[GCFL-discuss] Bored and Lee

[Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List]

OK Jeanene, I'll bite. Its good of you to stand up for your family. By
the way, even if true, my statement about Benedict Arnold stands
uncontested, since Robert E. Lee did not fight in the Revolutionary War.
His father, Lighthorse Harry Lee, did.

Lee more or less single-handedly assured the survival of the confederacy
in the eastern theater of the war for a good two or three years, taking
advantage of General McClellan's hesitation to spoil the beautiful army
he had built by actually taking it into battle, General Hooker's lack of
confidence in his own strategy, and General Ambrose Burnside's assinine
pursuit of a battle plan made obsolete by the arrival of Longstreet's
corps on Maryes Heights. He could take a small force, strike like
lightning in several directions, and put numerically superior adversaries
to flight. He could anticipate an excellent strategic move of his
opposite numbers, to which his own forces were quite vulnerable, and move
his own troops into position to make that strategic move absolutely
fatal. Not bad at all.

However, Lee lost the war. He had to surrender his army. He was, in the
end, out-generaled, mostly by General Grant, and to the extent he came to
command all confederate forces in the field, also by General Sherman, not
to mention, he was a bit undermined by General Hood's desire to go out
and fight when that simply opened opportunities for Sherman to take
Atlanta a bit sooner. General Johnson, for all the flak he took from
Richmond and from Hood, was doing the best anyone could do to slow
Sherman down. Lee met his match in Grant, so he was not the best general
in the Civil War, much less in the entire history of the United States.

On the moral side, Lee favored emancipation and the end of slavery,
opposed secession, said that to save the union he would sacrifice
everything but honor (which he concluded required him to fight for
Virginia if fighting had to be done), and firmly advocated General
Alexander Cleburne's proposal to enroll African Americans in the CSA
army, in exchange for not only freedom but full respect for their
marriages and families. (Lee and Cleburne were southern patriots, not
committed to slavery, whereas Alexander Stephens and several other
generals said "the whole point to secession is the inferiority of the
Negro, if we make a soldier of him we concede the whole question.")

Morally, Lee had his dark side. The horrors depicted in the novel Cold
Mountain were not unrelated to his draconian orders to stem desertion
from the CSA army. True, it is standard military procedure, and when
those who stay in the ranks stand a good chance of losing their lives,
there is a certain logic that anyone who deserts should summarily lose
theirs. But the horror for countless individual and more or less innocent
lives is still real.

Siarlys

P.S. My nominee for greatest general the USA had in any war would be
Joseph Stilwell, because taking on the Japanese in Burma, and getting
Chiang Kai-Shek to do any fighting against Japan at all, was a more
difficult job than even the invasion of Normandy. At least Eisenhower had
unimpaired command of all armies and supply operations he needed to go
into battle.



On Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:06:09 -0700 "Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies
List" <gcfl-discuss at gcfl.net> writes:
Ummmm, Robert E. Lee was the greatest general the United States had in
ANY war.
Jeanene
 
----- Original Message ----- 


Hello everyone. I'm bored. Would anyone like to discuss
 
"Benedict Arnold was the greatest general the United States had in the
Revolutionary War"
 
???
 
Siarlys
 
P.S. If you don't like that one, Jeanene can throw out another question.
 
P.P.S. If you do like that one, read up on Kenneth Roberts's historical
novels, especially Rabble In Arms.
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