Robert E Lee Whether He Would Surrender Again

Michael McLean is a PhD candidate in history at Boston College.

There's a fabulous moment from the Battle of Fredericksburg, a gruesome Civil War battle that extinguished several thousand lives, when the commander of a rebel army looked downwards upon the carnage and said, "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow as well addicted of it." That commander, of class, was Robert Lee.

The moment is the stuff of legend. It captures Lee's humility (he won the battle), compassion, and thoughtfulness. It casts Lee as a reluctant leader who had no choice but to serve his people, and who might have had 2d thoughts about doing so given the conflict'due south tremendous amount of violence and bloodshed. The quote, however, is misleading. Lee was no hero. He was neither noble nor wise. Lee was a traitor who killed United States soldiers, fought for human enslavement, vastly increased the bloodshed of the Civil State of war, and fabricated embarrassing tactical mistakes.

1) Lee was a traitor

Robert Lee was the nation's most notable traitor since Benedict Arnold. Like Arnold, Robert Lee had an exceptional record of military service before his downfall. Lee was a hero of the Mexican-American State of war and played a crucial role in its final, decisive campaign to accept Mexico City. But when he was called on to serve again—this time confronting fierce rebels who were occupying and attacking federal forts—Lee failed to honor his oath to defend the Constitution. He resigned from the Usa Ground forces and quickly accustomed a committee in a rebel army based in Virginia. Lee could have called to abjure from the conflict—it was reasonable to have qualms virtually leading U.s.a. soldiers against American citizens—but he did not abstain. He turned confronting his nation and took upwardly arms against it. How could Lee, a lifelong soldier of the United states, and so chop-chop betray it?

2) Lee fought for slavery

Robert Lee understood as well equally any other gimmicky the issue that ignited the secession crisis. Wealthy white plantation owners in the Due south had spent the better function of a century slowly taking over the United States government. With each new political victory, they expanded homo enslavement further and further until the oligarchs of the Cotton South were the wealthiest single group of people on the planet. It was a kind of power and wealth they were willing to kill and dice to protect.

Co-ordinate to Northwest Ordinance of 1787, new lands and territories in the W were supposed to be free while largescale human enslavement remained in the South. In 1820, however, Southerners amended that dominion by dividing new lands betwixt a free North and slave Due south. In the 1830s, Southerners used their inflated representation in Congress to pass the Indian Removal Act, an obvious and ultimately successful endeavor to accept fertile Indian state and transform information technology into productive slave plantations. The Compromise of 1850 forced Northern states to enforce fugitive slave laws, a blatant assault on the rights of Northern states to legislate against human enslavement. In 1854, Southerners moved the goal posts again and decided that residents in new states and territories could determine the slave question for themselves. Tearing clashes between pro- and anti-slavery forces soon followed in Kansas.

The South's plans to aggrandize slavery reached a crescendo in 1857 with the Dred Scott Decision. In the conclusion, the Supreme Court ruled that since the Constitution protected holding and enslaved humans were considered property, territories could not make laws against slavery.

The details are less of import than the overall trend: in the seventy years after the Constitution was written, a small group of Southerner oligarchs took over the authorities and transformed the United States into a pro-slavery nation. As one young politician put it, "Nosotros shall lie pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and nosotros shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has fabricated Illinois a slave State."

The ensuing fury over the expansion of slave power in the federal government prompted a historic backfire. Previously divided Americans rallied behind a new political party and the young, brilliant pol quoted above. Abraham Lincoln presented a clear bulletin: should he be elected, the federal authorities would no longer legislate in favor of enslavement, and would work to finish its expansion into the West.

Lincoln'due south election in 1860 was non simply a single political loss for slaveholding Southerners. Information technology represented a collapse of their minority political dominance of the federal government, without which they could non maintain and expand slavery to full extent of their desires. Foiled by democracy, Southern oligarchs disavowed information technology and declared independence from the Usa.

