Robert E. Lee | America's Discarded General

tsarnicholasIV said:

Robert E. Lee was the leader of Confederate forces during the American Civil War, and today is remembered as a highly controversial figure who's legacy is considered by many on the left to be offensive and worthy of being cancelled or erased. It's sometimes forgotten between all the controversy and debating who Robert E. Lee actually was beyond his service in the Civil War, who he was as a person, and what principles he believed in. On this anniversary of Robert E. Lee's birthday, we bring you a biographic on America's discarded general.

Click to expand...

How is Lee discarded their are hundreds of not thousands of ACW book that mention him? Lee has been portrayed in film for well over a hundred years . Some southern states have Lee and Jackson Day . Their where many monuments to Lee throughout the South.
Should we ignore why Lee fought for the Confederacy and that Lee was a slave owner?
Leftyhunter

I would not define Lee as a 'discarded general'. For a very long time he was in the spotlight thanks to the Lost Cause mythology as a noble warrior ("The marble man"); he was often compared positively to Grant that was on the other end considered a vile 'butcher'. As a general he was considered infallable for his early victories in the Civil War. I think today's historical point of view is pretty fair...

Pima said:

I would not define Lee as a 'discarded general'. For a very long time he was in the spotlight thanks to the Lost Cause mythology as a noble warrior ("The marble man"); he was often compared positively to Grant that was on the other end considered a vile 'butcher'. As a general he was considered infallable for his early victories in the Civil War. I think today's historical point of view is pretty fair...

Click to expand...

Interestingly enough Lee did not bang his chest and claim he was a great general nor did he write an autobiography . Lee wasn't known for giving interviews about his military service. Lee unlike Jefferson Davis didn't go on the lecture circuit post war. If course Lee had no control over his former subordinate Jubal Early who helped create the Lost Cause.
Leftyhunter

tsarnicholasIV said:

Well his legacy is being errased by radicals. Not just through knocking down statues but also by rewriting the man. Lee was a complicated man who fought for the South but sympathized with the North. After the War Lee advocated for healing

Click to expand...

Not sure if Lee should be put on a pedestal. Lee was not a man who sympathized with the North but a slave owner who fought on behalf of slavery vs Major General Thomas who Lee was friends with and also a fellow Virginian and slave owner who fought for the Union. Brigadier General Oden Guitar of the Missouri State Milita owned many slaves but fought Confederate guerrillas in Missouri .
Lee did betray his oath that he took at West Point as a young cadet and fought against the United States. Lee lead many men to their deaths long after it was obvious the Confederacy lost the war.
Yes Lee did accept that their would not be an independent Southern slave republic after his surrender at Appomattox . That doesn't make Lee an a man we should admire. Yes Lee was a competent general.
Leftyhunter

tsarnicholasIV said:

Don't forget Nathan Bedford Forrest who gathered his friends dressed up like spooky ghosts and used violence and/or practical jokes as a means to scare northerners and negros away. I think the modern view of history neglects any nuances

Click to expand...

Yes NBF was very briefly the Grand Wizard of the KKK but I have never read a source that NBF actually participated in a violent Klan act. Not saying he didn't but a source would be nice. Also have you heard of NBF's Maypole Speech shortly before he died where he favored equal voting rights for African Americans? Not to argue NBF was a warm and wonderful man .
Leftyhunter

tsarnicholasIV said:

Don't forget Nathan Bedford Forrest, who gathered his friends dressed up like spooky ghosts and used violence and/or practical jokes as a means to scare northerners and negros away. I think the modern view of history neglects any nuances. History is not like a generic action/superhero movie where there are clear villains and heroes.

Click to expand...

Not arguing that NBF was a wonderful person but how many KKK leaders or former has in this case state their belief in racial harmony to a crowd of African Americans and accept a kiss from a .... of color?
Leftyhunter

tsarnicholasIV said:

Well his legacy is being errased by radicals. Not just through knocking down statues but also by rewriting the man. Lee was a complicated man who fought for the South but sympathized with the North. After the War Lee advocated for healing

Click to expand...

