Posted on 06/22/2018 11:46:12 AM PDT by DIRTYSECRET
That was according to my 8th grade history teacher-retired military. The only one who came close was MacArthur. That brings up the politics of the left. If it is true that Lee was a great General isn't it at least worth acknowledging? This tearing down of statues should stop. Educated persons should acknowledge the truth. It's the left that's the intelligent ones as they would have us believe. I see no conservatives standing up for this truth. The Senate GOP candidate in Virginia should start an 'intellectual' conversation on Lee and let the left react. Don't wait for a baiting reporter to to knee-jerk him into a quick response that they can interpret their own way.
Eisenhower never commanded an army in the field.
Understandable since it didn't belong to South Carolina.
The bombardment that ensued was to regain the island at the entrance to Charleston Harbor. There were no casualties during the bombardment and the only when the Union soldiers agreed to leave, that a cannon exploded prematurely when firing a salute to signal their evacuation.
So the fact that nobody was killed makes a day long bombardment that reduced the fort to rubble all OK?
High tariffs had nothing to do with the South wanting to leave the union according to Northern Historians.
According to Southern leaders of the period, based on their speeches and writings.
The South did not launch a large and bloody rebellion. They wanted to leave and were attacked to prevent them from going.
Sumter attacked Charleston? Who knew?
Maybe we should go a little easy on slave owning traitor generals from Virginia?
Right, George Washington's adopted son.
Lincoln was a SAVAGE who murdered the Sons of the Founders and broke the promise that was made to the SOUTHERN STATES that paved the way for the ratification of the US Constitution.
After 1865, all bets are off.
They had to bury the DICTATOR LINCOLN in a steel cage under 3 tons of concrete.
Wonder why.
A nice tactical maneuver in a little battle that didn’t make much difference in the outcome of the battle.
You agree with Gore Vidal who thought the union success in the war created an empire. Gore, despite himself, had southern sympathies and wrote brilliantly on Lincoln and the war. I recommend his essays and novels on the subject.
I think what bothers me on FR, though, is the exquisite pc-ness affected by some people here over the issue of slavery. They reduce the whole war to that one issue - which is obviously not correct. But it makes people feel so...exquisite.
Lee did what he needed to do to win. He took risks when he had to, as did Grant. He threw his soldiers against enemy positions when he had to, as did Grant. The men had more in common than most people realize.
Basis Lee's piety versus Grant's hard drinking (costing him rank in 1854), I would say a pure war of bloody attrition was not something Lee would do.
Piety and drinking have nothing to do with it. Lee would have done what he needed to in order to win. If you don't think so then you misjudge the man.
His campaign into PA was to get a decisive victory - getting France to recognize the South - and end the war.
That ship sailed the year before when Lee lost at Antietam and Lincoln announced his Emancipation Proclamation. There was no chance of European recognition following that.
When Jackson was wounded in his left arm (by his own troops) General Lee sent word through his minister to tell Jackson that, "though he had lost his left arm, He (Lee) had lost his right"
No not even close.
Lee was a butcher whose criminally incompetent offensive tactics, and absolute fixation on Virginia, cost the South any chance of winning.
Jackson ran a Sunday School for slaves where they learned scripture and nothing else. Far from being done in secret, Sunday Schools for slaves was common throughout the South and Jackson's school had the full knowledge and support of the church. Jackson did not teach slaves or freed blacks how to read. Jackson would never have done that to another man's property behind their back. His sense of right and wrong would not have permitted it.
He was not a General in the US Army.
Pretty simple answer to that question.
Ike was a really good manager. Nothing wrong with that. But, it is what it is.
Why would Lee encourage that? It's a serious question.
None the less, after the early southern successes the north was forced to shift their rhetoric to that of slavery AND EVENTUALLY DELIVER ABOLITION in order to stave off the snowballing desertion problem. Lincoln had to hold up a cause that soldiers (many of them conscripts) would die for. Neither economics nor preserving the union in spite of the Constitution provided that.
It is thus dishonest to attempt to claim either that the war hadn't become about slavery as far as the troops were concerned by the end of the war or to claim that this was a secondary matter. In fact , to claim the latter one would basically have to show that the North didn't need an army to fight the south.
So, in spite of my Scotch and Irish ancestry I am forced to submit that the Brits did the right thing on this issue in supporting the south contingent of enacting abolition as a prerequisite.
Actually about 40% of military officers from Virginia stayed loyal to the union and did not join a rebellion to establish a country based on slavery. Here is a list of other prominent southerners who stayed loyal to the Union. They should be lauded for making the right choice. Lee chose poorly.
John Minor Botts[9]
Thomas E. Bramlette[10]
Robert Jefferson Breckinridge[11]
William Gannaway Brownlow[12]
William Cannon[13]
William Crutchfield[14]
Thomas H. DuVal
Emerson Etheridge[15]
Andrew Jackson Hamilton[16]
Joshua Hill[17]
William Woods Holden[18]
Joseph Holt[19][20]
Sam Houston[21][22]
Fielding Hurst [23]
Andrew Johnson [24]
Newton Knight
David Farragut
William Hugh Smith
Francis Lieber[25]
Montgomery C. Meigs[26]
Isaac Murphy[27][28]
Thomas Amos Rogers Nelson[29]
James L. Petigru[30]
Francis Harrison Pierpont[31]
Joseph G. Sanders[26]
Winfield Scott[26]
James Speed and Joshua Fry Speed[32]
George Henry Thomas
Elizabeth Van Lew
James Madison Wells[26]
When I was in Junior High learning about the Civil War, the first time I heard the "anaconda plan" it made absolutely no sense to me. Weren't the vast majority of all the battles fought on land? How are you going to take the land with Navy ships? Don't you need an Army?
The South seemingly had enough guns and soldiers to put up quite a fight, so I wasn't getting the purpose of the blockade. What was it blockading that mattered to the armies fighting on the land?
Took me years to understand it's value, and now that I understand it, I realize that it was absolutely the most important thing that could have been done.
It stopped European countries from making a profit through their natural trade with the South. Without that blockade, European merchants and shipping would have made greatly increased profits over what they had been making with New York, and it would have given their governments incentive to interdict on the side of the South.
By stopping those profits, Lincoln kept the Europeans from having a reason to side with the South.
Once European trade had been normalized with the South, it would have been over for the North. Lincoln's wealthy backers in New York would have been seriously hurt if not bankrupted by the loss of all that trade.
The War was over that trade. It was over that economic shift which would have occurred if the South had been able to establish significant low tariff trade with Europe. Stopping that commercial trade was absolutely essential to winning the war.
The Confederacy was running out of white men to fill the ranks of the Confederate Army. It was a move of sheer desperation.
Amazing. None of your understanding is true.
Grant was on the offensive Lee on the defensive. Grant should lose 3-4 times as many troops. Lee’s tactics actually cost the South a greater portion of their troops then Grand did. Lee is the single greatest “butcher” of the war.
Grant the “hard drinking butcher” was a political myth manufactured after the war by political foes and mindlessly repeated by faux historians.
Grant’s Vicksburg campaign is the greatest military campaign on US Soil. Nothing Lee did came even close.
Grant forced the surrender of 3 Confederate armies. Nothing Lee did was even close to what Grant accomplished. Lee’s opponents handed Lee his victories
Sorry the historic fact upsets the romantic notions of American History the ignorant have absorbed at Grand pappies knee.
Good to see you again.
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