Robert E Lee the South Will Rise Again Flag
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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 love Virginia at historic period 63 in 1870, v years after the end of the Ceremonious War. In a new biography, Robert Due east. Lee, Roy Blount, Jr., treats Lee as a human being of competing impulses, a "paragon of manliness" and "one of the greatest military commanders in history," who was however "not good at telling men what to practise."
Blount, a noted humorist, journalist, playwright and raconteur, is the author or coauthor of 15 previous books and the editor of Roy Blount'due south Volume of Southern Humor. A resident of New York Metropolis and western Massachusetts, he traces his interest in Lee to his boyhood in Georgia. Though Blount was never a Civil State of war buff, he says "every Southerner has to brand his peace with that War. I plunged back into it for this volume, and am relieved to accept emerged live."
"Also," he says, "Lee reminds me in some means of my male parent."
At the centre of Lee'south story is 1 of the monumental choices in American history: revered for his honor, Lee resigned his U.S. Regular army commission to defend Virginia and fight for the Confederacy, on the side of slavery. "The conclusion was honorable by his standards of honor—which, whatever nosotros may think of them, were neither self-serving nor complicated," Blount says. Lee "idea information technology was a bad idea for Virginia to secede, and God knows he was right, but secession had been more than or less democratically decided upon." Lee's family held slaves, and he himself was at best ambiguous on the discipline, leading some of his defenders over the years to disbelieve slavery's significance in assessments of his character. Blount argues that the upshot does matter: "To me it's slavery, much more secession as such, that casts a shadow over Lee's honorableness."
In the extract that follows, the full general masses his troops for a battle over three humid July days in a Pennsylvania boondocks. Its name would thereafter resound with backbone, casualties and miscalculation: Gettysburg.
In his dashing (if sometimes depressive) antebellum prime number, he may accept been the about beautiful 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 feet 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 Civil War and a symbol of nobility to some, of slavery to others.
After Lee's death in 1870, Frederick Douglass, the former fugitive slave who had become the nation'south near prominent African-American, wrote, "Nosotros can scarcely accept up a newspaper . . . that is not filled with nauseating flatteries" of Lee, from which "information technology would seem . . . that the soldier who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad crusade, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest identify in heaven." Two years subsequently 1 of Lee's ex-generals, Jubal A. Early, apotheosized his late commander as follows: "Our beloved Master stands, like some lofty column which rears its caput amidst the highest, in grandeur, uncomplicated, pure and sublime."
In 1907, on the 100th ceremony of Lee's birth, President Theodore Roosevelt expressed mainstream American sentiment, praising Lee's "extraordinary skill as a General, his dauntless courage and high leadership," adding, "He stood that hardest of all strains, the strain of begetting himself well through the greyness 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 retrieve we know Lee because we have a mental prototype: grey. Not only the compatible, the mythic equus caballus, the pilus and beard, but the resignation with which he accustomed dreary burdens that offered "neither pleasance nor advantage": in item, the Confederacy, a crusade of which he took a dim view until he went to state of war for information technology. He did not see right and incorrect in tones of gray, and nevertheless his moralizing could generate a fog, as in a letter from the front to his invalid wife: "You must endeavour to enjoy the pleasure of doing proficient. That is all that makes life valuable." All right. Just then he adds: "When I measure my own by that standard I am filled with confusion and despair."
His own mitt probably never drew human claret nor fired a shot in anger, and his simply Civil State of war wound was a faint scratch on the cheek from a sharpshooter'due south bullet, just 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 every bit a given Lee'southward granitic conviction that everything is God'southward volition, even so, he was born to lose.
