Like Lee at the Appomattox Court House in 1865, they lost the battle and the war.
Many generals consider Lee ‘the greatest strategist of them all’
Trump is correct that President Abraham Lincoln wanted Lee, then a colonel in the US Army, to help lead the North and he declined, later telling his sister he could not “raise my hand against my birthplace,” Virginia (which had seceded the day before Lincoln’s offer).
It’s also true that, in a handful of Civil War battles, Lee earned accolades, But the superlative employed by Trump ignores the storied careers, highlighted by military experts, of Gens. John Pershing, George Patton, William Sherman, David Petraeus and Douglas MacArthur, all of whom defended the United States rather than rebel uprisings.
Loyalty to country notwithstanding, Lee’s tactics have been highly scrutinized — most notably his style of leadership on the battlefield and his penchant for unnecessary aggression. Per the former, Lee was quoted in a conversation with Prussian army Capt. Justus Scheibert saying, “I think and work with all my powers to bring my troops to the right place at the right time, then I have done my duty. As soon as I order them into battle, I leave my army in the hands of God.”
Like other Confederate leaders, he suffered from poor maps and unprepared staff, but he also made his own problems, wrote historian Joseph Glatthaar, who has penned numerous books on the military, including two on Lee.
“His most egregious problem was to repeat an error that surfaced in his initial campaign: Lee attempted to coordinate too many independent columns. He overburdened himself and his staff. … What Lee achieved in boldness of plan and combat aggressiveness he diminished through ineffective command and control,” Glatthaar wrote in “Partners in Command: The Relationship Between Leaders in the Civil War.”
‘Except for Gettysburg, (Lee) would have won the war’
Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia scored many notable victories — including when it was outnumbered at the Battles of Second Manassas, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville — but he lost almost 30,000 troops in those campaigns, partially owing to his aggressive tactics.
Gettysburg, where almost 40% of his troops fell to casualty, was far from his only defeat. He also lost at Malvern Hill before faltering in the war’s final days at Five Forks and the Appomattox Court House, where he surrendered.
Lee was ‘perhaps the greatest unifying force after the war’
Trump is correct that Lee was “ardent in his resolve to bring the North and South together through many means of reconciliation,” but those efforts were limited to White Americans.
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Adam Serwer, writing for The Atlantic, are two of many who have dismantled the mythology and hagiography of a “kindly” Lee who voiced his opposition to human bondage while declining to end his involvement in the institution before the Civil War.
Yes, he called chattel slavery a “moral & political evil,” but he also wrote, “I think…
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