But if she secedes (though I do not believe in secession as a constitutional right, nor that there is sufficient cause for revolution), then I will follow my native State with my sword, and, if need be, with my life.”. that is not filled with nauseating flatteries” of Lee, from which “it would seem . No. “No,” he said, “the enemy is there, and I am going to attack him there.”. On Friday, President Trump called Lee “a great general” while defending his comments after the violence in Charlottesville in 2017. General Robert E Lee, born 1807, was an American general who commanded the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Was Lee an honorable man? Take a look, when Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appamatox, Coldest Case Solved but the Murderer Can’t Be Found, How the Father of Computers Died For Being a Homosexual, A 17th Century Entrepreneurial “She-Merchant” and Shipowner in America. As the Army of Northern Virginia was breaking camp in all deliberate speed for the withdrawal, Lee’s staff ran around anxiously crying, “Where is the hen?” Lee himself found her nestled in her accustomed spot on the wagon that transported his personal matériel. Robert was 11. Pickett’s troops advanced with precision, closed up the gaps that withering fire tore into their smartly dressed ranks, and at close quarters fought tooth and nail. That’s plain from their articles of secession. For all his audacity on the battlefield, he accepted rather passively one raw deal after another, bending over backward for everyone from Jefferson Davis to James McNeill Whistler’s mother. It has been estimated that 10,500 Johnny Rebs made the charge and 5,675—roughly 54 percent—fell dead or wounded. For many, that is all that they need to know. Lee didn’t know that in the night Meade had managed by forced marches to concentrate nearly his entire army at Lee’s front, and had deployed it skillfully—his left flank was now extended to Little Round Top, nearly three-quarters of a mile south of where Lee thought it was. Give a Gift. He decided to strike straight ahead, at Meade’s heavily fortified midsection. California Do Not Sell My Info Although he served capably in the Mexican American War (and as superintendent of West Point, as well as the leader of the US Army expedition to capture John Brown), his performance in the US Civil War showed him to be a fully rounded, dynamic battlefield commander. “There was a general rush of the small crowd to shake hands with him. On April 9, 1865, Lee finally had to admit that he was trapped. Thomas Morris Chester, the only black correspondent for a major daily newspaper (the Philadelphia Press) during the war, had nothing but scorn for the Confederacy, and referred to Lee as a “notorious rebel.” But when Chester witnessed Lee’s arrival in shattered, burned-out Richmond after the surrender, his dispatch sounded a more sympathetic note. From the 4th season Dukes of Hazzard episode "Goodbye General Lee," original airdate Dec 4, 1981. “The whole affair was disjointed,” Taylor the aide said of Gettysburg. Conservative writer David French wrote in light of the Kelly affair that sometimes honorable men fight dishonorable causes: I agree with General Kelly on his core point. Lee, whose devotion to white supremacy outshone his loyalty to his country, is the embodiment of everything they stand for. Lee's prewar family home, the Custis-Lee Mansion, was seized by Union forces during the war and turned into Arlington National Cemetery, and his family was not compensated until more than a decade after his death. He did not see right and wrong in tones of gray, and yet his moralizing could generate a fog, as in a letter from the front to his invalid wife: “You must endeavour to enjoy the pleasure of doing good. Most important, by April 1865 he no longer spoke of the Confederacy as “we” or “our country.” Now he spoke as a U.S. citizen, thereby forging the path to a reunited country. He may have had dysentery, though a scholar’s widely publicized assertion to that effect rests on tenuous evidence. To be sure, there were those in Lee’s army who proposed continuing the struggle as guerrillas or by reorganizing under the governors of the various Confederate states. The disgruntled Longstreet, never one to rush into anything, and confused to find the left flank farther left than expected, didn’t begin his assault until 3:30 that afternoon. This is the real, complex, often ugly, untold truth of Robert E. Lee. Now, I think Lee is not an honorable man, but I do think he was a good man. As a member of General Winfield Scott's staff, Lee distinguished himself, earning three brevets for gallantry, and emerging from the conflict with the rank of colonel. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. Perhaps it broke many years before the war. I believe … As battlefield generals go, he could be extremely fiery, and could go out of his way to be kind. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages.” But he goes on: “I think it however a greater evil to the white than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. What about racial equality after the war? The Dukes of Hazzard is an American action-comedy television series that was aired on CBS from January 26, 1979, to February 8, 1985. In the months after Gettysburg, as Lee stewed over his defeat, he repeatedly criticized the laxness of Stuart’s command, deeply hurting a man who prided himself on the sort of dashing freelance effectiveness by which Lee’s father, Maj. Gen. Light-Horse Harry, had defined himself. One is the question of what to do of statues of Confederate leaders and because White House Chief of Staff John Kelly made remarks that said that Lee was an honorable man. Terms of Use He was 56 and bone weary. When the usually repressed Lee felt an overpowering need for emotional release, and had an army at his disposal and another one in front of him, he couldn’t hold back. At Gettysburg he was jittery, snappish. Lincoln was assassinated five days later. His usually cheerful detachment patently covered solemn depths, depths faintly lit by glints of previous and potential rejection of self and others. Tribe and race over country is … That is all that makes life valuable.” All right. In either case, after crossing the river, you must move on and feel the right of Ewell’s troops, collecting information, provisions, etc.” But he had not, in fact, been able to judge: he met several hindrances in the form of Union troops, a swollen river that he and his men managed only heroically to cross, and 150 Federal wagons that he captured before he crossed the river. The only way to get inside Lee, perhaps, is by edging fractally around the record of his life to find spots where he comes through; by holding up next to him some of the fully realized characters—Grant, Jackson, Stuart, Light-Horse Harry Lee, John Brown—with whom he interacted; and by subjecting to contemporary