@farmerman,
The "Lost Cause" myth was so pervasive that it is often accepted by northerners as well as southerners. After the war, Lee was offered and accepted the job of President of Washington Collge, which is now Washington and Lee University. One of the young men that followed him there was William Preston Johnston, son of Albert Sidney Johnston, who was the highest ranking Confederate General, and who died needlessly of a minor wound at Shilor because none of his staff understood the use of a tourniquet.
W. P. Johnston had many conversations with Lee, and recorded them (his impressions of them at least), and these with a few other random memoirs of young men who gathered there constitute Lee's memoir legacy--he did not otherwise leave any memoirs. In the Johnston version, it is obvious that Lee's recollections served to alter the narrative of events to his point of view, which was free of self-criticism, and couched in the "gentlemanly" terms which he was famous for using in describing the enemy in that war.
After Lee's death (1870), Jubal Early, who had never gotten along particularly well with Lee during the war, began to tour the South presenting lectures on the excellence of Lee's military skills on what passed for the rubber chicken circuit at the time. He was so successful that he even toured in the North, which was, apparently, sufficiently forgiving to participate in the hagiography of Lee.
At the end of the war, there were many cogent criticisms of Confederate strategic and tactical doctrine, one in particular by a Federal staff officer who described their failures most succinctly. Basically, the South stood on a strategic defensive, determined to defend every square foot of ground (leading to incredible stupidity such as the 15,000 troops who languished in Florida throughout the war, while the North resolutely ignored the state). Tactically, they attacked the Federal armies relentlessly wherever they found them. Sometimes this made sense, but often it made no sense at all.
In 1982, two gentlemen from the University of Alabama published
Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage. It's the first time that i know of that anyone south of the Mason-Dixon line faced up to the failures of Southern arms. I don't really recommend the book, for two reasons. The first is that they often fudge the numbers without needing to do so. For example, in their analysis of the battle of Shiloh, they show casualties for Grant's Army of the Tennessee for the first day of battle, while showing his total strength including the 21,000 troops who arrived from Don Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio overnight between the first and second days--failing to include Buell's casualties. That makes Grant's casualties appear to be much smaller than they actually were. (The third division of Grant's army, commanded by Lew Wallace--author of
Ben Hur--had not been engaged on the first day, and along with Buell's divisions, that was the force that counterattacked on the second day, so, as attackers, they initially lost heavily before Beauregard's army broke--Beauregard took command after Johnston bled to death.)
That was unnecessary, because even when you compare the casualty rate of Johnston's army to Grant's, the casualty rate of the Confederates was still higher, both proportionately and in absolute terms of total casualties. Given that Johnston brought about 45,000 troops, and Grant's eventual re-inforced army numbered about 60,000 or more, the truth would have been a much stonger argument for their thesis than the doctored figures. I quickly lost respect for the authors when i saw them playing fast and loose with the numbers.
The second objection i had was that they spent so much of the book prating about the Scotch-Irish values of the South, and how that was what condemned them to the ruinous tactical doctrine. I was unconvinced. Nevertheless, as i have said, it's the first time i've seen anyone from the South acknowledging their most signal and disastrous failure.
Not long after the war, an officer who had served before Richmond and in every major campaign until he lost his leg at Gettysburg, Theodore Ayrault Dodge, was approached by the Massachusetts Military Historical Society to present a paper on the Chancellorsville campaign. It was so well received, that he worked it up to book length and it was published to a very successful sale. He also wrote
A Bird's Eye View of Our Civil War, the best short work (very short) on the subject, in my never humble opinion. He became, arguably, the best American military historian of the 19th century, publishing works on Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustuvus Adolphus and Napoleon, among others.
Reading Dodge's account of the Chancellorsville campaign was an eye-opener for me. Every other account of the campaign, including those written and published in the North, have been written from Lee's and Jackson's point of view. Dodge, of course, does not ignore what Jackson accomplished (before being mortally wounded)--after all, he was present in the rear of Hooker's army when the Confederates came screaming out of the woods at a largely unformed line of green German and Polish troops. But reading that book (i was just ten or eleven years old) clued me into the sort of distortion of history which can arise from bias, and a hagiography such as has arisen around men like Lee and Jackson.
If one looks at Lee as objectively as possible, not only does one see his warts, one can see that these were flaws fatal for the success of the "Lost Cause." Lee was one of the finest natural campaigners that the USMA ever produced. But that's about all that can be said for him. My two serious criticisms of him are that he was profligate of the lives of his men, and he completely neglected basic staff work. This can best be seen in the Seven Days. Before looking at that, though, let me recount the reminiscence of an English observer, who, asking Lee about the "genius" of his campaigns (remember, genius did not then mean what it means to us), says that Lee replied that he lead his army to the place at which he intended to fight, and that he believed that he had then done the whole of his duty, and left the conduct of the battle to his general officers. The one time when he broke that pattern--at Gettysburg--was the Army of Northern Virginia's greatest disaster (arguably, the greatest disaster after the Seven Days).
Since this is only tangentially germane to this thread, i'm going to copy this to the civil war thread, where i will look at Lee's performance in the Seven Days.
Thats the spirit ! Keep hope alive !