Their rebel system—the "Confederate States of America," a cheap imitation of the United States government stripped of its language of equality, freedom, and justice—did not care much for states' rights. States in the Confederacy forfeited both the correct to secede from it and the right to limit or eliminate slavery. What really motivated the new CSA was not only obvious, only repeatedly declared. In their articles of secession, which explained their motivations for violent coup, insubordinate leaders in the Due south cited slavery. Georgia cited slavery. Mississippi cited slavery. South Carolina cited the "increasing hostility… to the establishment of slavery." Texas cited slavery. Virginia cited the "oppression of… Southern slaveholding." Alexander Stephens, the second in command of the insubordinate cabal, alleged in his Cornerstone Spoken communication that they had launched the entire enterprise considering the Founding Fathers had fabricated a error in declaring that all people are fabricated equal. "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea," he said. People of African descent were supposed to be enslaved.

Despite making a few cryptic comments about how he refused to fight his beau Virginians, Lee would accept understood exactly what the state of war was about and how information technology served wealthy white men like him. Lee was a slave-holding aristocrat with ties to George Washington. He was the face of Southern gentry, a kind of pseudo royalty in a land that had theoretically extinguished information technology. The triumph of the Southward would accept meant the triumph non only of Lee, but everything he represented: that tiny, self-defined perfect portion at the superlative of a violently unequal pyramid.

Yet even if Lee disavowed slavery and fought only for some vague notion of states' rights, would that have made a difference? War is a political tool that serves a political purpose. If the purpose of the rebellion was to create a powerful, endless slave empire (it was), then do the opinions of its soldiers and commanders really matter? Each victory of Lee'due south, each rebel bullet that felled a United states soldier, avant-garde the political crusade of the CSA. Had Lee somehow defeated the United states Army, marched to the upper-case letter, killed the President, and won independence for the South, the consequence would have been the preservation of slavery in N America. In that location would accept been no Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln would not have overseen the emancipation of four meg people, the largest single emancipation upshot in human history. Lee's successes were the successes of the Slave South, personal feelings be damned.

If yous need more evidence of Lee's personal feelings on enslavement, however, note that when his rebel forces marched into Pennsylvania, they kidnapped black people and sold them into bondage. Contemporaries referred to these kidnappings every bit "slave hunts."

3) Lee was not a military genius

Despite a mythology around Lee being the Napoleon of America, Lee blundered his fashion to a give up. To exist fair to Lee, his early victories were impressive. Lee earned command of the largest rebel ground forces in 1862 and chop-chop put his experience to work. His interventions at the end of the Peninsula Campaign and his ambitious flanking movements at the Battle of Second Manassas ensured that the Us Army could not achieve a quick victory over rebel forces. At Fredericksburg, Lee besides demonstrated a keen agreement of how to establish a potent defensive position, and foiled another US offensive. Lee'southward shining moment came later at Chancellorsville, when he again maneuvered his smaller but more mobile force to flank and rout the US Army. Still Lee'southward broader strategy was securely flawed, and ended with his most infamous blunder.

Lee should have recognized that the objective of his army was not to defeat the larger United states of america forces that he faced. Rather, he needed to simply prevent those armies from taking Richmond, the urban center that housed the rebel government, until the United States government lost support for the war and sued for peace. New military applied science that greatly favored defenders would have bolstered this strategy. But Lee opted for a unlike strategy, taking his army and hit northward into areas that the Usa government still controlled.

It's tempting to retrieve that Lee'due south strategy was sound and could have delivered a decisive accident, only information technology'south far more probable that he was starting to believe that his men truly were superior and that his ground forces was essentially unstoppable, every bit many supporters in the S were openly speculating. Even the Boxing of Antietam, an aggressive invasion that concluded in a terrible rebel loss, did non dissuade Lee from this thinking. After Chancellorsville, Lee marched his army into Pennsylvania where he ran into the United states of america Ground forces at the boondocks of Gettysburg. After a few days of fighting into a stalemate, Lee decided against withdrawing as he had done at Antietam. Instead, he doubled down on his aggressive strategy and ordered a direct attack over open terrain straight into the heart of the US Ground forces's lines. The result—several thousand casualties—was devastating. It was a crushing accident and a terrible military determination from which Lee and his men never fully recovered. The loss too bolstered back up for the war effort and Lincoln in the North, almost guaranteeing that the United states would not terminate short of a total victory.