I can assure you that is legacy is not being erased by radicals. We can't touch these tricky points because I am afraid we would not respect the '2000 rule' (statues & the other stuff). Lee was for sure a complicated man but his 'old' portrait was wrong and was driven by a very specific 'agenda' (the Lost Cause mythology). History is not being re-written. Historians are simply trying to give the public a more realistic and truthful Lee. For example about the topic of Lee's loyalty at the beginning of the war you may like Mr. Gallagher's lecture 'Robert E. Lee and the Question of Loyalty. Gallagher is a very famous historian and wrote also a book about the Lost Cause (so he is an expert of the topic); I find the lecture very interesting because it presents a very complex portait of Lee as a man that had very different a specific loyalties. I think we can both agree that Lee 'deserves' to be potraited in this way both for is positive and negative traits !!!



Another book that you may like is Douglas Southall Freeman's definitive four-volume biography of Lee (I think you can find it online for free to read). Freeman was 'in love' with Lee and so his volumes are heavily biased but it is an interesting read. The volumes were heavily influential and that is why historians are trying to write a more truthful picture of Lee both as a general and as a man. Lee in Freeman's books is an heroic figure; the blame for his defeats or kickbacks (unjustly) goes to his subordinates. That I am afraid is more myth-making than true History !

tsarnicholasIV said:

Well his legacy is being errased by radicals. Not just through knocking down statues but also by rewriting the man. Lee was a complicated man who fought for the South but sympathized with the North. After the War Lee advocated for healing

Click to expand...

The whole idea of Lee as a wonderful and admirable man (not a man who broke an oath for slavery) was pushed by the white supremacist radicals who won the insurgency to control the south after 1865 (and that term "healing" in Southern parlance often meant "lets us whites in north and south come together and not make a fuss about what anyone else does to their local n*****s, thats private business")

I agree with @dubsar . I think that we're generally under-estimating the level of effort put into the Lost Cause myth after the war. It can be described as one of the larger, and perhaps most successful propaganda campaigns in US history.

My opinion of Lee is undecided, but whatever his skills or personality, he was still a traitor.

I found this book on the subject to be quite illuminating.

tsarnicholasIV said:

Robert E. Lee was the leader of Confederate forces during the American Civil War, and today is remembered as a highly controversial figure who's legacy is considered by many on the left to be offensive and worthy of being cancelled or erased. It's sometimes forgotten between all the controversy and debating who Robert E. Lee actually was beyond his service in the Civil War, who he was as a person, and what principles he believed in.

Click to expand...

When former Spanish army officer Narciso Lopez planed on invading Spanish Cuba with the goal of forming an indepent slave republic he first met the Senator Jefferson Davis D- Mississippi to recruit him as a general but Davis declined and recommended the Colonel Robert E. Lee who seriously considered the offer but declined .
Leftyhunter

Leftyhunter said:

WI: Davis and/or Lee join Narciso López

In 1849, Venezuelan-born adventurer and filibuster Narciso López was seeking military help for an attempt to liberate Cuba from Spanish rule. Of course, I use the term "liberate" rather loosely, since López was a supporter of slavery. Knowing that pro-slavery sentiment was strong in the South...

www.alternatehistory.com

When former Spanish army officer Narciso Lopez planed on invading Spanish Cuba with the goal of forming an indepent slave republic he first met the Senator Jefferson Davis D- Mississippi to recruit him as a general but Davis declined and recommended the Colonel Robert E. Lee who seriously considered the offer but declined .
Leftyhunter

Click to expand...

I am sure Lee and Davis were glad they didn't get involved. Lopez' who force, mostly from the US, but some Germans, etc., was captured and executed.

tsarnicholasIV said:

Well, for decades, these statues were allowed. It wasn't until grievance groups allied with the left-leaning Democratic Party started to complain about them. There is not the same outrage about statues of the genocidal maniac that is Genghis Khan. Heck there is even statues of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao whose brutality even surpassed the pagan weirdos larping as nationalists known as the Nazis. Personally, I don't think the South and all her generals were good people, but I also don't think the North was justified either. The biggest losers of the Civil War wee slaveowners but the everyday working class citizen. The leaders of both sides chose war instead of diplomacy, and as a result, an egregious bloody war happened where rights were trampled and millions of young men, women, and children were masscred despite having nothing to do with slavery and/or Lincoln's thirst for power.

