Robert E Lee Was a Trash General

Introduction

Was Robert E Lee a good general, and does it matter? This essay covers principally one aspect of Lee’s life in one period: his military career during the Civil War. This is what made him the icon of the Confederacy, and therefore that of the White South, and later, to some extent, white America. Naturally, I will also discuss his enemies and the wider context of the war.

The Seven Days: Granny Lee takes command

A neutral onlooker might’ve assumed that the Civil War would be over by the summer of ‘62. After months of prodding from Lincoln, the cowardly and probably traitorous general of the Union’s Army of the Potomac, George B. McClellan, finally marched on Richmond. Instead of marching directly on Richmond, he devised a ridiculous, and probably procrastinatory plan to sail to the tip of the Virginia Peninsula, that same Peninsula where the Americans had cornered the British and won the Siege of Yorktown in the Revolution, and approach Richmond from the South. Nevertheless, McClellan, mostly by accident, found himself at the gates of Richmond by the end of May ‘62. If Richmond fell, it would most likely mean the end of the Confederacy. It was becoming increasingly evident that the Confederacy was outmatched in the West, with Grant’s victories at Forts Henry and Donelson. If Virginia, the home state of Washington and Jefferson and the crown jewel of the Confederate project, fell to the Union, it would be a brutal crush to morale. Moreso, the Union still hadn’t resolved to crush the socio-economic structure, the Plantation system, of the South. The South probably could’ve rejoined the Union with perhaps a resentful admission that Slavery couldn’t expand westward.

In Richmond stood the old Virginian Joseph E. Johnston. Convinced that the Confederate rebellion was a replay of the American Revolution, he adopted a similar strategy to the founders. As the smaller, less equipped, and technologically inferior side, the South couldn’t go man for man with the North. Therefore, his strategy wasn’t to win battles, but to preserve his men and make occupation as costly as possible for the North. The problem was that the South, like the North, wasn’t Jefferson’s land of Yeoman Farmers. As textile mills boomed in Manchester and Lancashire, the South was eager to supply most of the cotton. The South, especially the Lower South, became an economic dependency of Great Britain, which enriched a small planter class that constituted most of the elite. On their plantations, which resembled the manors of old, they fancied themselves as gallant Cavaliers. Mississippi Planter and Mexican War hero Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, interpreted Johnston’s restraint as cowardice and implored him to fight the besiegers. Johnston eventually relented and would fight the Union at Seven Pines. The battle itself was inconclusive, but Johnston was wounded and replaced as commander by fellow Virginian Robert E Lee.

Lee was a distinguished soldier at the outbreak of the Civil War. So distinguished in fact that the General in Chief of the Union Army, another Virginian and the hero of the Mexican War (Wellington had called his campaign on Mexico City “The most brilliant in Modern Warfare”), Winfield Scott, offered him command of the Union Army assembling near Washington. Lee, as most men of the time, bore more loyalty to his state than his country, so he refused. Though it would soon seem that he made the wrong decision.

Early in the war, much of his Mexican War reputation would be punctured. His campaigns in West Virginia would be unsuccessful. His caution and affinity for digging trenches would earn him the nicknames of “Granny Lee” and “The King of Spades.” So when he inherited command of the Army of Northern Virginia, he wasn’t met with adulation, but suspicion. Luckily (or so it seemed) to the Confederates, Lee knew what McClellan was.

The military brass at the top of both the Union and Confederate armies were really of the same caste, and the top of the top were almost all West Pointers. Lee, McClellan, Scott, Grant, Sherman, Longstreet, Beauregard, and Johnston all graduated from West Point. They all knew of each other, and more than likely knew each other personally. Lee had gleaned enough about McClellan to know that he was a coward, and perhaps that he was a Southern sympathizer as well. Lee was outmanned and outgunned; still, he attacked McClellan again and again, never winning decisively but always making McClellan retreat further and further away from Richmond. Over the course of Seven Days, McClellan was spooked by the engagements and retreated to Washington. Lee had delivered Virginia and the Confederacy, and there was born Marse Robert. From that point on, he would be adored by his men and the Confederate political class. But at what cost?

