Charlottesville Milepost

George Turner in reply to Burt Likko says:

Well then let’s rename Washington DC and Washington state because Washington was a slave owner who committed treason against the British crown. Let’s also condemn Jefferson. In fact, let’s burn the document he wrote, the Constitution, and reunite under Queen Elizabeth II’s wise leadership. But wait. The South owned slaves under King George III. We have to disown him, too, and all his descendants.

Sorry, but it seems we can’t create the utopian past that suits you. We’ll just have to keep the past we’ve got, one in which Jefferson Davis faced post-war condemnation but one in which Lee didn’t.Report

George Turner in reply to Burt Likko says:

Lee’s “bad deeds” are what let the Union win. He fought with courage, honor, and integrity, but that was the problem. If he wanted the South to win, he shouldn’t have fought at all. He should’ve lurked, like the French did with their “fleet in being”. By staying alive and intact, they maintained an ever present threat against the superior English fleet. They knew not to engage massively superior forces or they’d eventually lose their fleet through attrition.

Lee didn’t seem to understand that. Every battle he won was a loss for the Confederacy because the Confederacy couldn’t afford to win battles. They couldn’t replace the lost men and equipment, but the North had both to spare. They should’ve fought more as irregulars, keeping their major formations as a threat to repel any major union adventures, and simply outlasted the North’s patience for an expensive war.

In Lee’s place, Washington would’ve won it. Ho Chi Minh would’ve won it. Lee lost it because Lee wouldn’t eschew major engagements, and Lee wouldn’t fight dirty and unfairly enough. His fighting was about honor and victory on the battlefield instead of winning a war by exhausting the other side’s patience.

Lee was an officer in an honor culture (not a dignity culture) where a general’s integrity, courage, and skill were beyond question, because to question them was an attack on his honor. Gentlemen simply didn’t do that to each other. So when they suffered setbacks, they’d blame everything except the goals, planning, conduct, and leadership of their own side. The South finished the war with basically the same lineup it started with. The North kept firing officers until it figured out which ones could win.

So I would support Lee’s failures as evidence of the noble cause the South talks about. They were so set on proving their courage and honor that they ran their rebellion into a ditch. Lee is the general you want on the other side, one who is both honorable and blind. One who will fight your fight, not the fight he could make.

He is the embodiment of Otter’s advice in Animal House. “No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part!”

Smashing into the Army of the Potomac time after time was that futile gesture. Then, his army destroyed, he used his commanding presence and influence to calm the South and get them to peacefully accept defeat and unification.

The war was going to happen whether Lee was in charge of an army or not. He was so well regarded and dignified that the South never thought of finding a better officer. The North eventually found those better officers and they took full advantage of Lee’s flaws. But Lee was so well regarded that the South, even in defeat, didn’t question how he’d led them into a ditch.

For that he deserves every statue we care to erect. Some people are magnificent in failure, and yet their conduct serves as an example to all who come after. He’s like King Richard III, the last Tudor King. The end of a lineage, the last gasp of a dying way of life. The man whose existence marks a turning point towards the future in his failure to save the past.Report

George Turner in reply to Burt Likko says:

That’s my point. In trying to win, he was losing. He fought with everything he had. He gave it his all. That’s why the South lost. They couldn’t afford Lee’s overwhelming victories. Lee didn’t intend to lose, but everything he did brought that outcome closer. It’s like using your star basketball players as hard as you can against a team with a very, very deep bench in a game that will go into triple overtime. It’s a losing strategy.

If Lee captured Washington, the South still would have lost. Washington wasn’t a very important city, except perhaps as a captured symbol that would enrage the North. What Lee’s advances did was remind the North that the South remained a threat, that they couldn’t just conduct the war at idle, but instead had to ramp up production and crush the Southern armies.

And in the longer term, the South couldn’t have survived as a viable entity. The states wouldn’t cooperate with each other, and made sure the South had no strong central government – during a war. Lee’s army was at Gettysburg looking for shoes. Southerners were starving. Even in the army, Southerners were starving. The Union took up donations of food to send to starving southerners, saying that money isn’t required because there wasn’t any food to buy down there.

