know how the Confederacy would behave because we’ve watched them actually do so since Reconstruction. They actively worked to overthrow it. Then they reinstated a system as close to slavery as they thought they could get away with. Then they exported their extremist political and religious movements throughout other parts of the US, which is how, to use one example, the KKK wound up controlling Indiana in the 1920s. Finally, any attempt to roll any of this back is met with overwhelming hostility, cries of victimization, and resistance undertaken in a variety of legal and illegal ways.
Adam L Silverman
@H-Bob: There were plots to kidnap Lincoln.
Adam L Silverman
@Subsole: I’d have to look it up, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Omnes Omnibus
@Andrya4: What exactly, in your opinion, qualifies someone to be an officer? In every army, even now, the difference in knowledge and experience between a subaltern in their first assignment and the NCO assigned to the same level of assignment is vast. One is an entry level job and the other is a mid career job. Part of the NCO’s job is to help train the junior officer. Good NCOs take pride in doing it well. Good junior officers listen and learn.
Roger Moore
@H-Bob:
Two points:
debbie
@Roger Moore:
I’m surprised they didn’t give someone sympathetic, like Shelby Foote, access to them.
Villago Delenda Est
Adam, thanks for another insightful and fact-filled post, with things you’ll never hear from slavery sympathizers. Lee was a traitor. He and all the Confederate leaders should have swung.
Adam L Silverman
@Villago Delenda Est: No arguments from me.
DCA
How bloody was Sherman’s March to the sea? My understanding is that he destroyed as much property as possible but left the non fighting population alone.
Andrya
@Omnes Omnibus: I say this with some humility, since I never served in the military (when I was a young woman in the early 1970s, female soldiers were basically secretaries, plus I was opposed to the Vietnam war).
That said, based on my grandfather’s comments, if a country has to ramp up the size of the military due to a major war, I think a bit of life experience would outweigh social class. In 1914, when my grandfather joined the British army, he had been a coal miner in the UK, immigrated to Canada by himself in his teens, and been a logger in Canada. He had a bit of an idea about how life worked. His immediate officers were 18 year old upper class or upper middle class “gentlemen” who had no life experience whatsoever.
I welcome correction from those better informed, but my impression is that in WWI, the French, German, and American armies benefited because social class was not a factor in selecting officers. The British and (tsarist) Russian armies were handicapped because they were selecting from “classy” people- and thus from a much smaller pool of potential officers.
redoubtagain
@Andrya: Your impression is the correct one.I’ve lately been checking out Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series on YouTube, set during the Napoleonic wars. With the exception of Sharpe himself, who rose from the ranks, nearly every British officer is from the aristocracy, purchased his commission, or both. Contrast with Horatio Hornblower, also on YouTube, who used family connections to get on board a ship but still had to sit for rigorous, competitive exams in order to get his commission. And that was still true a hundred years later.
SFAW
@bbleh:
Was that before or after Frederick Douglass did the exact same thing. By the way, we’re hearing more and more about Douglass these days.
SFAW
@Omnes Omnibus:
Depends on the particular part of the service. For example, I hear that to move up in artillery, fogging a mirror is all it takes.
Just kidding, of course, I haven’t had a chance to bust your stones in a good long while. How are you these days? Well, I hope.
Gretchen
@Andrya4: why didn’t they want them to cut the barbed wire?
Geminid
@DCA: There was relatively little blood shed during Sherman’s march from Atlanta to Savannah. Hood, commander of the main Confederate army that lurked to the west of Atlanta, took his Army north and tried to run down Thomas’ army pulling back to Nashville. Sherman’s army could easily brush aside the meagre forces Georgia scraped up to oppose it. Many of these “Home Guards” were teenagers or older men. The South had expanded the age range of it’s draft- “robbing the cradle and the grave,” as Grant put it.
But the property destruction was great. Barns, mills, workshops, and above all cotton put to the torch. Afterwards, Sherman bragged that in his marches to the sea and then across South Carolina his army destroyed $100 million worth of property, $20 million of which had military value.
Alce _e_ardillo
As much as Foote seemed to have bought into the “lost cause “ narrative; he was an honest man, and I think he would have been shocked by the Lee his papers painted.@debbie:
Geminid
@Alce _e_ardillo: Lee’s descendents may want his papers suppressed simply because they did not want the writings of a mortal man to detract from the myth of the Lost Cause Hero. The Lost Cause myth involved a conspiracy of silence amoong it’s participants. Criticism of Sothern military and civilian leadership would detract from the narrative that the South’s superior skill and spirit were overcome only by the North’s superior material advantages. Criticisms of Lee were especially muted, except for outliers like Longstreet who was himself scapegoated for taking a role in the reconstructed government of Louisiana. Was Lee critical of other leaders in his private papers? If Lee gave a candid opinion of Confederate President Davis’ leadership in these papers, that alone would undermine the poorly founded Lost Cause myth.
Andrya
Gretchen, I have no idea. I am forced to fall back on Hanson’s razor (which I have always liked) “never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity”.
Cmorenc
Gettysburg would likely have turned out far differently but/for the five minutes a thin union brigade from ny beat a numerically superior texas brigade by to occupying little round point, and then barely holding it long enough for union reinforcements to arrive. Had the confederates been able to take little round top, the entire union position atop the ridge would have become precariously vulnerable to flank attack.
Andrya
This is a very, very, minor point, but I thought that was the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment? Commanded by Joshua Chamberlain, one of my personal heroes? Not from NY?
Geminid
@Andrya: A New York regiment was in the same brigade as the 20th Maine, and helped in the desperate defense of Little Round Top against units from Hood’s Division, just a little ways down the line.
bk
@Scott P.: It appears you’re a student of Dunning. This reads as southron apologia. Pinning Lee against Richmond does not reek of failure and was the intended outcome.
In what way was Grant’s army worn down? What significant Union defeat? How was Lee’s army in better condition than Grant’s?
I see lots of assertions but little in the way of facts.
bk
@Barbara: Would not surprise me to find he doubted himself and the cause. Maybe he blamed others for his failures. That seems to be a constant among conservatives.
bk
@Jess: The side we identify with? That’s random. Sherman shortened the war. The March to the Sea should be celebrated as a masterstroke. Sherman’s racism toward native americans on the other hand..
ETA: Removing monuments to traitors is good. Cancelling Sherman would be bad.
bk
@Chief Oshkosh: He destroyed war materiel. That directly saved Union lives.
bk
@Adam L Silverman: People forget the rebels had hope that Lincoln would lose the election…
bk
@geg6: Grant was not in command at Gettysburg
bk
@Spanky: Laudanum?
bk
@Andrya: Rifles and rifled cannon. some breech loading rifles
bk
@JoyceH: The Brits aren’t here arguing they would have won if only shoulda woulda coulda
bk
@Adam L Silverman: The nazis studied the South and reconstruction. The master race blueprint
bk
@Scott P.: If it had been Lee instead of Washington we’d all have an English accent and have national health care