Why We Should Reconsider Robert E. Lee’s Place In American Nostalgia As radical as they are, lefty extremists’ position is at least useful in making us rethink the elevation of Confederate leaders to undeserved heights. By Kyle Sammin
June 30, 2017 This year, we have been going through an overdue, if overzealous, reexamination of the place of Confederate imagery in a modern American society. After demolishing a statue commemorating the end of Reconstruction in New Orleans, activists have progressed to calling for the demolition of all Confederate war memorials. Some have even directed ire at a statue of Texas Founding Father Sam Houston—despite his impeccable pro-Union, anti-Confederate principles—because he owned slaves. At this rate, calls for razing the Washington Monument will not be far behind.
The answer lies somewhere in between the two extremes of neo-Confederate reactionaries and Antifa memory-holers. As radical as they are, lefty extremists’ position is at least useful in making us rethink the elevation of Confederate leaders to heights that, even ignoring the fact that they bore arms against the United States, would be undeserved.
In the decades following the Civil War, proponents of the Lost Cause myth created legends of men who were often merely mediocre. Nowhere is that more true than in the near-deification of Gen. Robert E. Lee.
True, Robert E. Lee Had a Fine RésuméIn 1861, Lee resigned his commission after a career of efficient, if unremarkable, service in the U.S. Army. His graduation from West Point in 1829 with zero demerits was exemplary—one of the few cadets to achieve that level of good behavior. He served honorably in the Mexican War, but as a staff officer rarely had occasion to showcase the strategic brilliance of Winfield Scott or dashing élan of John C. Frémont. Even Ulysses S. Grant, later maligned as a mediocrity by pro-Southern historians, was able to cover himself in glory when he dragged a howitzer into the bell tower of a church and bombarded enemy troops at the Battle of Chapultepec.
Lee’s peacetime service after Mexico could best be described as correct. His most noteworthy action was capturing John Brown during Brown’s well-intentioned but ineptly managed rebellion in 1859. When the Civil War began, Lee was stationed in a fort on the Mexican border. He returned home to Virginia and, unlike fellow Virginian generals Winfield Scott and George H. Thomas, he followed the Commonwealth into secession and war against the United States.
Lee became a full general in the Confederate Army early in the War, one of five so promoted. His initial combat action called that rank into doubt. At the Battle of Cheat Mountain in what was soon to become West Virginia, Lee’s forces outnumbered the Union army but threw away that advantage through poor coordination. It would go down as a minor battle, but at the time it was enough for Confederate President Jefferson Davis to reassign Lee to manage the coastal defenses of Georgia and the Carolinas.
Soon thereafter, federal troops captured Fort Pulaski on the Georgia coast, largely due to their innovative use of technology, which caught Lee flat-footed. It was a pattern that would repeat.
A Pattern of ErrorsLee was recalled to Richmond as the Union Army of the Potomac advanced toward the city. Initially placed in charge of the capital defenses, Lee’s cautious entrenchment earned him the nicknames “King of Spades” and “Granny Lee.” When Joseph E. Johnston, commander of the Confederate army defending Richmond, was injured, Lee took over command. Against the phlegmatic Union commander, George McClellan, Lee achieved his first victories, pushing the federal troops back from their position in the outskirts of Richmond.
Although he had finally shaken off his losing reputation, Lee’s tactical victories contained the seeds of the problems that would later doom him. Lee had McClellan on the run as the overcautious Pennsylvanian retreated back down the York-James peninsula toward transport ships for home. As he pulled back, however, McClellan ordered his men to occupy the high ground at Malvern Hill and entrench there. Lee, for all the faith he had earlier shown in entrenchments, now disregarded them and ordered his men to charge them head-on. The result was more than 5,000 Southern casualties. As Lee’s subordinate D.H. Hill later wrote, “it was not war; it was murder.”
Malvern Hill was not a one-time lapse in judgement for Lee. It revealed a fixed mindset about battle that, had any Union general picked up on it, might have led to a quick defeat for the Confederacy. Informed, like many of his generation of soldiers, by the battles of the Napoleonic Wars, Lee believed the path to victory was destroying the enemy army in one dramatic battle. Tactically, the idea suffered from advances in military technology—most especially in the development of the rifled musket—that rendered the frontal assault on an entrenched position far less likely to succeed.
Union generals were slow to learn this, too, as shown by unsuccessful and bloody assaults at Antietam and Fredericksburg. But even seeing the results from the other side failed to convince Lee. When he ordered Pickett’s Charge, a frontal assault on entrenched Union lines at Gettysburg in 1863, more than half the men involved were killed, wounded, or captured.
Better Tactics, Wrong Strategy<..snip..>
http://thefederalist.com/2017/06/30/reconsider-robert-e-lees-place-american-nostalgia/
