However, your second point actually supports my view that Lee in fact had big problems, because in "winning" the battles that he won by taking such huge casualties, he was losing the war. And we aren't even counting Ft. Donelson's surrender (11,000) or Vicksburg's surrender (20,000) which weren't Lee's, but they were all part of the strategic plan that Lee at least helped to craft. My criticism of Lee is that the "aggressive defense"---which I certainly admit was dreamed up mostly in Davis's office because the Confed. simply couldn't afford to pull a Soviet-style "territory-for-position" retreat---was a loser.
First, Lee was responsible for the Army of Northern Virginia, and can hardly be blamed for southern defeats elsewhere.
Second, Lee fought his part of the war the way Lee wanted to fight it -- sometimes over objections from Davis & others in the Confederate government. Indeed, at their conference in May 1863, where Lee proposed to go north to Pennsylvania, others wanted him to dig in behind fortifications while sending part his army out west to help at Vicksburg.
Some posters here have even suggested Lee was wrong and the others right, and that Lee's "aggressive defense" was the wrong strategy for the South.
Be that as it may, I don't agree, but my point is: Lee's "aggressive defense" strategy was HIS strategy, not someone else's, and Lee continued it until near the very end, when his forces were too weak to do anything but dig in around Petersbug.
Here's the bottom line: no matter how brilliant Lee & other southern generals were, or how gallant their troops, the South was doomed to lose in the long run. Unless... unless they could somehow early-on convince the North it would never defeat them, and so must negotiate a compromise settlement.
The possibility of doing so ended with the loss of Vicksburg, and in Lee's defeat at Gettysburg, in the summer of 1863. So, Gettysburg was, to quote my trusty source, the South's "Last Chance for Victory."