Reneging on your oath as an officer in order to not piss off your social set back home is hardly an honorable decision.
Care to name ONE military action that occured during the first "6 months" of the war, where General Robert Lee held any significant authority?
Lee was offered the command of the Union armies. If he had command of the Army of the Potomac early on in the war, with its massive advantage in resources and manpower, the early days of the war would have gone very, very differently. Lee would not have dickered for months like McLellan, but would have driven on Richomond and probably have taken it in short order.
I wonder what people would say about an Iraqi-American general who, at the beginning of the build-up in 2003 resigned his commission in the US Army and went back to Iraq to take command of its forces.