Click to expand...

My goodness a lot to unpack here. Millions of people did not die in the ACW the generally accepted figures is well under a million somewhere around 700k altogether.
Lincoln don't start the war Jefferson Davis did. Lincoln had no authority to allow any US territory to secede from the Union. One side that if the Confederacy chose war .
Where men women and children massacred in the ACW yes but mostly Native Americans by both sides and not in the thousands . Confedrate guerrillas did shot unarmed men and boys in Lawrence, Kansas but less then a hundred. Yes civilans where murdered and ..... by guerrillas and or free lance bandits which was common in areas that neither side fully controlled. Yes their where some rapes by Union soldiers but some where hanged for .....
Leftyhunter

tsarnicholasIV said:

...The biggest losers of the Civil War wee slaveowners but the everyday working class citizen. The leaders of both sides chose war instead of diplomacy, and as a result, an egregious bloody war happened where rights were trampled and millions of young men, women, and children were masscred despite having nothing to do with slavery and/or Lincoln's thirst for power.

Click to expand...

Something that many debates on the diplomacy leading up to the Civil War seem to consider is that, Lincoln had no Constitutional authority to surrender an Federal Fort. The Constitution is very clear that this is in the perview of Congress. And although the Confederacy had been negotiating with Buchanan, who gave them all sorts of assurances and promises, Buchanan also had no Constitutional right to surrender Fort Sumter.

Even though there was a special session of Congress between March 4th (Lincoln's Inauguration) and March 28th, the issue of Sumter and Southern Union Forts was not addressed.

Therefor, if Lincoln would have simply allowed the Confederacy to take Sumter, an argument could be made that he was violating both his oath of office AND the Executives Constitutional Authority. So, in my opinion, the South were the ones who directly chose war over diplomacy. Because, also in my opinion since it's rewriting history, I believe that if they had not fired on Sumter, and allowed Congress to reconvene, they most likely would have been allowed out of the Union since anti-war sentiment was high in early 1861.

Making the choice to fire on Sumter quickly removed all that sentiment right quick.

Regarding the OP: Before you start blaming the 'Libs' and 'Cancel Culture' for the removal of Lee's statues, please tell me what the purpose of those statues are in the first place?

Lee and all the other Confederate Generals defied the United States and what it stood for. Why should they be honored in the first place? And understanding the time and socio political issues wracking this nation when a majority of statues were put up helps to understand even more the questions of why they should be removed from certain places.

Anecdotely, I worked in Mississippi and i none small down, right out in front of the court house, was a statue of a local Confederate General. How do you think a black American might feel about justice if that is what represents a hero of the local justice system?

Robert E. Lee is a historical figure of considerable complexity whose legacy is being reappraised. Memorials are for the living, and the living get to decide how to remember the tarnished heroes of the past.

There's a story that is possibly apocryphal about Lee's habit of deliberately marching out of step during commencement exercises when he was President of Washington College following the Civil War, and that it was a display of regretful reflection on his life as a soldier. Rather than being discarded, Lee's legacy is finding a new historical equilibrium that is not so out of step with these times.

DingBat said:

I agree with @dubsar . I think that we're generally under-estimating the level of effort put into the Lost Cause myth after the war. It can be described as one of the larger, and perhaps most successful propaganda campaigns in US history.

My opinion of Lee is undecided, but whatever his skills or personality, he was still a traitor.

I found this book on the subject to be quite illuminating.

Click to expand...

"Robert E. Lee and Me" sounds like a weird knock-off of 23andMe. I have no idea why I thought of that!

Pima said:

you may like Mr. Gallagher's lecture 'Robert E. Lee and the Question of Loyalty. Gallagher is a very famous historian and wrote also a book about the Lost Cause

DingBat said:

I found this book on the subject to be quite illuminating.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Thanks Pima and Dingbat for these references. And thanks to TsarnicholasIV for opening this topic.
The myth of the Lost Cause is surprisingly enduring, even in the face of historians debunking it.