SOUTHERNERS STARTED THE CIVIL WAR TO PRESERVE SLAVERY

Good. This is an opportunity to get a compressed version of Snood's thread.

Good on you Setanta. It sure looks like some folk need reminding.

Yeah--sadly, although they lost the shooting war, the southern wackos have won the propaganda war. That needs to end. We need a liberation movement for the historical truth.

I think you're being a bit hard on Lee. Many of his strategies are still taught to today's war fighters in West Point and the Army War College as lessons in how to win battles. Don't poo-poo people because you don't like them. That makes for bad history.

I'll await the lengthy lesson on why Lee wasn't actually a good General...

Education is the only cure for this brand of ignorance. Sadly, so many Americans are dead set against it.

How thoughtful of you to wait. The two general officers who killed the most Confederate soldiers were R. E. Lee and J. B. Hood (also a Confederate general)--it's a toss-up which one cause the most damage.

Lee was, I believe, the fourth name on the list of General from the Confederate Congress (what today is casually called a "four star" general). His first field command was in West Virginia in late 1861. John Floyd and Henry Wise were there before him, and they largely ignored him. Lee made no effort to get reliable information on the enemy, and underestimated their strength. The result was disaster, a fiasco which left the press calling him "Granny Lee" and "Evacuating Lee." After that campaign, he was sent to South Carolina to supervise the improvement of coastal fortifications. He actually expected white men to (gasp!) dig. After that, they called him "the King of Spades."

Lee was the advisor to Jefferson Davis thereafter. As the girl wants to use the computer, I'll complete this later. While you wait, perhaps you could give us particulars of what campaigns of his are taught at the USMA at West Point.

Are you sure you are talking about Robert E Lee? Maybe you have him mixed up with one of the other Confederate Generals?

Lee was a pretty savvy tactician and won a lot of battles against forces much larger than his. One of the lesson's that is studied in the USAWC is Lee and the Operational Art: The Right Place, The Right Time. It talks about Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania as a distraction from Richmond. It talks about Lee's operational awareness that has remained an integral function of modern military leadership.

Did Lee make mistakes? Oh sure he did, but he also had a lot of victories. Fortunately for the North, the previous were more than the later. All of what you refer to is Lee's very early role in the Civil War. Oh, and those trenches "the King of Spades" had them digging? They proved to be valuable in the battles towards the end of the war.

Lee's first real battle field command was against McClellan in the Seven Days Battles. McClellan retreated. After that, he wasn't referred to by your comic relief names. After the Seven Days Battles, and until the end of the war, his men called him simply "Marse Robert", a term of respect and affection.
After McClellan, Lee defeated John Pope at the Second Battle of Bull Run and had effectively moved the battle lines from outside Richmond to outside Washington D.C.
Lee won a few other battles in Fredericksberg and Chancellorsville (where Stone-Wall Jackson was killed). He won these fights against much larger armies by implementing sound tactical strategy. His use of Stone-Wall Jackson in Chancellorsville is one of the many battles Lee commanded that continues to be taught in leadership classes in the US Army

Gettysburg was the start of the downfall for the South though. Grant had a bigger, better equipped army that just kicked ass all the way South.

Needless to say, the North won.

But, I would hesitate to believe that you, being the well read and well informed historian that I know you to be would poo-poo all this just because it's not popular to back Lee as a relevant military general during a time of American crisis.

Oh, and Lee wore 3 stars as the rank of Colonel as he held in the US military prior to the Civil War. He did not want to be made General until after the South won the war.

I am sure you will elucidate upon all of this and not leave everyone believing that Lee finished out the Civil War as "the advisor to Jefferson Davis thereafter."

Lee was arguably one of the finest campaigners the USMA ever produced. Otherwise, he was a disaster on horseback. He made his name in the Mexican War as the chief staff engineer to Winfield Scott during the second invasion of Mexico. Staff engineers are responsible, among other things, for reconnaissance. That was exactly what Lee became famous for. In West Virginia, he had two or three young officers with him, who functioned as well-heeled couriers, because Floyd and Wise largely ignored him. Lee would continue this pattern of poor to no staff work, and an inability to impose his will on insubordinate commanders.

