The Cult of General Bobby Lee

This article puts forth the argument that the greatest American general of the 19th Century was the general who won the Civil War: Ulysses S. Grant.

The article is worth your time, but if you don't feel like it, this is the key conclusion:

Grant’s performance outshone that of Lee. Grant, a national general, won the Mississippi Valley Theater, saved a trapped Union army in the Middle Theater, and won the Eastern Theater (with fewer casualties than incurred there by his Union predecessors). The North had the burden of winning the war to end Southern independence, and Grant’s aggressive actions were consistent with achieving victory. Grant won the war and was the greatest general of the war. On the other hand, Lee was a one-theater general who adversely influenced Confederate prospects in his own and other theaters. Although the South needed only a stalemate to maintain its independence and was badly outnumbered, Lee gambled for victory, initiated the disastrous Maryland and Gettysburg strategic campaigns, used overly aggressive tactics that decimated his army, and placed the Confederacy in a weakened condition that assured the reelection of Lincoln, whose defeat had become the South’s best hope for victory.

Thing is, though, that the Southerners had to construct the Lee Cult in order to gloss over their defeat. And so they did and so the myth was created that Lee was the better general and that Grant won battles only because he was heedless of his losses.

But Lee wasn't the better general. His failure at Antietam gave President Lincoln the breathing room to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and to set in concrete the point that the war was about ending slavery. That made it untenable for the Europeans to formally recognize and overtly support the Confederacy.

Lee fundamentally did not understand the strategic goal of the Southern insurrection. What they needed to do was stop the Union Army from winning, to make it politically dicey for the Union to continue the war, as the American distaste for long wars was evident long before anyone ever heard of Vietnam. The South would win independence by not losing the war, by being able to drag the war on until the United States tired of it, in the same way that American independence had been won eighty years before.

George Washington understood that he would win by not losing. Lee never understood that. Lee didn't understand his mission, what he needed to do in order to prevail.

Grant understood it all too well. Which is why, with the possible exception of Washington, Grant may well have been the greatest warfighter that this nation has ever produced.

(H/T)