Second Manassas and Antietam: Little Mac

Lincoln didn’t have much respect for McClellan by the time he finally left Washington for the Peninsula Campaign. At that time, he was constructing another army to invade Virginia from the North. To head the army, he brought John Pope from the West, where the Union had seen almost only victories. Pope himself had made his fame in a brilliant amphibious operation where, with Rear Admiral Andrew Foote, he had captured a 7000-man garrison with less than 100 casualties on his own side. As McClellan was licking his wounds from being whipped by Lee, the army Invaded Northern Virginia. The two armies met at the same spot where the war had started a year prior, Bull Run for the Union and Manassas for the Confederacy (the Union liked naming armies and battles after rivers and the Confederacy after places). The Union army was decisively defeated. James Longstreet enveloped Pope’s left flank, and forced him to retreat. Pope was perhaps overzealous; the Confederate generals in the West, to be frank, sucked(mostly), and Lee was, if not strategically sound, tactically ferocious. However, it wasn’t just Pope's arrogance that lost the day. Under Pope’s command was Fitz John Porter, essentially McClellan’s crony. Pope ordered Fitz John Porter to attack Lee’s center, but Porter refused, that was, until Longstreet was in such a position to crush Pope’s Army. Porter was then court martialed and (wrongly) exonerated. Second Manassas more exemplified the disunity in the Union Army than any genius from Lee. Still, it built up his mythos to the point where he ordered an invasion of Maryland afterwards.

McClellan was an egotist and a coward, but he wasn’t an idiot. He wrote to his wife after Second Manassas, and Pope’s Army of Virginia being absorbed into his Army of the Potomac, “My enemies are crushed, silent, and disarmed.” McClellan, in his own eyes, was fighting a two-front war, one front succession, another abolition. “Help me to dodge the nigger—we want nothing to do with him. I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union,” he said. Pope’s failure, partially architected by him, had assured his unchallenged mastery of the Armies of the East. With it, he could put his plan into motion to preserve “The Union as it Was”(with slavery), and Lee gave him the perfect opportunity. In his invasion of Maryland, Lee had split up his armies, anticipating McClellan’s cowardice. However, Lee’s plan was intercepted when Union Soldiers found a cigar with an order displaying Lee’s troop movements. With this miraculous stroke of luck, McClellan predictably did little.

He could’ve defeated Lee’s army in detail, but instead, he intercepted Lee’s army with about double the number of men. It was something, but still a huge missed opportunity. This would result in the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, Antietam. In this battle, McClellan was uncharacteristically willing to throw his men at the enemy. On his left flank, Joe Hooker acquitted himself well against Stonewall Jackson, but was wounded in the fighting. On his right was Ambrose Burnside. McClellan delayed an attack until A.P. Hill’s Corps could arrive. At that point, Burnside sent his men over a bridge in perfect view of Confederate artillery. They were predictably slaughtered (guess which of McClellan’s subordinates would be offered command of the Army of the Potomac next).

At the end of the day, more than 20,000 were dead, missing, or wounded. McClellan didn’t call in his reserves, didn’t renew the battle the next day, and didn’t chase Lee’s army before he could get to Richmond. Was it cowardice? If so, why did that cowardice betray him on the first day? Or did McClellan get what he wanted on the first day of Antietam? To exhaust the Army of Northern Virginia enough that it wasn’t a threat to the Union, but keep it intact so the abolitionist currents in the nation, which were months later to result in the Emancipation Proclamation, couldn’t impose their will on the South? Antietam was the only battle McClellan controlled from beginning to end. He chose the portion of Lee’s army he wanted to confront, he controlled the pace of his subordinates, and he dictated the duration of the battle. When McClellan called it a “work of art”, he wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t a work of art for the interests of the Union Army, but it was for the interests of his caste, which wanted a reconciliation between the Northern and Southern elite.

The problem was that he overestimated the power of that caste, which at that point was represented by Northern Democrats. After Antietam, no efforts were made to pretend the war never happened and reabsorb the South with slavery and all. Lincoln relieved McClellan of command of the Army of the Potomac on November 7th and issued the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year's Day 1863. Nevertheless, Second Manassas and Antietam weren’t Lee’s projects; they were McClellan’s. Lee read McClellan during the 7 Days and whipped him. McClellan read Lee after this and deliberately didn’t whip him. Lee would later say, when asked who was the best of his opposing generals, “McClellan by All Odds.” It’s still a puzzling statement, but it makes more sense when you grasp who McClellan was.

Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville: The Indian Summer of The Army of Northern Virginia

It is said that Ambrose Burnside wept like a child when he was appointed commander of the Army of the Potomac. Nevertheless, he had devised a good plan to reach Richmond after taking over the Army of the Potomac from McClellan. Instead of approaching Lee directly, he attempted to utilize the Union’s superior naval capacity to organize a route crossing three rivers to beat Lee to Richmond. However, with more complexity comes more chances for failure, and, in something that can be attributed to Burnside’s miscommunication and Halleck’s (General in Chief of the Union Army) tardiness, the pontoon boats to cross the Rappahannock River were a week late. Lee was able to catch up to Burnside and put his Army on the other side of the River in Fredericksburg. Burnside, in a seemingly suicidal move, decided to build a pontoon bridge right across from the town of Fredericksburg, in view of Confederate snipers and the mass of Lee’s army. Despite the difficulties in building the bridge, it proved to be effective. The Union Army was able to cross the bridge and take the town of Fredericksburg. Further South, the Union Army made another successful crossing, pushing the Confederates back. Major General George Gordon Meade even temporarily broke the Confederate line; however, they were eventually halted by a Confederate counterattack. In an attempt to finish off the Confederates, Burnside attacked Mayre’s Heights, on which the Confederates were behind a Stone Wall. This would be one of the most disastrous attacks of the Civil War. It became evident early on that the attack was doomed, but Burnside would continue to assault the Confederate Position until the sun set. When the day was done, the Union had lost almost three times as many men as the Confederacy. Still, they outnumbered the Confederates, who could’ve renewed the battle the next day. Again, apart from Burnside’s miscalculation, the Union had been successful in most other areas.

Here is where the mythos of Lee and the “superior” Southern Soldier comes in. For Civil War fans, I want you to think of what Grant would’ve done in this situation (for others, just think of someone who isn’t a bitch). Grant certainly wasn’t above making disastrous assaults. Cold Harbor, about 2 years later, would kill about as many people as Fredericksburg. That being said, Grant always knew he had superior numbers and could reinforce his losses better than Lee. “But they would’ve been crushed against the river”, you mean like Grant was during Shiloh earlier that year, where he ultimately triumphed? Of course, Burnside was fat and auraless, and his corps commanders were already dissenting, but the notion that Burnside had to retreat to Washington because Lee was a genius is ahistorical hero worship, which, unfortunately, many American historians still believe today. Need I remind you that Burnside was beating Lee until his disastrous assault? It wasn’t necessarily a bad idea to retreat from Fredericksburg. If it was bad ground, it was bad ground; it would make sense to try to seek another battle on favorable ground, but to just give up when you still had the superior army? It’s insane, and it’s treasonous that everyone just agrees Burnside should’ve done this because Lee was oh, such an extraordinary general. Regardless of what I think, Burnside did retreat. And became a bit of a darling for some because of his relatable managerial incompetence and pretender syndrome. The difference is that the office workers who relate to him didn’t make mistakes which caused needless deaths.

Burnside would be replaced by Joe Hooker. Hooker was, according to the accounts of the time, handsome and also bold. Initially, it seemed as if the Army of the Potomac had finally found a commander willing and able to take on Lee. Hooker attempted to use the mangled geography of Northern Virginia to his advantage and outmaneuvered Lee (it deserves to be remarked how Burnside also did) and attained favorable ground. Hooker said, “Our enemy must ingloriously fly, or come… or come out from behind his defenses and give us battle on our own ground, where certain destruction awaits him”. Lee seemed to oblige Hooker and gave him battle, outnumbered and on unfavorable ground. At which point Hooker inexplicably lost nerve. Hooker assumed the tactical defensive against an enemy less than half his size, leaving Lee and Jackson free to put their plan into motion. Jackson would engage in a night maneuver to sneak behind the Union’s 11th Corps and roll up Hooker’s line. This would succeed, forcing Hooker to assume an even more defensive position. Meanwhile, in Fredericksburg, about 10 miles away, a Union Army of about 20,000 under John Sedgewick had (belatedly) forced Confederate general Jubal Early out of the city. If Sedgewick reached Lee before he dealt with Hooker, it would force him to either flee or risk his army being attacked in both front and rear. So Lee split his smaller force, at this point knowing Hooker wouldn’t do anything, to hold off Sedgewick’s corps. Lee then attacked Hooker’s line once again, to little effect tactically, but spooking Hooker enough to retreat back across the Rappahannock.

Chancellorsville would be regarded as Lee’s greatest victory in the Civil War, then and thereafter. And ostensibly, it does have all of the markers of a great victory. Lee defeated an Army nearly twice his size on inferior ground, while defying military convention and splitting his force in two. However, all of this depended on Hooker acting as Union generals had beforehand, completely afraid of his aura. In that sense, Lee’s most impressive achievement in the battle was assuming that the Yankees were pansies. Nevertheless, Lee had taken a bold gamble, and it resulted in his most spectacular success. He would take the same boldness into Pennsylvania months later, and it would result in his most spectacular failure.