skepticism certain concepts—honor, “gradual emancipation,” divine will—upon which he unreflectively founded his identity. “If Virginia stands by the old Union,” Lee told a friend, “so will I. A Virginia convention that had voted 2 to 1 against secession, now voted 2 to 1 in favor. (Once, Dwight Eisenhower, who admired Lee’s generalship, took Field Marshal Montgomery to visit the Gettysburg battlefield. Someone counted 15 bodies on a patch of ground less than five feet wide and three feet long. As an African American descended from slaves, I’ve always had an ambiguous relationship with the leader of the Confederate Army. It was nearly 30 years ago, that my parents and I went to Washington, DC. He only wanted a Virginia farm—no end of cream and fresh butter—and fried chicken. Has any one heard of a stonewall tank? --Southern Partisan Walter Taylor was "first to last the closest" of all staff officers to General Robert E. Lee, and his intimate relationship with his commander gives Taylor's writings signal importance in any study of Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. For these men, the Civil War was just the ticket. A resident of New York City and western Massachusetts, he traces his interest in Lee to his boyhood in Georgia. So Lee was forced to improvise. After Gettysburg, Lee never mounted another murderous head-on assault. |. He was in his element gossiping with belles about their beaux at balls. Cookie Policy TOO BAD!”. In 1818, after five years away, Harry headed home to die, but got only as far as Cumberland Island, Georgia, where he was buried. But then he adds: “When I measure my own by that standard I am filled with confusion and despair.”. Officers’ hearts went out to him across the latitude he granted them to be willingly, creatively honorable. To be a good soldier, you must love the army. He and his second wife, Ann Hill Carter Lee, and their children departed the Lee ancestral home, where Robert was born, for a smaller rented house in Alexandria. Neither a citizen of the Union he once loved nor of the Confederacy that ceased to exist, Lee publicly rejected the idea of a guerrilla struggle. The Union seized the property after he went to war and it became the place we know today. Acouple of hundred Confederates did break the Union line, but only briefly. . The days of July 1-3, 1863, still stand among the most horrific and formative in American history. When the Duke boys lose a cross country race to a better car, a discouraged Luke makes an offhanded remark about the General Lee possibly wearing out its usefulness. Eisenhower said, “The man [Lee] must have got so mad that he wanted to hit that guy [Meade] with a brick.”). . Robert appears to have been too fine for his childhood, for his education, for his profession, for his marriage, and for the Confederacy. After midnight, he told a cavalry officer, “I never saw troops behave more magnificently than Pickett’s division of Virginians. He supported the enslavement of African Americans. A tank was named after him. . “It’s all my fault,” he assured stunned privates and corporals. True False Previous Next → No new data to save last checked at 1:30pm Submit Quiz “You know she is like her papa, always wanting something,” he wrote about one of his daughters. Adam Serwer’s take on Lee charges that Lee that most historians know never existed. But there are other parts to Lee’s life. With the war nearly over, however, Harry decided he was underappreciated, so he impulsively resigned from the army. During the postbellum century, when Americans North and South decided to embrace R. E. Lee as a national as well as a Southern hero, he was generally described as antislavery. It all seemed Olympian, in a Christian cavalier sort of way. Not one fried chicken or two—but unlimited fried chicken.” Just before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, one of his nephews found him in the field, “very grave and tired,” carrying around a fried chicken leg wrapped in a piece of bread, which a Virginia countrywoman had pressed upon him but for which he couldn’t muster any hunger. Life goes on. Tribe and race over country is the core of white nationalism, and racists can embrace Lee in good conscience. That flag has landed the General Lee in hot water before. I plunged back into it for this book, and am relieved to have emerged alive.”, “Also,” he says, “Lee reminds me in some ways of my father.”, At the heart of Lee’s story is one of the monumental choices in American history: revered for his honor, Lee resigned his U.S. Army commission to defend Virginia and fight for the Confederacy, on the side of slavery. On the other hand, Lee beat McClellan. Not according to him. No. Was he an honorable man? True patriotism sometimes requires of men to act exactly contrary, at one period, to that which it does at another, and the motive which impels them—the desire to do right—is precisely the same. He betrayed his country. In this regard, Lee showed himself to be a very good general. The General Lee Lyrics: I'm a charger / That charges through the night / Like an orange bolt of lightning / Passing everything in sight / I'm the best pal the Duke boys' ever had / I'm thunder on the To efface the squalor and horror of the war, we have the image of Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves, and we have the image of Robert E. Lee’s gracious surrender. That no doubt suited the Confederate fighting man, who didn’t take kindly to being told what to do—but Lee’s only weakness as a commander, his otherwise reverent nephew Fitzhugh Lee would write, was his “reluctance to oppose the wishes of others, or to order them to do anything that would be disagreeable and to which they would not consent.” With men as well as with women, his authority derived from his sightliness, politeness, and unimpeachability. President Gerald Ford signed a bill in 1975 granting Lee full citizenship and a pardon, something he didn’t receive after the war’s end. Lee, however, has come down in history as too fine for the bloodbath of 1861-65. So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that Slavery is abolished. Lee cut off any such talk. Lee didn’t think much of Grant as a general, saying that McClellan was the superior foe. . He did have rheumatism and heart trouble. Before Gettysburg, Lee had seemed not only to read the minds of Union generals but almost to expect his subordinates to read his. The Lost Cause ideology imagines Lee as a gifted military general who wasn’t fighting for slavery but was fighting for state’s rights. And wrong. The General Lee (sometimes referred to as simply "the General") is an orange 1969 Dodge Charger driven in the television series The Dukes of Hazzard by the Duke boys, Bo and Luke, along with cousins Coy and Vance (in season 5). Rebellion in western Pennsylvania but almost to expect his imprudence to be.. 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