And the Confederate states were intent on forming foreign alliances with European powers. They would have ended up as bickering banana republics, isolated and alone. There would have been no more slave states because the Union would have just taken over any new state the South tried to form out West, and the Confederates, their armies disbanded, wouldn’t have had the cohesion to resist as a whole.

And Lee was not a very good general. His trick was to get there first with the most, but against prepared positions he was as lost as anyone. He also fought with little knowledge of the terrain despite having the country’s best map maker at hand. Lee would task his map maker to map the prior battlefield instead of the upcoming one, I suppose to preserve things for posterity.

In contrast, General Thomas had his map makers noting the loyalty and conditions of every house on every road he used, along with determining how many supply wagons the road could support in different kinds of weather. Thomas had the first mobile communications wagon built, came up with timed artillery barrages, and was among the first to switch to mounted infantry.

He was so far ahead of the time that Grant and Sherman couldn’t figure out why he wanted so many horses for the battle of Nashville when cavalry was proving largely useless in battle. Thomas wanted horses because buses, taxis, jeeps, and armored personnel carriers hadn’t been invented yet.

Where Lee understood the advantage of being first to the battlefield, throwing up head logs and hastily prepared positions, Thomas understood the even greater importance of being first to get to where your enemy is going to retreat to after you kick him down the road.

Joseph E. Johnston, the commander replaced by Lee in 1862, illustrates the problem the South had. Johnston knew the South couldn’t win in a long series of major battles. Against Sherman’s approach to Atlanta, he adopted a strategy of refusing battle, looking for an opportunity to make a stand but not forcing one. He was maintaining an “army in being”. He knew that for the South to outlast the North, the South’s armies had to remain intact.

But Southern pride wouldn’t let anyone agree with Johnston. They dismissed him as indecisive, and he was removed from command. In upholding their honor, making sure each rebel died a proud and glorious death on the battlefield, they were giving away the war. They didn’t have the men, the industrial capacity, or the ammunition to go toe-to-toe against vastly superior numbers. The war’s white population ratio was even more lopsided than the Soviet Union versus Nazi Germany, and the industrial disparity was vastly worse. Yet Southern pride demanded new attacks all the time. They weren’t so much defeated, as depleted, flat ran out of army in a war of attrition.Report

George Turner in reply to Burt Likko says:

Well, for one, he made the war so entertaining. Lee brings the underdog quality to the whole endeavor, the little engine that could.

And he brings the honor of a true Southern gentleman. He wouldn’t fight dirty. He was accepting of defeat. The country healed. If you compare that to a lot of civil wars, our casualty rate was high while it was fought, but it didn’t degenerate into 50 years of insurgency and constant kidnappings and assassinations, just Jim Crow and lynchings. We should be thankful the South took Lee as the role model, not John Wilkes Booth.

But what’s interesting is that there’s a prominent Confederate general who has no old Southern statues, General James Longstreet. Critical of Lee’s leadership, Longstreet became a Republican and a race traitor who even led black soldiers against white Democrat insurrectionists, so no statues for him!

His hometown first erected a small statue of him in 1998, as did Gettysburg that same year, but the Gettysburg statue is small and has been called “the troll on the pony”.

The Washington Post suggested New Orleans should replace their statues of Lee and other with a statue of Longstreet, who was showing the true path forward even when Southerners would have none of it.Report

George Turner in reply to LeeEsq says:

Uh, no. The left protests constantly, about almost everything. Whales, trees, gay rights, racist cops, big oil, Palestine, Mumia, abortion, Iraq. Making signs and paper mache puppet heads, or lighting candles, is what they do.

Occasionally the right would send a photographer to record the hjinks, but rarely is there a counter protest, and almost never is the counter protest larger than the size of the original protest, much less 20 or 100 times larger.

If the right had always been vigorously counter protesting, each person on the left would remember the hundreds of protests they’d attended as being mass violence and chaos instead of a bunch of dopey people holding hands.

The appearance of any significant right counter protest is recent, stemming from the videos of how violent the BLM and antifa protesters were getting. Police weren’t intervening, so it was seen as a signal to go hands on and defend people and property when no one else would. That gave the white nationalist nutcases, themselves likely a response to BLM, a forum, a platform, and an audience, so now they’re doing bizarre Nuremberg rally re-enactments.Report