Gettysburg: The Catastrophe

Save for the draw at Antietam, Lee had only seen victories against the Union armies, and so he devised a plan to defeat the Union Army within the Union itself, threaten Washington, and gain foreign recognition in the process.

As Lee was preparing his invasion of Pennsylvania, the Sasuke to his Naruto, Grant was renewing his Vicksburg offensive after being humiliated in his earlier attempt, following a Confederate cavalry raid that destroyed his supply base. Here is where the tactics made famous by Sherman’s March to the Sea were being devised: foraging, emancipation as a war aim, and war against Southern society as well as Southern armies.

Weeks before Lee’s planned invasion of Pennsylvania, Grant carried out perhaps the most remarkable campaign in American history. Unfortunately, we don’t have time to go over in depth Grant’s second and successful attempt to capture Vicksburg, but it involved Grant utilizing naval, Infantry, and Cavalry operations to defeat 2 Confederate armies in detail, encircling one of them in the city of Vicksburg. However, Grant would not be able to take the city by storm and would be forced to lay siege. This gave the Confederates time to consider whether to reinforce Joseph E. Johnston (remember him?), who was now commanding the largest Confederate army in the West, to relieve the city. Lee refused, saving all of his men for his invasion of Pennsylvania, and still resting on his Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg laurels, he got his way.

Hooker, for whatever reason, was still in command of the Army of the Potomac after Chancellorsville, and as Lee crossed the Potomac. Mercifully, he was relieved of command. Replacing him would be the Pennsylvanian George Meade, a competent but relatively unknown corps commander. Meade wouldn’t have much time to adjust to his promotion; however, as the Union and Confederate armies met in the town of Gettysburg on his 6th day in command. The Confederate forces would push the Federals out of the town proper. Although initially overwhelmed, the Union would establish a defensive line South of the town, bending in a fishhook shape from Culp’s Hill, through Cemetery Ridge, and ending at Little Round Top.

Lee is often criticized for giving battle after the Union had solidified their favorable defensive position south of the town, and that is unfair. Lee was on enemy territory without good reconnaissance (this was not without fault of his own), and Meade was still green in Army command. Time only made the Army of Northern Virginia weaker and the Army of the Potomac stronger. Lee committed himself to fight and win on Union ground, and he wasn’t likely to find a better opportunity than Gettysburg.

On the second day of Gettysburg, Lee attempted to break the Union left. Whatever Longstreet's opinion on the matter, his “insubordination” after being rebuked is often cited as a reason for his perceived inadequacy at Gettysburg, particularly on the Second Day. Frankly, most of this is just 19th-century gossip. After the war, it became a convenient dog on Longstreet because he became a Republican (that means he didn’t murderously despise black people), so critiques vary from “he was late” to “he should have flanked the Union Position”. The first might be true, but it is unverified, and the second is almost certainly a lie. One of Longstreet’s Division Commanders, John Bell Hood, would describe his superior plan to flank the Union position 11 years after the fact. Knowing who Hood was(we’ll discuss him later),he made this up.

The Union Left was weakened by Dan Sickles, who moved his corps from Cemetery Ridge to a more vulnerable position in the Peach Orchard of Gettysburg. Sickles is, like Longstreet(though for a better reason) thrown under the bus for this blunder. This has more to do with this weird credentialist contempt that American Historians have for “political generals” (that being generals whose troops were of a political constituency that they raised) than Sickles’s actual error. It was a miscalculation that resulted in the needless death of numerous men, but it wasn’t really straight-up insubordination. Porter’s actual insubordination at Second Manassas is justified, and Sickles’ blunder at Gettysburg is condemned. There’s obviously a double standard here, and it is telling that Americans are more instinctively disgusted by the leaders of citizen armies than the West Point Clique.

Regardless of what I have to say about it, Sickles’s Blunder made the 2nd day at Gettysburg a closer affair than it really should’ve been, and in the process gave various Union regiments the opportunity to attain everlasting glory. The debates over which regiments were truly the most valiant are really just state-by-state dick-measuring contests, but the two most famous are the 20th Maine and the 1st Minnesota. The 20th Maine was located at the end of the Union line and resisted numerous attempts by the Confederates to outflank them. When they ran out of ammo, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain ordered a desperate Bayonet charge, which routed the attackers. Joshua Chamberlain was astute with the press and made sure his valor would be recognized then and thereafter. This irks some people, so the 1st Minnesota is pulled as a “Well, Actually” to the 20th Maine. There was a gap in the Union Line, and the 1st Minnesota Regiment was sent to hold off the Confederates, so it could be reformed. They engaged in an even more desperate bayonet charge and lost most of their men to buy time for the rest of the army. I don’t really know how Chamberlain’s savvy or the 1st Minnesota’s sacrifice made the 20th Maine less brave, but that’s the implication.