4) Lee, not Grant, was responsible for the staggering losses of the Civil War

The Civil War dragged on even after Lee's horrific loss at Gettysburg. Even afterwards it was clear that the rebels were in trouble, with white women in the South rioting for bread, conscripted men deserting, and thousands of enslaved people self-emancipating, Lee and his men dug in and continued to fight. Only later on going back on the defensive—that is, digging in on hills and building massive networks of trenches and fortifications—did Lee commencement to achieve lopsided results once more. Ceremonious War enthusiasts often point to the resulting carnage every bit bear witness that Ulysses S. Grant, the new Full general of the entire United States Army, did not care nearly the terrible losses and should be criticized for how he threw wave after wave of men at entrenched rebel positions. In reality, nevertheless, the situation was completely of Lee'due south making.

Equally Grant doggedly pursued Lee's forces, he did his best to flush Lee into an open field for a decisive battle, like at Antietam or Gettysburg. Lee refused to accept, however, knowing that a crushing loss likely awaited him. Lee also could have abased the area around the rebel capital and allowed the United States to accomplish a moral and political victory. Both of these options would have drastically reduced the loss of life on both sides and ended the war earlier. Lee chose neither selection. Rather, he maneuvered his forces in such a way that they always had a secure, defensive position, daring Grant to sacrifice more than men. When Grant did this and overran the rebel positions, Lee pulled back and repeated the procedure. The result was the about gruesome menses of the war. It was not uncommon for dead bodies to be stacked upon each other after waves of attacks and counterattacks clashed at the same position. At the Wilderness, the forest caught fire, trapping wounded men from both sides in the inferno. Their comrades listened helplessly to the screams as the men in the wood burned alive.

To his credit, when the war was truly lost—the rebel uppercase sacked (burned by retreating rebel soldiers), the infrastructure of the Due south in ruins, and Lee'south army chased one hundred miles into the west—Lee chose not to engage in guerrilla warfare and surrendered, though the decision was likely based on image more than a concern for homo life. He showed upwards to Grant's army camp, after all, dressed in a new uniform and riding a white horse. So ended the war machine career of Robert Lee, a man responsible for the death of more Us soldiers than whatever single commander in history.

***

So why, later all of this, do some Americans even so celebrate Lee? Well, many white Southerners refused to have the result of the Civil War. After years of terrorism, local political coups, wholesale massacres, and lynchings, white Southerners were able to retake power in the S. While they erected monuments to war criminals like Nathan Bedford Forrest to transport a clear bulletin to would-be ceremonious rights activists, white southerners also needed someone who represented the "greatness" of the Old S, someone of whom they could exist proud. They turned to Robert Lee.

But Lee was not great. In fact, he represented the very worst of the Old South, a man willing to betray his republic and slaughter his countrymen to preserve a violent, unfree society that elevated him and but a scattering of others like him. He was the gentle face of a brutal system. And for all his acclaim, Lee was non a military genius. He was a flawed aristocrat who fell in love with the mythology of his own invincibility.

Afterwards the state of war, Robert Lee lived out the remainder of his days. He was neither arrested nor hanged. But information technology is up to usa how nosotros remember him. Retention is oft the trial that evil men never received. Perhaps nosotros should have a page from the United States Army of the Civil War, which needed to make up one's mind what to exercise with the slave plantation it seized from the Lee family unit. Ultimately, the Ground forces decided to use Lee's land equally a cemetery, transforming the land from a site of human enslavement to a final resting place for Us soldiers who died to make men free. Y'all tin can visit that cemetery today. After all, who hasn't heard of Arlington Cemetery?

wilderhoper1961.blogspot.com

Source: https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/173624

Share this post