Robert E. Lee was a traitor who served an immoral cause. But he was also a great general.
This bears note considering Lee’s treatment on Twitter following President Trump’s Friday explanation of why he equivocated on the 2017 white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Va. Trump’s equivocation, he said, was motivated by some of the protesters’ affection for Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. And Lee, the president asserted, was a “great general, whether you like it or not.” That sparked a storm of tweets such as this one from New York Times columnist Charles Blow.
So, Trump thinks racist, slave-owning Robert E. Lee, who lead the confed army to crushing defeat, was a great general.
And, he thinks racist, slave-owning Andrew Jackson, whose “Indian removal program” eventually lead to the Trail of Tears, was a great prez.
See the pattern?
— Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow) April 26, 2019
OK, once again, don’t get me wrong, Lee was a traitor who served an immoral cause (incidentally, Andrew Jackson’s record is more mixed). But Blow and the Twitterati are wrong about Lee’s generalship.
First off, there is a clear reason that Lee lost the Civil War: The Confederacy was pretty much doomed from the beginning for its inferior industrial and population base. By the end, Lee also faced a superior general in Ulysses Grant, eventually a superior force in the Union Army, and a logistical infrastructure that could not sustain his operational needs.
But Lee was a great general. Consider the successes that Lee achieved in the summer of 1862 after assuming command of the Confederate Army’s main formation. Seizing the initiative, Lee threw his forces full-tilt in a defensive stronghold strategy against George McClellan. Relying on Union morale deficits, lack of organization, and McClellan’s hesitating command ethos, Lee secured victory in the Seven Days Battles and, via Gen. James Longstreet’s counterattacking ferocity, then at Bull Run. Lee took hold of the offensive, credibly threatening Washington, D.C., until the superior Union army at Antietam, Md., narrowly prevailed and sent him into retreat.
But Lee was not done. At Chancellorsville, Va., he again broke the Union Army’s momentum and pretty much kept it until Gettysburg, Pa. There, Lee’s desperation and his excessive impulse to aggression met disaster in the face of a (by then, at long last) much better organized and professional Union Army. Alongside Grant’s victory at Vicksburg, Miss., the North’s victory was thus assured.
Lee’s disastrous defeat, of course, was good for America. The Civil War was a moral victory that ended a despicable evil, prospered freedom, and ensured the unity of strength that, at least in large part, makes America great today. But for much of the Civil War, Lee used a bad hand to deal striking blows. Judged in full sum, his military leadership was great. That is why military facilities such as an academy barracks at West Point still retain Lee’s name even when he was, ultimately, the enemy.
History and emotion are bad partners. An objective assessment should lead us to condemn Lee’s politics and appreciate his generalship. He wasn’t Napoleon or Patton, but he was a great general.