On May 31st and June 1st, 1862, Joe Johnston, the third ranking Confederate officer (A. S. Johnston had been killed at Shiloh, and Cooper and Lee outranked him), lead an attack on McClellan's army east of Richmond. He had almost 40,000 men, and there were only about 34,000 Federal troops, but the battle was a tactical draw. But Johnston was wounded, and that was when Lee took over. This was one of the few times that he began a campaign with a reconnaissance, and ordered Stuart to scout to the northeast, toward White House on the Pamunkey River, the estate of Lee's son, "Rooney" Lee. This really was a useless operation, as they already knew that McClellan was using it as a supply terminal. Lee rather casually told Stuart to take as many men as the thought he needed. Stuart took 1200 men, and "rode around McClellan," a stunt which got his name in the newspapers once again--always one of Stuart's ambitions. Lee ignored this penchant in Stuart until it lead to disaster in the Gettysburg campaign.

It had one crucial effect, though. The commander of McClellan's right, Fitz John Porter immediately began evacuating his wounded, turning out the hookers and the sutlers and preparing to shift his base from the Pamunkey River. He was separated from the rest of the army by the Chickahominy River, and did not intend to be trapped there. (One of the best combat officers in the Federal army, he was also a friend of George McClellan; since Lincoln could not "get" McClellan, who was too influential in the Democratic Party, Porter was court-martialed after the second battle of Manassas, and did not clear his name until 1878.)

Thomas Jackson had conducted a brilliant campaign in the Valley of Virginia, and as that campaign was ending, he make a quick trip to Richmond, where Lee "suggested" that he join them, and bring his army. Jackson was given no maps, there were no messages from Lee when he arrived with his troops, no staff officers were sent to him, and he was unable to make contact with the troops he was supposed to cooperate with. On the third day, a young cavalryman who was a native of the area was sent to him, and when Jackson complained that they were moving away from the sound of the guns, the young man began to quarrel with him. (In his own army, Jackson very likely have had the man arrested.) The campaign was a fiasco from start to finish. Porter was indeed driven from his position, but he made the Confederates pay and pay, and he slipped out of Lee's rather obvious trap. Lee's army suffered more than 20,000 casualties, and McClellan, who had 20,000 more troops to begin with, suffered fewer than 16,000. That this is considered a Confederate victory is due to the prevailing "lost cause" myth, and the fact that McClellan was Lee's opponent. The south could not afford casualties such as that, and it was just the beginning of Lee's career of slaughtering Confederate infantry. At Malvern Hill, the final battle of the campaign, the Confederates were slaughtered in rare fashion, suffering about twice as many casualties as the Federal troops. The Federals had a grand battery of more than 100 cannon, and blew away the Confederate artillery, who were committed piecemeal to the engagement. Daniel Harvey Hill commented: "It wasn't war, it was murder." Hill's days in Lee's army were numbered after that.

The Seven Days highlight the lack of effective reconnaissance, the almost complete lack of staff work, the lack of maps and the failure to control his senior, subordinate officers. Eventually, Lee dealt with that by getting rid of obstreperous officers (like Hill), but that can't go on long with so few candidates. Lee's subsequent reputation was made on the strength of Jackson's performance. You can see this today in Lost Cause people who daydream about "what if Jackson had been at Gettysburg." Yeah, right . . . what if there had been a competent commander to plan the affair.

Jackson was the forward commander during the campaign which lead to the second battle of Manassas, called Second Bull Run in the north. He also saved Lee's ass during the battle of Sharpsburg, called Antietam in the north. The incident known as the lost order took place just before the battle. Lee had invaded Maryland after second Manassas, and about 30,000 of his troops refused to cross the Potomac--insubordination on a grand scale. They were willing to defend the south, but not to invade the north. After Lee had marched west, and McClellan's army occupied Frederick, Maryland, some soldiers found some cigars in a field, wrapped in a long sheet of paper. They were delighted--tobacco was hard to come by and expensive. One of them realized that the paper they were wrapped in was important, and passed it on to his regimental commander. That man must have almost filled his pants, and he quickly sent it to McClellan. It was Lee's general order for the campaign. Lee's staff work was so slipshod, that the Confederates didn't know about the lost order until after the war. It was lucky for Lee that he was facing McClellan, who spent a couple of days thinking it over before he got into motion. At the battle of Sharpsburg, he launched three attacks at Lee's army. He also launched them one at a time, over the course of the day. Lee hung on by the skin of his teeth, and the final attack was only stopped by Alvin Powell Hill's division which had marched overnight from Harper's Ferry after more than 12 hours in the road. That was the end of McClellan's career.

