Re: the revisionists. The amazing thing is that in a low and cynical age that breeds revisionists (some needed) at every turn, the debunkers have never laid a finger on Lee. Sure, one can second guess this or that tactical decision, and he made some mistakes, though fewer than his fair share, but I herewith list below every single discreditable thing that historians have discovered about the man’s character and personal behavior:
And if you try really hard to accentuate the negative, there is:
Washington is in this class as well, but Lee earned his pedestal.
Actually, a couple of Southerners have reconsidered Lee's Civil War career and thoughtfully, and with supporting data, identified a couple of lacunae in Lee's thinking (which is more time-consuming than finding eminences in the thinking of his contemporaries) and respectfully reported them and shown how they led the South to disaster in the one campaign that really mattered, that could have won the war for the South, which was the 1864 campaign, when Lincoln's war, and Lincoln himself, were up for reconsideration by the Northern mobs that had been mobilized and incited by the Abolitionists' and the War Party's propaganda between 1830 and 1860.
But after the marble cast by the losing generals has been chipped away, and all the Northern and socialist hate-propaganda; after all the mistakes have been accounted for and impulses parsed out and weighed, there still remains the matter of Lee's character, which still looms above its critics, detractors, and competitors like the Front Range of the Rockies. And that is Greenberg's point.
Actually, the revisionists are the lost cause losers.
They pretended for years that Lee never owned slaves.
Eventually his will was found, and it was revealed that he did. he was another slave owner, fighting to further the institution of slavery.