Posted on 10/13/2018 6:40:42 PM PDT by TBP
“So Robert E. Lee was a great general,” Trump told the audience. “And Abraham Lincoln developed a phobia.”
“He couldn’t beat Robert E. Lee,” he explained. “He was going crazy.”
“I don’t know if you know this story,” he continued. “But Robert E. Lee was winning battle after battle after battle.”
“And one day it was looking really bad and Lincoln just said you hardly knew his name,” he said, “and they said don’t take him he’s got a drinking people.”
“And Lincoln said I don’t care what problem he has, you guys aren’t winning,” Trump continued. “And his name was Grant, General Grant. And he went in and he knocked the hell out of everyone.”
But it was Mead who chose to stay there and fight, rather than fall back to the Pipe Creek position he had previously chosen.
Then it was a terrible calculation. Lee had already seen at Malvern Hill and Fredericksburg the results of an uphill massed charge over open ground against an entrenched enemy - annihilation. Longstreet saw it and did everything he could to change Lee's mind. "Sir, no 15 thousand men who ever took the field of battle could take that hill"
Lee was playing for Virginia. People were citizens of their states. It's more akin to calling the Brits "traitors" for leaving the EU.
You’re a student of history. Good analysis.
Not so. The South had the much better philosophical and legal position in the CW. Just not the power. 150 years of government school propaganda has erased that truth, but scholars know it.
What passed for legality, and political quorums during the Cw in the South could hardly be called exemplary.
“He was a very good Commander.”
What helped Lee to be a great commander was that he had as a subordinate perhaps the greatest tactical general the United States has ever produced: Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Lee lost Gettysburg because he fought that battle as if he still had Jackson, who had died just weeks before. Longstreet was no Jackson.
Please note that the UK isn't a separate entity from the E.U. Once you join you can't quit. Ever.
Meade arrived and could have ordered the army to fall back, but he didn’t. He chose to stand and fight there. Reportedly, he relied upon the Council of War of his general officers in making the decision, but still, the point remains that he could have decided differently. Of course, Meade’s decision making during and after the Battle of Gettysburg was questioned a lot both during and after the Civil War. He was an overly cautious commander, perhaps, but at the time of Gettysburg he had just been appointed to the top command and had not had time to become thoroughly familiar with his forces. I’d say he did pretty well for the situation he was thrust into suddenly..... it could have turned out much worse for the Union.
Lee regarded Virginia as his homeland and first loyalty. That is why he left his officer’s commission in the US Army, as one of the most impressive West Point graduates, to return to Virginia. We can say he should have looked at matters differently, but it is well established fact that he was “Virginia First” in his outlook.
I will never forget, or forgive, that it was Nikki Haley that started the movement to erase Civil War history.
I am not an expert on the Civil War.
My teachers taught me to abhor slavery, and I do.
As I have aged, I have found that there are many intricacies and subtleties that I was not taught in school.
What once seemed so clear to me can, at times, appear cloudy.
Nothing stirs up a good fight on Free Republic like a thread about The Civil War. I have seen voluminous arguments over a footnote in a book.
I am an old Soldier. I don’t study the Civil War as a historian or humanitarian.
I study it to learn military lessons.
That means that I must look at both sides in the fight to see what they militarily did right and wrong.
Lee’s first year in command of The Army Of Northern Virginia was very successful.
I still abhor slavery.
...and then someone has to come along and say stupid shit like what you just did.
You poor apologists for the democrat party of slavery, secession, and the KKK. The Confederacy and the democrat party lost. Get over it. Do you support the Constitution or do you cling to the lost democrat cause?
The b.s. rape, pillage, and burn crap was and is post-confederate democrat propaganda. Grant, along with Sherman, were warriors who overcame the political lies about alcoholism and insanity to win restore the Constitution. Is that what makes you so bitter? They restored the supremacy Constitution.
Lee was an honorable man and a great general who was given every bit of the respect he deserved from Grant. He resumed his life as an American citizen and urged all to put aside any enmity and be the best citizens they could be.
Some, unfortunately, to this day would rather be bitter democrats.
The philosophy of the South was the philosophy of the democrat party; period.
Lee urged everyone to come together as a nation under the Constitution after the war ended. Unfortunately, to this day some still hold to the philosophy of the democrat party.
Does “scorched earth” ring a bell. Or Shiloh. Fort Donalson maybe? Banning Jews ‘as a class’ from Illinois? Cold Harbor? Vicksburg siege? Petersburg siege? Families dragged from their homes in the middle of the night to become Ft. McHenry hostages? Kidnapping men fresh off the immigrant boat docks for conscription into the Union Army? Opposing the Texicans and the Mexican war that netted us California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas? Or Grant’s inability to follow orders, his disastrous management of POWs and equally disastrous reconstruction?
How about his drifting about until he was almost 40, living off his wife’s family, or his brothers’, and their connections to Washburne? Washburne, who somehow managed to get Grant promoted from ‘military aide’ to Colonel in less than 2 months, and Colonel to Brigadier General in the same amount of time? Quite the climb for a supply sgt who was in his cups more often than not - and that’s not a myth.
How about Sherman peacocking around bragging to any ear in DC he could turn about the terrible conditions he brought down upon women and children and the old - including slaves who had nowhere to go - left on the farm to starve - raided of all provisions, homes burned, livestock confiscated or killed and fields salted? Hardly a myth.
The North will only admit to 50,000 southern civilian deaths, but Grant really didn’t have any incentive to make an accurate count once he was in a position to, now did he? Political animal that he had become with the southern vote repressed.
Lee’s citizenship? He didn’t live as a ‘citizen,’ after the War. He died without his citizenship being restored. But he did live as he did before the War of Unjust Aggression - a man of honor trying to deal with Spanish, French and Northern slave-dumping and Northern opposition to compensation for, and mass deportation of, those slaves. At the same time in northern state after northern state laws were passed making it illegal for blacks to live up there, or the West for that matter, firmly locking slaves into the South but providing the South no recourse of its own.
Only the undeducated would make an association of the South as ‘you democrats’. The South had and has both republicans and democrats. The post-war tax collectors made no distinction between the two and neither did the carpetbaggers. The only thing that mattered was who was above the Mason-Dixon line and who was below. The North sucked in how it exploited and punished Confederates, black and white as second-class citizens - most of whom never owned a slave. Half of whom’s families settled the land to begin with. An attitude that obviously continues to this day, from some comments.
So, again, unless we’re discussing slave-holders, Grant doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same paragraph as Robert E. Lee.
The below link may be useful in understanding why, the Civil War is rightly called the War of Unjust Aggression. There were ways to end slavery just as there were ways to avoid seccession - war was the lamest choice:
http://slavenorth.com/
That’s quite the chip on your shoulder. Sounds painful.
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