As battleground generals get, he could be extremely peppery, and could get out of his way to exist kind. But in even the most sympathetic versions of his life story he comes across as a flake of a stick—certainly compared with his scruffy nemesis, Ulysses S. Grant; his zany, ferocious "right arm," Stonewall Jackson; and the dashing "eyes" of his army, J.E.B. "Jeb" Stuart. For these men, the Civil War was just the ticket. Lee, even so, has come down in history every bit as well fine for the bloodbath of 1861-65. To efface the squalor and horror of the state of war, we have the image of Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves, and we take the prototype of Robert East. Lee's gracious surrender. Nonetheless, for many contemporary Americans, Lee is at best the moral equivalent of Hitler's brilliant field align Erwin Rommel (who, nonetheless, turned against Hitler, as Lee never did confronting Jefferson Davis, who, to be sure, was no Hitler).
On his begetter's side, Lee's family unit was amid Virginia's and therefore the nation's most distinguished. Henry, the scion who was to become known in the Revolutionary War as Lite-Horse Harry, was born in 1756. He graduated from Princeton at xix and joined the Continental Army at xx as a captain of dragoons, and he rose in rank and independence to command Lee'southward low-cal cavalry and then Lee'due south legion of cavalry and infantry. Without the medicines, elixirs, and food Harry Lee'south raiders captured from the enemy, George Washington's army would not probable have survived the harrowing winter encampment of 1777-78 at Valley Forge. Washington became his patron and shut friend. With the state of war virtually over, notwithstanding, Harry decided he was underappreciated, so he impulsively resigned from the regular army. 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 down the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. In 1799 he was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he famously eulogized Washington as "showtime in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen."
Meanwhile, though, Harry's fast and loose speculation in hundreds of thousands of the new nation's acres went sour, and in 1808 he was reduced to casuistry. He and his second married woman, Ann Loma Carter Lee, and their children departed the Lee ancestral home, where Robert was born, for a smaller rented firm in Alexandria. Under the conditions of bankruptcy that obtained in those days, Harry was still liable for his debts. He jumped a personal appearance bail—to the dismay of his blood brother, Edmund, who had posted a sizable bail—and wangled passage, with pitying help from President James Monroe, to the West Indies. In 1818, after five years away, Harry headed home to die, only got only as far as Cumberland Island, Georgia, where he was cached. Robert was 11.
Robert appears to have been too fine for his childhood, for his education, for his profession, for his marriage, and for the Confederacy. Not according to him. Co-ordinate to him, he was non fine enough. For all his audacity on the battlefield, he accepted rather passively one raw bargain afterwards another, bending over backward for everyone from Jefferson Davis to James McNeill Whistler'south mother. (When he was superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy, Lee acquiesced to Mrs. Whistler's request on behalf of her buck son, who was somewhen dismissed in 1854.)
By what can nosotros know of him? The works of a full general are battles, campaigns and normally memoirs. The engagements of the Ceremonious State of war shape up more as bloody muddles than as commanders' chess games. For a long fourth dimension during the state of war, "Old Bobbie Lee," as he was referred to worshipfully by his troops and nervously by the foe, had the profoundly superior Wedlock forces spooked, but a century and a 3rd of analysis and counteranalysis has resulted in no core consensus equally 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 so impersonal and (generally) unselfserving as to seem above the fray.
During the postbellum century, when Americans Due north and South decided to embrace R. E. Lee as a national as well as a Southern hero, he was by and large described equally antislavery. This supposition rests not on any public position he took but on a passage in an 1856 letter to his wife. The passage begins: "In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in whatever Land. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages." But he goes on: "I retrieve it however a greater evil to the white than to the blackness race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the erstwhile. The blacks are immeasurably improve off hither than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & atomic number 82 them to ameliorate things. How long their subjugation may exist necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence."
The only way to go within Lee, perhaps, is by edging fractally effectually the record of his life to find 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 Brown—with whom he interacted; and past subjecting to contemporary skepticism sure concepts—honor, "gradual emancipation," divine will—upon which he unreflectively founded his identity.
