There Goes Robert E Lee by Caldwell

Ref: Christopher Caldwell (2021). There Goes Robert E. Lee; His Eclipse in American Life. Claremont Review of Books. Retrieved from:  There Goes Robert E. Lee - Claremont Review of Books

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Summary­

  • An article describing the importance of, and the contributions by General Robert E. Lee to US History in response to the present generation’s radicalization around race ideologies.

  • Robert E. Lee the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, the greatest military strategist of the Civil War, the moral leader of the rebel Confederacy, and a paragon of certain gentlemanly virtues that people across the defeated South claimed (and claim) for their own.

  • Winston Churchill was drawing when he described the American Civil War as “the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass-conflicts of which until then there was record.” Churchill is not using the adjective “noble” in the sense we do, as a synonym for “ethical.” He is implying that the resolution of the Civil War was a matter of heroism and greatness.

  • The war was indeed fought between two sections that had each tolerated slavery to varying degrees, and finally faced an irreconcilable difference over whether any part of that institution could be tolerated. But there has been a shift in our understanding of what this means. Whereas earlier Americans understood slavery primarily as a problem of liberty, today’s Americans understand it primarily as a problem of race.


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US Civil War

  • In some respects, the (Civil) war resembled those of certain colonial populations taking up arms against the British empire. The South never managed to manufacture guns, artillery, or gunpowder. It could not even manufacture blankets. Nor could it import those things, since the Union had a Navy and the Confederacy did not. The South was blockaded, and once Ulysses S. Grant’s troops had secured the Mississippi, the blockade was hermetic. At the end of the war, the South was using the same muskets it had in the beginning, with a range of 50 yards or so, while certain Northern units had new rifles with a range of 400 to 500 yards.

  • It was on Scott’s urging that President Lincoln offer Lee command of the army that he was mustering to invade the South after the firing on Fort Sumter. Lee, then 54, refused, and resigned from the army to follow the course of the state of Virginia (which had voted against secession but now appeared likely to reconsider).

  • Ulysses S. Grant opposed the prosecution (of Lee) “vehemently,” in Reeves’s description, as breaching the agreement by which he had ended the war, and warned Johnson he would resign his commission if Lee were arrested.

  • Charles Francis Adams, Jr., described Appomattox as “the most creditable episode in all American history.” He was correct, and in the century and a half since no episode has arisen to surpass it. At its center is the encounter between the two warriors, the victorious Grant and the vanquished Lee, the lack of arrogance or enmity on either side, in fact the outright patriotic tenderness in both men, beginning with Grant’s first letter to Lee, which reads in its entirety: “The results of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle. I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood, by asking of you the surrender of that portion of the Confederate States army known as the Army of Northern Virginia. And then Lee arriving at the McLean farmhouse in his dress uniform the following afternoon, carrying George Washington’s sword, to surrender his army and renounce its cause.”

  • Lee cannot be offered a different role in the story of the Civil War without altering the meaning of what Grant did, what Appomattox meant, what the Civil War settled, and what the United States stands for.


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Misc Quotes

  • “Robert E. Lee was one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen.”-FDR.

  • “General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation…selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.”-Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  • “Hold on with a bulldog grip and chew and choke as much as possible.”-Lincoln to Grant at Petersburg.

  • “In the course of 3.5 years, the resistance of the Confederacy was crushed, its cause lost, and every interest and principle that had been invoked in its behalf abandoned for ever.”-Spenser Wilkinson, British Military Historian.

  • Dwight Eisenhower, who considered Lee one of the four greatest Americans and hung his portrait in the Oval Office alongside those of the other three (Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Lincoln).

  • Whether they were erected in that spirit or not, Confederate statues, road names, and ceremonies today betoken the settlement of the constitutional and moral question from which the Civil War arose—not the reopening of it.

  • “In essence, (my) motivations had been neither here nor there. That was my view: that the act of Virginia, in withdrawing herself from the United States, carried me along as a citizen of Virginia, and that her laws and her acts were binding on me.”-Lee when questioned on his motivations and allegiance by a Senate committee after the war.

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Chronology

  • 1975: POTUS Gerald Ford signs legislation posthumously restoring all Robert E. Lee’s citizenship rights following a unanimous Senate vote and a house vote of 407-10.-Lee by Caldwell.

  • Christmas, 1868: US General Robert E. Lee is pardoned under a general amnesty.-Lee by Caldwell.

  • Oct, 1865: Robert E. Lee signs an oath of allegiance to the USA (at the bequest of Grant), however the vindictive Johnson apparently pockets it (it was discovered in the 1970s.-Lee by Caldwell.

  • Spring, 1865: Grant breaks Lee’s resistance at Petersburg and traps the fleeing Lee at Appomattox, forcing Lee’s surrender, and effectively ending the US Civil War.-Lee by Caldwell.

  • Summer, 1864- Spring, 1865: The Siege of Petersburg; Grant sieges Lee’s forces at Petersburg.-Lee by Caldwell.

  • Summer, 1862: US Northern General George McClellan crosses the Potomac with 120K men, a force roughly twice that of Lee’s, bringing it to within earshot of Richmond. Until D-Day, it would stand as the largest amphibious invasion in the history of warfare.-Lee by Caldwell.

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