Lee to Never Invavde North Again
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Few figures in American history are more divisive, contradictory or elusive than Robert E. Lee, the reluctant, tragic leader of the Confederate Army, who died in his beloved Virginia at historic period 63 in 1870, 5 years after the end of the Civil State of war. In a new biography, Robert Eastward. Lee, Roy Blount, Jr., treats Lee equally a man of competing impulses, a "paragon of manliness" and "ane of the greatest military commanders in history," who was nonetheless "not adept at telling men what to practice."
Blount, a noted humorist, journalist, playwright and raconteur, is the author or coauthor of xv previous books and the editor of Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor. A resident of New York Urban center and western Massachusetts, he traces his interest in Lee to his boyhood in Georgia. Though Blount was never a Civil War buff, he says "every Southerner has to make his peace with that War. I plunged back into information technology for this book, and am relieved to have emerged alive."
"Too," he says, "Lee reminds me in some ways of my father."
At the center of Lee's story is 1 of the monumental choices in American history: revered for his honor, Lee resigned his U.S. Army commission to defend Virginia and fight for the Confederacy, on the side of slavery. "The determination was honorable past his standards of honor—which, any we may think of them, were neither self-serving nor complicated," Blount says. Lee "thought it was a bad idea for Virginia to secede, and God knows he was right, simply secession had been more or less democratically decided upon." Lee'south family unit held slaves, and he himself was at best ambiguous on the subject, leading some of his defenders over the years to disbelieve slavery's significance in assessments of his graphic symbol. Blount argues that the issue does matter: "To me it'due south slavery, much more than secession equally such, that casts a shadow over Lee'south honorableness."
In the extract that follows, the full general masses his troops for a boxing over three humid July days in a Pennsylvania town. Its proper noun would thereafter resound with courage, casualties and miscalculation: Gettysburg.
In his dashing (if sometimes depressive) antebellum prime, he may have been the most cute person in America, a sort of precursorcross between Cary Grant and Randolph Scott. He was in his element gossiping with belles about their beaux at balls. In theaters of grinding, hellish man carnage he kept a pet hen for company. He had tiny anxiety that he loved his children to tickle None of these things seems to fit, for if ever there was a grave American icon, it is Robert Edward Lee—hero of the Confederacy in the Ceremonious War and a symbol of nobility to some, of slavery to others.
After Lee's expiry in 1870, Frederick Douglass, the erstwhile fugitive slave who had become the nation's most prominent African-American, wrote, "Nosotros can scarcely have upwards a paper . . . that is not filled with nauseating flatteries" of Lee, from which "it would seem . . . that the soldier who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven." 2 years later one of Lee'south ex-generals, Jubal A. Early on, apotheosized his late commander as follows: "Our beloved Chief stands, similar some lofty cavalcade which rears its head among the highest, in grandeur, uncomplicated, pure and sublime."
In 1907, on the 100th anniversary of Lee's birth, President Theodore Roosevelt expressed mainstream American sentiment, praising Lee'southward "extraordinary skill every bit a General, his dauntless backbone and loftier leadership," calculation, "He stood that hardest of all strains, the strain of begetting himself well through the grayness evening of failure; and therefore out of what seemed failure he helped to build the wonderful and mighty triumph of our national life, in which all his countrymen, north and south, share."
We may think we know Lee because we take a mental image: greyness. Not only the uniform, the mythic horse, the hair and beard, just the resignation with which he accepted dreary burdens that offered "neither pleasure nor advantage": in particular, the Confederacy, a crusade of which he took a dim view until he went to war for it. He did not run into right and wrong in tones of gray, and yet his moralizing could generate a fog, as in a letter of the alphabet from the front end to his invalid wife: "Y'all must endeavour to enjoy the pleasure of doing expert. That is all that makes life valuable." All right. Only so he adds: "When I mensurate my own past that standard I am filled with confusion and despair."
His own hand probably never drew human claret nor fired a shot in anger, and his just Ceremonious War wound was a faint scratch on the cheek from a sharpshooter's bullet, only many thousands of men died quite horribly in battles where he was the dominant spirit, and most of the casualties were on the other side. If we take as a given Lee's granitic confidence that everything is God's will, however, he was born to lose.
Equally battleground generals go, he could be extremely peppery, and could go out of his way to be kind. But in even the most sympathetic versions of his life story he comes across equally a bit of a stick—certainly compared with his scruffy nemesis, Ulysses S. Grant; his zany, ferocious "right arm," Stonewall Jackson; and the dashing "optics" of his army, J.Eastward.B. "Jeb" Stuart. For these men, the Civil War was simply the ticket. Lee, however, has come down in history every bit too fine for the bloodbath of 1861-65. To efface the squalor and horror of the war, nosotros accept the epitome of Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves, and we have the image of Robert Eastward. Lee's gracious give up. Still, for many contemporary Americans, Lee is at all-time the moral equivalent of Hitler'southward vivid field marshal Erwin Rommel (who, notwithstanding, turned against Hitler, as Lee never did against Jefferson Davis, who, to be sure, was no Hitler).