Thanks to Chamberlain, Strong, and yes, Sickles, along with the thousands of unsung heroes in the ranks, the Union Line held for the rest of the day. Seeing the Union line nearly break, Lee planned a frontal assault to finish off the Union. Longstreet opposed the plan and again proposed disengaging and seeking favorable ground, which, at this point, given how favorable Meade’s position and interior lines were, made more sense. However, Lee again refused. And so would commence Pickett’s Charge.

To clarify army hierarchy, from largest to smallest denomination ending at regiment: Army-Corps-Division-Brigade-Regiment. Robert E Lee led the Army of Northern Virginia, Longstreet led a corps within it, and Pickett led a Division within Longstreet’s corps. Pickett’s charge was an attack of James Longstreet’s corps on the Union Center. Its namesake, George Pickett, was a sentimental caricature of Southern valor, in McPherson's words, “he affected the romantic style of Sir Walter Scott’s heroes”, so his pain is a lot more endearing than that scalawag Longstreet’s. Having missed out on the action on the 2nd Day at Gettysburg, Pickett was eager to prove his valor, and so his Division was put on the front in the attack. The attack began with the largest artillery bombardment of the war, but the Confederate artillery aimed high, and the Union line was spared the worst of the bombardment. Unaware of the damage, or lack thereof, they had inflicted, Longstreet reluctantly ordered his Corps’ advance. Shelby Foote said, “It would’ve been much harder not to go than to go. It would’ve taken a great deal of courage to say ‘Marse Robert, I ain’t going’. Nobody has got that much courage”. We can’t blame Longstreet for lacking that courage. Perhaps we can’t blame Lee either. For him, it would’ve been a great deal of courage to see reality beyond the aura of his invincible legions, to refuse to sacrifice his men for glory. Lee didn’t have that kind of courage. The attack, predictably, was a disaster. Of the 15,000 men in the attack, about half would be casualties. Seeing the destruction of the cream of his army, Lee said to the retreating men, “It is all my fault”, which it was. Like children who felt like they had disappointed their father, some units proposed to renew the attack. Pickett was not one of them. He never truly recovered from the destruction of his division, suffering depression for the rest of his life. He would never forgive Lee.

On to ‘64: Irish woes and Grant rising

All of the events up until this point, from the 7 Days to Gettysburg, happened over the span of 1 year. From among the worst July 4ths in American history, one of the most glorious. Vicksburg would surrender to Grant on July 3rd to pair with the victory at Gettysburg. Palmerston, the British Prime Minister, would quietly discard the idea of Confederate recognition; to those paying attention, the result of the war was clear. Yet it would continue for two more years. Lee is known for his nerve in the 7 days, his boldness at Chancellorsville, his audacity at Gettysburg, and then his regality at Appomattox. But what happened in the intervening years?

You might’ve expected the North to be in a great mood after the twin victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and most were. But here we must consider that armies are composed of men. Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg resulted in about 50,000 combined casualties for the Union. To replenish the ranks, the Union had to engage in waves of conscription, each time capturing people less and less inclined to fight. “They were offended by the idea of fighting for black people” is the common refrain, but the troops heavily voted for the Republicans, the abolitionist party in the 1864 election. Really the only group who broadly detested black people in the North were the Irish. Americans were still Anglo-Protestants during the Civil War, and needless to say, they weren’t too fond of Catholics or Irish. Fiercely protective of their place a few rungs above black people on the social ladder, the Irish were often murderously inclined against blacks. These factors would culminate barely a week after Gettysburg in the New York City Draft Riots. Mostly Irish Rioters would go around New York burning black churches and schools, and committing lynchings. The chaos reached such a degree that the Union Army had to be called in to restore order. (Dan Sickles was a Tammany Democrat. He brought people like this to fight for the Union voluntarily. So yeah, I’ll give him some grace for his error at Gettysburg.)

If there was a weakness in the Union Army, it was this. The Union wasn’t militarily vulnerable after Gettysburg, but its population was sensitive to the casualties of War. And so the only option left to the Confederacy wasn’t to win the war on the field of battle, but to make the war so costly for the Union so as to make it politically unfeasible to continue.

