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.
Agreed. One can criticize any number of Lee’s command decisions; he was a great commander, not a perfect one, and the south lost the war so one can always debate alternative courses of action. But when one turns to character, the debunkers have come up empty.
But...there still remains the matter of Lee’s character, which still looms above its critics... And that is Greenberg’s point.”
We should honor General Lee for this reason, if no other. What a remarkable man.
I suspect Lee's in for a lot of "debunking" -- a general who goes against the country he once swore allegiance to and makes the conflict much bloodier than it would otherwise have been -- especially after so many decades of reverence.
At least we should consider that there are two sides to the controversy. I'm not saying the Civil War is still going on, but we're not quite at the point where the English -- who can look back on Cavaliers and Roundheads and bless them both equally and without distinction -- are with their Civil War.