On his father's side, Lee'southward family was amongst Virginia'due south and therefore the nation's most distinguished. Henry, the scion who was to become known in the Revolutionary War as Light-Horse Harry, was born in 1756. He graduated from Princeton at nineteen and joined the Continental Ground forces at 20 as a captain of dragoons, and he rose in rank and independence to control Lee'south lite cavalry then Lee's legion of cavalry and infantry. Without the medicines, elixirs, and food Harry Lee's raiders captured from the enemy, George Washington's ground forces would not likely accept survived the harrowing winter encampment of 1777-78 at Valley Forge. Washington became his patron and close friend. With the war nearly over, however, Harry decided he was underappreciated, and so he impulsively resigned from the ground forces. In 1785, he was elected to the Continental Congress, and in 1791 he was elected governor of Virginia. In 1794 Washington put him in command of the troops that bloodlessly put downwards the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. In 1799 he was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he famously eulogized Washington as "first in war, commencement in peace, and commencement in the hearts of his countrymen."
Meanwhile, though, Harry'southward fast and loose speculation in hundreds of thousands of the new nation's acres went sour, and in 1808 he was reduced to chicanery. He and his second wife, Ann Hill Carter Lee, and their children departed the Lee bequeathed domicile, where Robert was born, for a smaller rented house in Alexandria. Under the conditions of bankruptcy that obtained in those days, Harry was still liable for his debts. He jumped a personal advent bail—to the dismay of his brother, Edmund, who had posted a sizable bond—and wangled passage, with pitying aid from President James Monroe, to the West Indies. In 1818, after v years abroad, Harry headed home to die, just got only as far equally Cumberland Island, Georgia, where he was buried. Robert was eleven.
Robert appears to have been too fine for his childhood, for his instruction, for his profession, for his marriage, and for the Confederacy. Not co-ordinate to him. Co-ordinate to him, he was non fine enough. For all his audacity on the battleground, he accustomed rather passively one raw deal later on another, bending over backward for everyone from Jefferson Davis to James McNeill Whistler'south mother. (When he was superintendent of the U.S. Armed services Academy, Lee acquiesced to Mrs. Whistler'south request on behalf of her cadet son, who was eventually dismissed in 1854.)
By what can nosotros know of him? The works of a general are battles, campaigns and usually memoirs. The engagements of the Civil War shape upward more as bloody muddles than equally commanders' chess games. For a long time during the war, "Old Bobbie Lee," every bit he was referred to worshipfully by his troops and nervously past the foe, had the profoundly superior Union forces spooked, but a century and a tertiary of analysis and counteranalysis has resulted in no cadre consensus as to the genius or the folly of his generalship. And he wrote no memoir. He wrote personal letters—a discordant mix of amour, joshing, lyrical touches, and stern religious adjuration—and he wrote official dispatches that are and then impersonal and (generally) unselfserving equally to seem above the fray.
During the postbellum century, when Americans Due north and South decided to encompass R. E. Lee as a national every bit well as a Southern hero, he was more often than not described as antislavery. This assumption rests not on whatsoever public position he took but on a passage in an 1856 alphabetic character to his wife. The passage begins: "In this aware historic period, there are few I believe, but what volition acknowledge, that slavery every bit an establishment, is a moral & political evil in any Land. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages." But he goes on: "I think it notwithstanding a greater evil to the white than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably ameliorate off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I promise volition prepare & lead them to meliorate things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence."
The only manner to get inside Lee, perhaps, is by edging fractally around the record of his life to observe spots where he comes through; by holding up next to him some of the fully realized characters—Grant, Jackson, Stuart, Light-Horse Harry Lee, John Chocolate-brown—with whom he interacted; and by subjecting to gimmicky skepticism certain concepts—accolade, "gradual emancipation," divine will—upon which he unreflectively founded his identity.