He wasn't always gray. Until war anile him dramatically, his sharp dark chocolate-brown eyes were complemented past black hair ("ebon and abundant," every bit his doting biographer Douglas Southall Freeman puts it, "with a wave that a adult female might have envied"), a robust black mustache, a potent full mouth and chin unobscured by any bristles, and dark mercurial brows. He was not ane to hibernate his looks under a bushel. His heart, on the other hand . . . "The heart, he kept locked away," every bit Stephen Vincent Benét proclaimed in "John Chocolate-brown's Body," "from all the picklocks of biographers." Accounts past people who knew him give the impression that no one knew his whole center, even before it was broken by the state of war. Perhaps information technology broke many years earlier the war. "Y'all know she is like her papa, always wanting something," he wrote most one of his daughters. The great Southern diarist of his solar day, Mary Chesnut, tells u.s.a. that when a lady teased him virtually his ambitions, he "remonstrated—said his tastes were of the simplest. He merely wanted a Virginia farm—no end of cream and fresh butter—and fried chicken. Non ane fried craven or 2—simply unlimited fried craven." But earlier Lee'due south surrender at Appomattox, one 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 simply for which he couldn't muster any hunger.
Ane matter that clearly drove him was devotion to his domicile state. "If Virginia stands by the one-time Union," Lee told a friend, "and then volition I. But if she secedes (though I practice not believe in secession as a ramble correct, nor that there is sufficient cause for revolution), then I will follow my native Country with my sword, and, if demand be, with my life."
The North took secession every bit an human activity of aggression, to be countered appropriately. When Lincoln chosen on the loyal states for troops to invade the South, Southerners could see the consequence equally defense non of slavery merely of homeland. A Virginia convention that had voted ii to 1 against secession, at present voted two 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.S. Army commission he had held for 32 years.
The days of July one-3, 1863, still stand among the virtually horrific and determinative in American history. Lincoln had given up on Joe Hooker, put Maj. Gen. George M. Meade in command of the Ground forces of the Potomac, and sent him to stop Lee'south invasion of Pennsylvania. Since Jeb Stuart'southward scouting operation had been uncharacteristically out of affect, Lee wasn't sure where Meade's army was. Lee had actually avant-garde farther n than the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when he learned that Meade was south of him, threatening his supply lines. So Lee swung back in that direction. On June 30 a Amalgamated brigade, pursuing the report that there were shoes to be had in Gettysburg, ran into Federal cavalry westward of town, and withdrew. On July 1 a larger Amalgamated force returned, engaged Meade's advance forcefulness, and pushed it back through the town—to the fishhook-shaped heights comprising Cemetery Colina, Cemetery Ridge, Little Round Top, and Round Summit. It was virtually a rout, until Maj. Gen. O. O. Howard, to whom Lee as West Point superintendent had been kind when Howard was an unpopular cadet, and Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock rallied the Federals and held the high ground. First-class ground to defend from. That evening Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, who allowable the Beginning Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, urged Lee non to attack, but to swing around to the south, get between Meade and Washington, and find a strategically fifty-fifty meliorate defensive position, against which the Federals might feel obliged to mount one of those frontal assaults that nigh always lost in this state of war. Still not having heard from Stuart, Lee felt he might have numerical superiority for in one case. "No," he said, "the enemy is in that location, and I am going to assault him at that place."
The next forenoon, Lee set in move a two-office offensive: Lt. Gen. Richard Ewell's corps was to pin down the enemy's right flank, on Culp's Hill and Cemetery Colina, while Longstreet'southward, with a couple of extra divisions, would hitting the left flank—believed to be exposed—on Cemetery Ridge. To go there Longstreet would have to make a long march under comprehend. Longstreet mounted a sulky objection, simply Lee was adamant. And wrong.
Lee didn't know that in the night Meade had managed by forced marches to concentrate most his entire army at Lee's front, and had deployed it skillfully—his left flank was now extended to Little Round Superlative, virtually iii-quarters of a mile southward of where Lee thought it was. The disgruntled Longstreet, never one to rush into annihilation, and confused to notice the left flank farther left than expected, didn't begin his assault until three:30 that afternoon. It almost prevailed anyway, but at concluding was beaten gorily back. Although the two-pronged offensive was ill-coordinated, and the Federal arms had knocked out the Confederate guns to the northward before Ewell attacked, Ewell'south infantry came tantalizingly close to taking Cemetery Hill, but a counterattack forced them to retreat.