During the summer of 1863, the Union had seen victory on three major fronts. We’ve already discussed Gettysburg and Vicksburg, but we haven’t discussed Tennessee. Union Major General William Rosecrans conducted a campaign of maneuver, which pushed the Confederacy out of Tennessee around the same time. Months later, he planned a campaign in Georgia. Here is where the bloody battle of Chickamauga would commence.

Chickamauga was a grotesque affair. Combining the scale of the Eastern Theater with the savagery of the Western Theater, it was basically a 2-mile-long line of close-quarters combat, ending when Rosecrans mistakenly (This is the last time I’ll clarify that, because at this point in the war, almost all important Union generals wanted to win on Lincoln’s terms) left a gap in his line, which was exploited by Longstreet's Corps (which Lee had lent). The Union Army broke into retreat, and it would’ve been a rout, had it not been for George H. Thomas, a Union Virginian, holding action to secure retreat for the rest of the army. The Confederates, led by Braxton Bragg, would besiege the city of Chattanooga in Southeastern Tennessee, and Grant would be called in from Mississippi to deliver the Union Army of the Cumberland.

The Rebels had staked out defensive positions on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge before the battle. The Army of the Cumberland received reinforcements from both East and West, among which was our old friend Joe Hooker.

Fighting Joe, to his eternal credit, lived up to his nickname and forced the Rebels off of Lookout Mountain in the scenic “Battle Above the Clouds”. This gave him a favorable position to flank the Confederate position on Missionary Ridge; however, this would not make the Chattanooga Campaign. In what was supposed to be a diversionary attack to allow Sherman to flank the Confederate Forces, Union forces first captured a line of Confederate rifle pits in the center of Missionary Ridge. Facing fire from the Confederate lines above, the Union forces would go on to capture the second and then the third lines of Confederate forces, until the center broke. Hooker’s forces on the right pushed from the south and further assisting in defeating the Confederate Army. All in all, it was an extraordinary display of strategy, logistics, and valor. It would earn Grant the rank of Lieutenant General, last held by George Washington, and command of all Union Armies.

Sherman, The Overland Campaign, and The Petersburg Trenches: Modern War and Lee Finest Hour

Sherman’s Marches to the Sea and through the Carolinas are often credited with innovating the methods of “Total War”, which would be utilized to devastating effect in the World Wars. But really, his March to the Sea was the utilization of a very old method of War. The English during the 100 Years' War, and their glorious heroes like Edward the Black Prince, knew that the legitimacy of a King rested on his ability to protect his peasantry, and that the king's armies subsisted on the harvests of those peasants. Therefore, to strike at the peasants was to strike at the heart of the enemy, and better yet, at little risk to an army.

The Black Prince held the line at Poitiers, captured the French King, and earned himself everlasting glory for England; what is less known is how he forced the French to battle. He launched a Chevauchee across Southern France, where his army would traverse the French Countryside and burn every village in their path, killing man, woman, and child along the way. Those whom they did not kill or rape or both would be unable to sustain themselves and would either have to leave or perish. The French King had to defeat the Prince or let his entire Kingdom burn.

Sherman’s march wasn’t a Chevauchee; he never targeted civilians for slaughter or wanton brutalization, though it did sometimes happen (more often against blacks than whites). Sherman wouldn’t brutalize fellow Anglo-Protestants like the Papist mongrels, who many of the Southerners in Sherman’s path had gloried in brutalizing 17 years earlier in Mexico. Sherman instead targeted the South’s means to fight and feed its armies: arms and ammunition depots, railroads, and Plantations, among other infrastructure. Sherman’s scourging of the Lower South was brilliant and necessary, but it was the adoption of a precept of war that the Union had willfully ignored, not an innovation in warfare in itself.

Sherman is a prophet of destruction in the American mind, not because he brutalized the people of the South, but because he psychosexually humiliated them. He emasculated, penetrated, and decapitated a society based on manly valor. In short, he raped it. Tf do you think “I will make Georgia Howl” means?

The real precursor to Modern War would be the Eastern Front. Americans don’t understand it as such because it doesn’t give them an opportunity to moralize. It was more about technology than people suddenly forgetting about the sanctity of life. With Repeating Rifles, shell guns, and early machine guns, the tactical defense was becoming much more favorable than the offensive. This would result in the positionally static, but casualty-heavy Trench Warfare, which most of us associate with WW1. While Americans found a coy way to call Sherman Hitler because he was mean to the South, they ignored that Americans had complex trenches over miles of frontlines half a century before WW1.