He wasn't always gray. Until war aged him dramatically, his sharp dark brown eyes were complemented by black hair ("ebon and abundant," as his doting biographer Douglas Southall Freeman puts it, "with a moving ridge that a adult female might have envied"), a robust black mustache, a stiff total oral fissure and chin unobscured by whatever beard, and nighttime mercurial brows. He was non one to hide his looks under a bushel. His heart, on the other hand . . . "The heart, he kept locked away," as Stephen Vincent Benét proclaimed in "John Dark-brown's Body," "from all the picklocks of biographers." Accounts past people who knew him give the impression that no one knew his whole centre, even before it was cleaved by the war. Perchance it broke many years before the state of war. "You know she is like her papa, ever wanting something," he wrote about one of his daughters. The swell Southern diarist of his day, Mary Chesnut, tells u.s. that when a lady teased him about his ambitions, he "remonstrated—said his tastes were of the simplest. He only wanted a Virginia farm—no end of cream and fresh butter—and fried craven. Not one fried chicken or two—simply unlimited fried chicken." Merely earlier Lee'due south surrender at Appomattox, 1 of his nephews found him in the field, "very grave and tired," carrying around a fried chicken leg wrapped in a piece of bread, which a Virginia countrywoman had pressed upon him but for which he couldn't muster any hunger.
I thing that clearly drove him was devotion to his home state. "If Virginia stands by the quondam Union," Lee told a friend, "so will I. Just if she secedes (though I do non believe in secession every bit a constitutional right, nor that in that location is sufficient cause for revolution), and so I volition follow my native Country with my sword, and, if need exist, with my life."
The North took secession equally an act of aggression, to be countered appropriately. When Lincoln chosen on the loyal states for troops to invade the Southward, Southerners could come across the issue every bit defence non of slavery but of homeland. A Virginia convention that had voted two to 1 against secession, now voted ii to 1 in favor.
When Lee read the news that Virginia had joined the Confederacy, he said to his wife, "Well, Mary, the question is settled," and resigned the U.Due south. Army committee he had held for 32 years.
The days of July 1-3, 1863, still stand among the near horrific and formative in American history. Lincoln had given upwardly on Joe Hooker, put Maj. Gen. George G. Meade in control of the Army of the Potomac, and sent him to finish Lee'south invasion of Pennsylvania. Since Jeb Stuart'south scouting operation had been uncharacteristically out of touch on, Lee wasn't sure where Meade's army was. Lee had actually advanced further north than the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when he learned that Meade was s of him, threatening his supply lines. And so Lee swung back in that direction. On June 30 a Amalgamated brigade, pursuing the written report that at that place were shoes to be had in Gettysburg, ran into Federal cavalry west of boondocks, and withdrew. On July ane a larger Amalgamated force returned, engaged Meade'south advance forcefulness, and pushed it back through the town—to the fishhook-shaped heights comprising Cemetery Hill, Cemetery Ridge, Little Round Elevation, and Round Elevation. It was well-nigh a rout, until Maj. Gen. O. O. Howard, to whom Lee as Westward Point superintendent had been kind when Howard was an unpopular cadet, and Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock rallied the Federals and held the high footing. Excellent ground to defend from. That evening Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, who commanded the Beginning Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, urged Lee not to attack, only to swing around to the due south, get between Meade and Washington, and find a strategically even meliorate defensive position, confronting which the Federals might feel obliged to mount one of those frontal assaults that virtually ever lost in this state of war. Still not having heard from Stuart, Lee felt he might have numerical superiority for once. "No," he said, "the enemy is there, and I am going to assail him there."
The next morning, Lee ready in movement a two-part offensive: Lt. Gen. Richard Ewell's corps was to pin downwardly the enemy's right flank, on Culp'southward Hill and Cemetery Colina, while Longstreet'south, with a couple of extra divisions, would hit the left flank—believed to be exposed—on Cemetery Ridge. To get there Longstreet would accept to make a long march under cover. Longstreet mounted a sulky objection, but Lee was adamant. And wrong.
Lee didn't know that in the night Meade had managed past forced marches to concentrate nearly his entire army at Lee's front, and had deployed it skillfully—his left flank was now extended to Little Round Top, nearly three-quarters of a mile southward of where Lee thought it was. The disgruntled Longstreet, never one to rush into anything, and confused to find the left flank farther left than expected, didn't begin his set on until 3:xxx that afternoon. Information technology nearly prevailed anyway, simply at last was browbeaten gorily dorsum. Although the two-pronged offensive was ill-coordinated, and the Federal artillery had knocked out the Confederate guns to the north before Ewell attacked, Ewell'southward infantry came tantalizingly close to taking Cemetery Hill, but a counterattack forced them to retreat.