On the third morn, July 3, Lee's plan was roughly the same, but Meade seized the initiative by pushing forrard on his right and seizing Culp's Hill, which the Confederates held. So Lee was forced to improvise. He decided to strike directly ahead, at Meade's heavily fortified midsection. Confederate arms would soften information technology upward, and Longstreet would straight a frontal attack across a mile of open ground confronting the center of Missionary Ridge. Again Longstreet objected; again Lee wouldn't heed. The Confederate artillery exhausted all its shells ineffectively, so was unable to support the set on—which has gone down in history as Pickett'southward accuse considering Maj. Gen. George Pickett'south division absorbed the worst of the horrible bloodbath information technology turned into.
Lee's idolaters strained after the state of war to shift the blame, but the consensus today is that Lee managed the battle badly. Each supposed major corrigendum of his subordinates—Ewell'south failure to take the high ground of Cemetery Hill on July i, Stuart's getting out of touch and leaving Lee unapprised of what force he was facing, and the lateness of Longstreet'south attack on the second day—either wasn't a blunder at all (if Longstreet had attacked before 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 Union generals but almost to expect his subordinates to read his. He was non in fact good at telling men what to do. That no doubt suited the Confederate fighting man, who didn't take kindly to beingness told what to do—merely Lee'southward only 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 every bit well as with women, his authority derived from his sightliness, politeness, and unimpeachability. His usually cheerful detachment obviously covered solemn depths, depths faintly lit past glints of previous and potential rejection of self and others. It all seemed Olympian, in a Christian condescending sort of way. Officers' hearts went out to him across the latitude he granted them to be willingly, creatively honorable. Longstreet speaks of responding to Lee at another critical moment by "receiving his anxious expressions really as appeals for reinforcement of his unexpressed wish." When people obey you because they think you enable them to follow their own instincts, you need a groovy instinct yourself for when they're getting out of touch, as Stuart did, and when they are balking for good reason, as Longstreet did. As a father Lee was addicted but fretful, as a husband devoted but distant. Equally an attacking general he was inspiring simply non necessarily cogent.
At Gettysburg he was jittery, snappish. He was 56 and bone weary. He may have had dysentery, though a scholar's widely publicized assertion to that effect rests on tenuous bear witness. He did have rheumatism and heart trouble. He kept fretfully wondering why Stuart was out of touch, 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 all-time to act on Lee's written instructions: "Yous will . . . be able to gauge whether you tin can laissez passer around their army without hindrance, doing them all the damage you tin, and cantankerous the [Potomac] east of the mountains. In either instance, later on crossing the river, you must move on and experience the right of Ewell's troops, collecting information, provisions, etc." But 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 second twenty-four hours Stuart did evidence up at Gettysburg, later pushing himself almost to exhaustion, Lee's only greeting to him is said to have been, "Well, General Stuart, y'all are here at last." A coolly devastating cut: Lee's way of chewing out someone who he felt had let him down. In the months later Gettysburg, as Lee stewed over his defeat, he repeatedly criticized the laxness of Stuart's command, securely pain a human who prided himself on the sort of dashing freelance effectiveness by which Lee's father, Maj. Gen. Calorie-free-Horse Harry, had divers himself. A bond of implicit trust had been broken. Loving-son effigy had failed loving-male parent figure and vice versa.
In the by Lee had besides 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. "At that place was an utter absence of accord in the movements of the several commands."
Why did Lee pale everything, finally, on an sick-considered thrust straight upward the heart? Lee's critics have never come with a logical explanation. Plain he just got his claret up, equally the expression goes. When the unremarkably repressed Lee felt an overpowering demand for emotional release, and had an army at his disposal and another i in front end of him, he couldn't hold back. And why should Lee expect 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 correct in forepart of Meade's headquarters. (In one case, Dwight Eisenhower, who admired Lee's generalship, took Field Marshal Montgomery to visit the Gettysburg battleground. They looked at the site of Pickett'south charge and were baffled. Eisenhower said, "The man [Lee] must have got and then mad that he wanted to hit that guy [Meade] with a brick.")