Not that Grant wanted it that way. When Grant arrived in Washington to take control of the Union Armies, he devised a simple but strategically sound plan to push the Confederacy on all fronts possible. This would be done effectively for Grant’s and Sherman's campaigns in Virginia and Georgia, respectively, but the political Generals would drop the bag. Franz Sigel, Nathaniel Banks, and Ben Butler all got whipped. They deserve credit for raising constituencies, and Butler, in particular, for the “contraband” legal trick for justifying the confiscation and freeing of slaves, but none of these guys had any talent for war and should’ve been out of it far before 1864.

Still, the Confederate Army was being pushed more than it could handle and would inevitably be defeated unless something drastically changed in the North. Sherman was slowly moving the outnumbered Army of Tennessee towards Atlanta against old Joe Johnston, who had reluctantly been reappointed despite his contentious relationship with Jefferson Davis. Meanwhile, Lee was defending Virginia. Grant would cross the Rapidan and meet Confederate forces in the Wilderness near Chancellorsville. The Civil War, at this point, was presenting, with each new battle, more harrowing ways to die and be wounded. Perhaps this is why the narrative of the Eastern Front stops at Gettysburg and starts again at Appomattox. We can romanticize picket saying “remember you are from Old Virginia. We can’t romanticize a piece of tree bark cutting a man’s Jugular. The Battle of the Wilderness was naturally in the Wilderness, so it wasn’t just enemy bullets that each side had to worry about, but shrapnel coming from trees and shrubs, along with microscopic debris, making the battlefield less visible and less breathable. How anyone could go into that forest and come out with anything resembling sanity, I don’t know. After an inconclusive result, Grant, instead of retreating back to Washington, moved further South, to Spotsylvania Courthouse. This battle was perhaps not as viscerally grotesque as The Wilderness, but it was even more violent. The most brutal fighting would occur at a point of the Confederate line that roughly formed a right angle. Some initial Union successes encouraged Grant to send more men to attack the angle, but successful Confederate counterattacks prevented the line from breaking. Because so much fighting was coordinated in such a small area, bodies would pile up, and each side would have to wade through their fallen comrades to fight the enemy. The battle would be inconclusive again, but Grant would again move further south.

This is the trend of the Overland Campaign. Grant and Lee would fight; the result would be inconclusive, and Grant would treat it as a victory nonetheless and march further South. One major battle in the campaign could be called a victory for one side or the other, and that was the Battle of Cold Harbor. Grant attempted to assault an entrenched position. Most casualties happened within 30 minutes; an estimated 7,000 perished, around the casualty total of Pickett’s charge. It was a horrific attack, and Grant can’t really ever be absolved for it. Foote said of Pickett’s charge that it was the “price of having Lee in command”, and he was right. The same is true of Grant with Cold Harbor. What the South got for Lee was thousands of dead, defeat, and his saintly image for the next century or more. What the North got for Grant was thousands of dead, victory, and a caricature of a drunkard for the next century, until they finally marbleized him beside Lincoln, and so still reduced him to a caricature

After the defeat at Cold Harbor, Grant would move south to Petersburg to cut off the last supply line to Richmond. He would nearly take the city, but would again be forced to lay siege. Between Richmond and Petersburg, a frontline would develop. The Union would attempt some more assaults, most famously at the Crater, which was a genuinely innovative plan to plant explosives under the Confederate Trenches and blow a hole in their defenses, a plan pushed by our old friend Ambrose Burnside, which was ruined both by army politics and Burnside’s ineptitude. A black division had been trained for the attack, but Meade, who never really trusted black soldiers, ordered that a white division lead the attack instead. So then, I shit you not, Burnside drew straws to decide which of his commanders would lead the attack, and of course, the worst one, James Ledlie, was chosen. After the explosion, the untrained troops went into the crater instead of around it, getting stuck inside, and becoming target practice for the Confederates once they reoriented.