On the third morning time, July 3, Lee's plan was roughly the same, just Meade seized the initiative by pushing forward on his correct and seizing Culp's Colina, which the Confederates held. Then Lee was forced to improvise. He decided to strike direct ahead, at Meade's heavily fortified midsection. Amalgamated artillery would soften it up, and Longstreet would direct a frontal set on across a mile of open basis against the center of Missionary Ridge. Again Longstreet objected; again Lee wouldn't listen. The Amalgamated artillery wearied all its shells ineffectively, then was unable to support the assault—which has gone downwardly in history equally Pickett's charge because Maj. Gen. George Pickett'due south division absorbed the worst of the horrible bloodbath it turned into.
Lee'south idolaters strained afterwards the state of war to shift the blame, but the consensus today is that Lee managed the battle badly. Each supposed major blunder of his subordinates—Ewell'south failure to have the high ground of Cemetery Hill on July 1, Stuart'southward getting out of touch and leaving Lee unapprised of what force he was facing, and the lateness of Longstreet's attack on the second twenty-four hours—either wasn't a corrigendum at all (if Longstreet had attacked earlier he would have encountered an even stronger Union position) or was caused by a lack of strength and specificity in Lee's orders.
Before Gettysburg, Lee had seemed not only to read the minds of Wedlock generals but virtually to look his subordinates to read his. He was not in fact proficient at telling men what to do. That no doubt suited the Confederate fighting man, who didn't take kindly to being told what to do—but Lee'south but weakness as a commander, his otherwise reverent nephew Fitzhugh Lee would write, was his "reluctance to oppose the wishes of others, or to order them to do anything that would be disagreeable and to which they would not consent." With men besides equally with women, his potency derived from his sightliness, politeness, and unimpeachability. His unremarkably cheerful detachment patently covered solemn depths, depths faintly lit past glints of previous and potential rejection of self and others. Information technology all seemed Olympian, in a Christian cavalier sort of way. Officers' hearts went out to him across the latitude he granted them to exist willingly, creatively honorable. Longstreet speaks of responding to Lee at another critical moment past "receiving his anxious expressions actually as appeals for reinforcement of his unexpressed wish." When people obey you because they think y'all enable them to follow their own instincts, y'all demand a keen instinct yourself for when they're getting out of bear upon, as Stuart did, and when they are balking for skillful reason, as Longstreet did. Every bit a father Lee was addicted simply fretful, as a husband devoted but afar. Equally an attacking full general he was inspiring simply not necessarily cogent.
At Gettysburg he was jittery, snappish. He was 56 and bone weary. He may take had dysentery, though a scholar's widely publicized exclamation to that event rests on tenuous evidence. He did accept rheumatism and heart problem. He kept fretfully wondering why Stuart was out of bear on, worrying that something bad had happened to him. He had given Stuart broad discretion as usual, and Stuart had overextended himself. Stuart wasn't frolicking. He had done his best to act on Lee's written instructions: "You will . . . be able to judge whether you can pass around their ground forces without hindrance, doing them all the harm you can, and cantankerous the [Potomac] eastward of the mountains. In either case, later on crossing the river, you must move on and feel the right of Ewell's troops, collecting information, provisions, etc." Just he had not, in fact, been able to judge: he met several hindrances in the form of Union troops, a swollen river that he and his men managed only heroically to cross, and 150 Federal wagons that he captured earlier he crossed the river. And he had non sent word of what he was up to.
When on the afternoon of the 2d day Stuart did show up at Gettysburg, after pushing himself nigh to exhaustion, Lee'due south only greeting to him is said to have been, "Well, General Stuart, yous are here at last." A coolly devastating cutting: Lee'south fashion of chewing out someone who he felt had let him downward. In the months afterward Gettysburg, as Lee stewed over his defeat, he repeatedly criticized the laxness of Stuart's command, deeply pain a man who prided himself on the sort of dashing freelance effectiveness by which Lee's father, Maj. Gen. Light-Horse Harry, had divers himself. A bail of implicit trust had been cleaved. Loving-son effigy had failed loving-male parent figure and vice versa.
In the past Lee had also granted Ewell and Longstreet wide discretion, and it had paid off. Maybe his magic in Virginia didn't travel. "The whole affair was disjointed," Taylor the adjutant said of Gettysburg. "In that location was an utter absence of accord in the movements of the several commands."
Why did Lee stake everything, finally, on an ill-considered thrust straight upwards the middle? Lee's critics have never come with a logical explanation. Obviously he simply got his claret up, as the expression goes. When the normally repressed Lee felt an overpowering demand for emotional release, and had an army at his disposal and some other 1 in front of him, he couldn't agree dorsum. And why should Lee look his imprudence to be any less unsettling to Meade than it had been to the other Spousal relationship commanders?