McClellan was replaced by Burnside, who launched an attack at Fredericksburg that was pure slaughter. (One Federal officer did shine in that battle, George Meade. Meade's division and a good eye for terrain to penetrate Jackson's line, and Jackson was obliged to commit his entire reserve, three times Meade's force, to drive Meade out.) The following spring, with Longstreet gone, taking two of his four divisions, Lee was attacked by Joe Hooker, who pushed hard on his line, and then, unaccountably, stopped. Jackson marched around Hooker's army, and as the sun was setting, attacked the rear of the Federal army. It was the last time Jackson would haul Lee's chestnuts out of the fire. Making a reconnaissance after dark, he was shot by his own troops while riding back to his lines. Jackson died eight days later. Lee never won another victory. (One could say he won Cold Harbor, but that was more a case of Grant making a stupid attack--Lee didn't so much win the battle as Grant lost it.)

After Jackson's death. Lee reorganized his army and began the invasion of the north which would culminate at Gettysburg. Stuart was to have screened the army, but once again, Lee gave him not firm orders, and Lee even gave in to Stuart's pleas for discretionary orders. Stuart would not arrive until the second day of the battle, and Lee had only William "Grumble" Jones' brigade of cavalry to screen his army. Jones properly guarded the trains and the rear of the army, so that Lee was effectively blind as he marched into Pennsylvania. Harry Heth was to have made a reconnaissance toward Gettysburg, but with the casual insubordination common in Lee's army, he took his entire division. He was followed Dorsey Pender's division. Lee had given orders not to bring on a general engagement, which, of course, Heth and Pender ignored. Lee had sent for Dick Ewell to bring the Second Corps back to rejoin the army. Ewell, with the divisions of Rodes and Early, attacked south through the town in the late morning. As the Federal troops fell back to the high hill and the low ridge to the east, Lee sent orders to Ewell to "take the hill (Cemetery Hill) if practicable" but not to bring on a general engagement. For Dog's sake, it had been a general engagement since early morning, and taking Cemetery Hill would have forced Meade to retreat, probably all the way back to Maryland. Meanwhile, Jubal Early was pouring poison into Ewell's ear, and advising caution. Early wanted Ewell's job, which he eventually got--he didn't really care about the outcome of the battle.

Longstreet's First Corps had marched hard all day and night to get to the battlefield. By now, Lee had seemingly decided that a general engagement was in order. Longstreet had convinced himself that Lee had agreed to a general plan whereby they would not attack the Army of the Potomac, but wait to receive their attack, and then counterattack. Now he learned that Lee wanted him to attack the next day. His first two divisions, McLaws and Hood, had only arrived at 2:00 a.m. The nest morning, he learned that Lee's "staff" had not scouted an approach march, so his troops waited until ten o'clock while Longstreet's staff officer's found an approach march for them. His attack did not go in until mid-afternoon, with the final attack on Little Round Top taking place in late afternoon. It was another fiasco of not poor staff work, but no staff work at all. Longstreet sulked through the third day, and while Pickett's division marched to its destruction, Lee did nothing to see that the other divisions to join the attack coordinated with Pickett. It was a bloody debacle, and Lee had hammered another nail in the Confederate coffin.

Suffice it to say that Lee was not "all that." There were two brilliant general officers from Virginia in that war, Thomas Jackson, and George Henry Thomas. Unlike Lee and Jackson, Thomas was not forsworn. He took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the constitution, and he served the United States Army with distinction in that war, never defeated in any battle in which he commanded the Federal troops. (Like Lee and Jackson, your boy President Plump also took that oath, and he is also forsworn. He went on Fox television and described the constitution as antiquated and said it is a "really bad thing for the country.")