The New York Draft Riots about a year earlier had shown that the Union public was still sensitive to casualties, even with victory. And the Overland Campaign did genuinely raise discontent in the Union. However, I think people are being a bit dramatic when they say Lincoln was going to lose the presidential election if something didn’t change before the election. I don’t doubt Lincoln believed it when he said, “It seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected”. I just think he was wrong. Lincoln won the presidential election by 10 points and won nearly every state. I could say the Overland Campaign tanked Lincoln's popularity, Lee had won, a Democrat would offer the Confederacy peace, and then Hood’s Southern Valor in attacking Sherman and then abandoning Atlanta won Lincoln the election, and hence lost Lee the war. It would be great for my narrative, but it just isn’t true. Lincoln most likely would’ve won again even if Atlanta hadn’t fallen. Still, I do believe Lee’s finest hour was his final defense of Virginia; it was the moment of the war where he was forced by circumstance and an enemy who wouldn’t blink to stop playing Hannibal, and defend his country. But ultimately, it had little effect. After Gettysburg, the Confederacy was done; all that was left was to die harder.

Appomattox: The Myth and the Man

It wouldn’t be until 1865 that the Confederacy considered using its one yet untapped source of manpower, its slaves. At the beginning of 1864, when maybe it would’ve meant something, Major General Patrick Cleburne, perhaps the best division commander in the West, had proposed arming the South’s slaves and freeing them as a condition for Service. Cleburne was an immigrant, an Anglo-Irish Protestant, one of the few Confederates who didn’t come from the Planter elites. He didn’t have a plantation to protect, nor did he care much for the racial caste system, and so he was one of the few, perhaps the only Confederate, who was fighting for the independence of the Southern States above all else. Realizing that slavery would prevent foreign recognition, and the slave population constituted a fifth column that the North could recruit and turn against the South, Cleburne proposed enlisting the South's Slaves and granting them freedom after their service. This made perfect military sense, of course, but Cleburne did not understand what the South was truly fighting for. His proposal would be censored, and he would be blacklisted. After Johnston’s removal from the Army of Tennessee, he deserved Corps command, and perhaps command of the whole army. Instead, Hood would be given command of the Army of Tennessee. He would send Cleburne, along with the best of the army, to be killed at Franklin in the most disgusting display of incompetence and malice in the war.

Lee would support the enlistment of black troops, but it was too late. The Petersburg lines would be breached before any Black troops saw combat. When Petersburg fell, the last supply line to Richmond was cut off, and so Richmond had to be evacuated at last. Lee would attempt to unite with the remnants of the Western Army, again under the command of Johnston, after Davis had exhausted all worse options. However, at that point, the Confederates couldn’t even beat the Union in speed. Stonewall Jackson whipped army after army in the Shenandoah in 1862. In 1864, Union cavalry general Phil Sheridan killed “The Last Cavalier” of the South basically for fun (Sheridan himself was an Irishman who looked like a Mongol; so it’s a surprise that the image of the Little Yankee Khan murdering the tragic knight of the South wasn’t utilized more by Lost Causers), defeated the remnants of Confederate Cavalry, and burned the Shenandoah more thoroughly than Sherman burned Georgia. Sheridan’s victory at Five Forks against George Pickett would force the evacuation of Petersburg, and Sheridan led a pursuit of Lee's army. Lee’s army would be caught in Appomattox a few days after his evacuation. Surrounded by an enemy more than 3x larger than his own, Lee said, “there is nothing left to do but to see general Grant, and I would rather die 1000 deaths”.

When Jezebel heard Jehu was coming for her, knowing she would be killed, she put on her makeup: “her mask, her beauty, her bravery”. Lee arrived at his own surrender resplendent in full dress uniform, with a gold-trimmed collar, and a sword by his side: his mask, his chivalry, his bravery. Dare I say his beauty? The Appomattox surrender has been done to death in Civil War history, chiefly because it represents a reconciliation of White North and White South. Grant probably saw it this way (though he had called the Confederate cause “one of the worst for which a people ever fought”), but did Lee think of it this way? Did Lee, scion of a first family of Virginia, see Grant, a tanner’s son walking in, 5’8” and stoop-shouldered in a mud-splattered private’s uniform, and think he was the other great side of America? I doubt it.

So then, was Lee a good general? He certainly had talent for war and for inspiring men, but he wasn’t what he wanted to be. Lee wasn’t a great offensive general. He profited from the cowardice of McClellan and Hooker early in the war and was turned back each time he attempted to take the war outside of Northern Virginia. Lee’s talent was in defensive warfare. Marse Robert was the compelling legend. The King of Spades was the good general. And that’s why he, and the Confederacy, failed, or at least failed as hard as they did. Lee was rewarded in his time and would be rewarded in memory for spectacular battles, which cost him thousands of men he could not spare, even when he lost. His one true victory was like that of Jezebel’s. To wear his mask in defiance of the world that had vanquished him. The South realized the power of this image nearly the instant after surrender. It would take women 3000 years to discover the power of Jezebel’s.