Mint Julep
Sergeant
- Joined
- Mar 4, 2015
Although the newspaper seems to take glee in lampooning anything south of the Potomac, I don't think the article itself was a "hatchet job". There are those historians who think that Lee made some costly mistakes. I, myself, have always thought that Lee was an excellent Virginian but something less than a great Confederate, who had difficulty seeing things west of the Alleghenies or south of the Dismal Swamp. Had the North not had in Lincoln an inflexible commander in chief who flat out would not cave in to the Confederacy under any circumstances, his strategy of making it too costly for the North to invade the South just might have worked. As a commander he did the best any Southern commander could have done, given the physical limitations of the Confederacy. But even Lee recognized, and that early in the war, that defeating Northern armies by itself would not win the war unless he could crush his opponents by cornering and trapping them and this he could not do. As for Gettysburg, it was not a battle entirely explainable as something that Lee either did or did not do. Fighting on their own dunghill the Yankees had something to do with that.
He isn't a historian.