Jubal Early hated Lee, although he only maligned him behind his back. But after Lee's death in 1870, Early went on the 19th century "rubber chicken" circuit to praise Lee. He started the hagiography of Saint Robert, and in large measure, the lost cause myth. The south had few really competent general officers. The north had many, but first they had to work through all the political generals, to get to someone who, in Lincoln's words, understood the numbers. That man was, of course, Ulysses Grant. Lee was brilliant at seizing the initiative in his campaigns, because he had his opponents awed. But that didn't work with George Meade and it didn't work with Ulysses Grant. During the overland campaign, Lee started falling back with about a one day lead over the army of the Potomac. By the beginning of June, Meade had pared that lead down to almost nothing. One the morning of June 1, 1864, Grant, Meade and their staff officers rode into the yard of a Justice of the Peace in Henrico County, east of Richmond. As reported in Freeman's R. E. Lee, that JP overheard their conversation. Grant, using the nickname he had bestowed on Lee, said that if he didn't hear his guns in fifteen minutes, he had "the Old Fox." Ten minutes later, they could hear the guns at Cold Harbor. Lee could no longer pull the wool over the eyes of his opponents, and they weren't going to dance to his tune. He just wasn't the miracle worker that people would still have us believe

Lee was no kind of tactician. I'll just assume that you don't know what the term means. His idea of tactics was to throw his infantry headlong at the enemy until they broke, or his troops could do no more. Increasingly, the latter condition applied. As I've already pointed out, Lee's successes were actually Jackson's successes, and he won them against second string political generals. Lee's record went downhill rapidly after the death of Jackson, and the appointment of Meade to command the Army of the Potomac. Even those few early victories came at a terrible price, one the south could not afford. Grant was not at Gettysburg, he was at Vicksburg then, accepting the surrender of John C. Pemberton, who was, ironically, a son of Pennsylvania.

Lee wore a colonel's insignia because the war unhinged him, and that was the highest rank he had held in "the Old Army." It had nothing to do with winning the war. He referred to Confederate officers by their full rank and title, but he referred to Federal officers by the rank they had held in the Old Army. He would never say the United States Army, or the Union Army--he usually just said "those people" or "those people over there." In fact, I'm convinced that he was attempting suicide by combat when he attempted to ride into the firing line with the Texas brigade during the battle of the Wilderness in May, 1864. They wouldn't let him join them.

Lee is grossly overrated. It looks like the War College has drunk the lost cause koolaid, but I'm not really surprised. Lee was a brilliant campaigner, but that's all that can be said about him, and he was sunk when he met an opponent, George Meade, who wouldn't play his games. If you want to read about the best general officer from Virginia in that war, read about George Henry Thomas. He was no traitor, he remained loyal.

The operational doctrine of the United States Army derives from Emory Upton. He was a young officer whose plan for the attack on Lee's position at Spotsylvania Courthouse was brilliant and successful. Grant promoted him Brigadier General after the battle. He shot himself in 1881 (he may have been dying of a brain tumor), but he already had a reputation for his military studies. He left behind a manuscript which was eventually published in 1903, I believe. This is what Wikipedia has to say about Upton's writings:

Lee in the Civil War.
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Setanta or anyone else- can you explain to me why some people think it's so damn significant that ALL of the motives the North had for fighting the war weren't 100% morally pristine? The war was fought by and large over whether or not to preserve the institution of slavery. If Lincoln or anyone else had ulterior motives, there was still a RIGHT and a WRONG side to be on, when it came to chattel slavery.

I would guess it's an attempt at an equivalency in the moral sphere.

Anyway, I'm just bookmarkerizing.

Yeah, I get that it may be to try to mitigate some perception of ancestral guilt vestiges, or something along those lines. The horror of chattel slavery is not called America's original sin for no reason. It may be that some of the chatter about Lincoln and the North's "true motives" is just a wordy act of denial in an attempt to avoid the stain of that sin.

Looking at it from across the border, it always seems like there is a contingent of Americans who way down deep believe slavery was fine/good/no problem because you know - slaves, they're black/indian/mexican/not us for gawdsake. And because of that belief, there had to have been another real cause for the American Civil War.

Interesting.Thanks.

Interesting? I think it's disturbing to run into these people.

Reading their comments here is one thing, but meeting them in real life - it's nauseating.

Yes, your response to my question was interesting. Is that word a problem? Just because I'm not expressing my disgust and outrage with these pieces of racist crap every waking moment doesn't make me feel it any less.

Who here has made those comments? The only people I see saying that "slavery was good" is your side attempting to make a point.

It's a good thing you Canadians never had slavery so you can have the guilt free look down your nose at those terrible Americans...

Wait a sec, what is this? Slavery in Canada? I never learned that! But surely that was only for a short period right?

Nope. 200 years a slave: the dark history of captivity in Canada

pm'd my response so the thread won't be further diverted