The spot against which he hurled Pickett was right in front of Meade'south headquarters. (Once, Dwight Eisenhower, who admired Lee'south generalship, took Field Align Montgomery to visit the Gettysburg battlefield. They looked at the site of Pickett's accuse and were baffled. Eisenhower said, "The man [Lee] must have got so mad that he wanted to hit that guy [Meade] with a brick.")
Pickett's troops avant-garde with precision, closed up the gaps that withering fire tore into their smartly dressed ranks, and at shut quarters fought tooth and nail. Acouple of hundred Confederates did interruption the Union line, but only briefly. Someone counted 15 bodies on a patch of footing less than five feet wide and 3 feet long. It has been estimated that 10,500 Johnny Rebs made the charge and 5,675—roughly 54 percent—fell dead or wounded. As a Captain Spessard charged, he saw his son shot dead. He laid him out gently on the ground, kissed him, and got back to advancing.
Equally the minority who hadn't been cutting to ribbons streamed back to the Confederate lines, Lee rode in excellent calm among them, apologizing. "It's all my fault," he assured stunned privates and corporals. He took the fourth dimension to admonish, mildly, an officeholder who was beating his horse: "Don't whip him, helm; it does no good. I had a foolish horse, once, and kind treatment is the best." Then he resumed his apologies: "I am very pitiful—the task was too swell for you—merely nosotros mustn't despond." Shelby Foote has called this Lee's finest moment. But generals don't desire apologies from those below them, and that goes both means. After midnight, he told a cavalry officeholder, "I never saw troops deport more magnificently than Pickett's division of Virginians. . . . " And then he cruel silent, and it was then that he exclaimed, as the officeholder after wrote it down, "Too bad! Too bad! OH! TOO BAD!"
Pickett's charge wasn't the half of information technology. Altogether at Gettysburg as many as 28,000 Confederates were killed, wounded, captured, or missing: more than a third of Lee's whole army. Possibly it was because Meade and his troops were so stunned past their own losses—about 23,000—that they failed to pursue Lee on his withdrawal southward, trap him against the flooded Potomac, and wipe his regular army out. Lincoln and the Northern press were furious that this didn't happen.
For months Lee had been traveling with a pet hen. Meant for the stewpot, she had won his eye by inbound his tent showtime thing every morn and laying his breakfast egg under his Spartan cot. As the Army of Northern Virginia was breaking camp in all deliberate speed for the withdrawal, Lee's staff ran around anxiously crying, "Where is the hen?" Lee himself institute her nestled in her accustomed spot on the wagon that transported his personal matériel. Life goes on.
After Gettysburg, Lee never mounted another murderous caput-on assault. He went on the defensive. Grant took over command of the eastern front and 118,700 men. He set out to grind Lee'southward 64,000 down. Lee had his men well dug in. Grant resolved to turn his flank, force him into a weaker position, and crush him.
On April 9, 1865, Lee finally had to admit that he was trapped. At the commencement of Lee'southward long, combative retreat by stages from Grant's overpowering numbers, he had 64,000 men. By the end they had inflicted 63,000 Union casualties but had been reduced themselves to fewer than 10,000.
To be sure, there were those in Lee's army who proposed continuing the struggle every bit guerrillas or by reorganizing nether the governors of the various Confederate states. Lee cut off any such talk. He was a professional soldier. He had seen more than enough of governors who would be commanders, and he had no respect for ragtag guerrilladom. He told Col. Edward Porter Alexander, his artillery commander, . . . the men would become mere bands of marauders, and the enemy's cavalry would pursue them and overrun many wide sections they may never have occasion to visit. We would bring on a situation it would take the country years to recover from."
"And, as for myself, you immature fellows might get to bushwhacking, just the only dignified form for me would be, to go to Gen. Grant and give up myself and take the consequences." That is what he did on Apr ix, 1865, at a farmhouse in the village of Appomattox Courtroom House, wearing a fulldress uniform and conveying a borrowed ceremonial sword which he did not surrender.
Thomas Morris Chester, the only black contributor for a major daily paper (the Philadelphia Press) during the war, had zilch only scorn for the Confederacy, and referred to Lee equally a "notorious rebel." Simply when Chester witnessed Lee's arrival in shattered, burned-out Richmond after the surrender, his dispatch sounded a more sympathetic note. After Lee "alighted from his equus caballus, he immediately uncovered his head, thinly covered with silver hairs, every bit he had done in acknowledgment of the veneration of the people along the streets," Chester wrote. "There was a general rush of the small crowd to shake hands with him. During these manifestations not a word was spoken, and when the ceremony was through, the General bowed and ascended his steps. The silence was then broken past a few voices calling for a speech communication, to which he paid no attention. The General then passed into his firm, and the oversupply dispersed."
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/making-sense-of-robert-e-lee-85017563/
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