Pickett'due south troops advanced with precision, closed up the gaps that withering fire tore into their smartly dressed ranks, and at close quarters fought tooth and nail. Acouple of hundred Confederates did intermission the Union line, but just briefly. Someone counted 15 bodies on a patch of basis less than five anxiety wide and iii feet long. Information technology 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 expressionless. He laid him out gently on the footing, kissed him, and got back to advancing.
As the minority who hadn't been cut to ribbons streamed back to the Amalgamated lines, Lee rode in splendid calm amid them, apologizing. "It'due south all my fault," he assured stunned privates and corporals. He took the fourth dimension to admonish, mildly, an officer who was beating his equus caballus: "Don't whip him, captain; information technology does no good. I had a foolish horse, once, and kind treatment is the best." Then he resumed his apologies: "I am very sorry—the task was also great for you lot—but we mustn't despond." Shelby Foote has called this Lee's finest moment. Simply generals don't desire apologies from those beneath them, and that goes both ways. After midnight, he told a cavalry officer, "I never saw troops behave more magnificently than Pickett's partitioning of Virginians. . . . " Then he brutal silent, and it was so that he exclaimed, as the officer afterward wrote it down, "Too bad! Too bad! OH! As well BAD!"
Pickett'south accuse wasn't the half of it. Birthday at Gettysburg as many as 28,000 Confederates were killed, wounded, captured, or missing: more than a third of Lee's whole army. Perhaps it was considering Meade and his troops were so stunned by their ain losses—about 23,000—that they failed to pursue Lee on his withdrawal south, trap him confronting the flooded Potomac, and wipe his 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 center by entering his tent first thing every morning 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 constitute 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's 64,000 downwardly. Lee had his men well dug in. Grant resolved to turn his flank, force him into a weaker position, and crush him.
On Apr nine, 1865, Lee finally had to admit that he was trapped. At the beginning of Lee's long, combative retreat by stages from Grant's overpowering numbers, he had 64,000 men. By the stop they had inflicted 63,000 Union casualties just had been reduced themselves to fewer than 10,000.
To be sure, in that location were those in Lee'due south regular army who proposed continuing the struggle as guerrillas or by reorganizing under the governors of the various Confederate states. Lee cut off whatever such talk. He was a professional soldier. He had seen more than enough of governors who would exist commanders, and he had no respect for ragtag guerrilladom. He told Col. Edward Porter Alexander, his arms commander, . . . the men would get mere bands of marauders, and the enemy'due south cavalry would pursue them and overrun many broad sections they may never accept occasion to visit. We would bring on a state of affairs it would accept the state years to recover from."
"And, as for myself, you young fellows might go to bushwhacking, but the only dignified course for me would be, to go to Gen. Grant and surrender myself and accept the consequences." That is what he did on April nine, 1865, at a farmhouse in the hamlet of Appomattox Court Business firm, wearing a fulldress uniform and carrying a borrowed ceremonial sword which he did non surrender.
Thomas Morris Chester, the only blackness correspondent for a major daily paper (the Philadelphia Press) during the war, had nothing but scorn for the Confederacy, and referred to Lee as a "notorious rebel." But when Chester witnessed Lee'southward arrival in shattered, burned-out Richmond subsequently the surrender, his dispatch sounded a more sympathetic annotation. After Lee "alighted from his horse, he immediately uncovered his head, thinly covered with silver hairs, equally he had washed in acquittance of the veneration of the people along the streets," Chester wrote. "In that location was a full general rush of the small crowd to milk shake hands with him. During these manifestations non a word was spoken, and when the ceremony was through, the General bowed and ascended his steps. The silence was so cleaved past a few voices calling for a spoken language, to which he paid no attention. The General then passed into his house, and the oversupply dispersed."
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/making-sense-of-robert-e-lee-85017563/
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