Kindly General Lee

 

While surfing the internet today, I was directed to a 'recommended link' from The Atlantic debunking the 'canard' of Robert E. Lee as a gentlemanly soldier and talented tactician.  Of course there was not an opportunity to comment on the article, and I always suspect foul play when a publication thus shies away from adverse opinions.  The author of the piece, Adam Serwer, suggests that Lee was a poor tactician, else why would he fight a conventional war against an industrial behemoth?  And 'gentleman'?  What sort of gentleman would own slaves?  According to The Atlantic, the war was all about slavery and Lee was responsible for hundreds of thousands dead or maimed.  No wonder they don't allow comments!

I warrant the vast majority of Americans today actually do believe the Civil War was 'all about slavery'.  Why wouldn't they?  It's what they've been taught in every American History class since they were six.  It's not true that slavery had nothing to do with the war, but to say it was the entire, or even the primary, cause of the war is provable nonsense.  The easiest proof of that can be found in the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Civil War started, we're told, on April 12th, 1861 when South Carolinian troops shelled federal troops occupying Fort Sumter.  The Emancipation Proclamation was issued January 1st, 1863.  Now, that's odd, isn't it?  The war was 'all about slavery' but Lincoln waited over 20 months after the war started before making the empty gesture of declaring free those slaves then in territory the Union had no control over.  Further, slaves in Pennsylvania and New York weren't covered by that proclamation because Pennsylvania and New York were not 'in rebellion'.  How strange that those slaves would continue as slaves when the whole conflict was 'all about slavery'!

At the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Union was getting its clock cleaned by someone who was, according to The Atlantic, not very good at warfare.  Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a sop to the abolitionists who, up until that time, didn't see much reason to enlist.  Afterwards, the war was 'a war to free the slaves' and abolitionists signed up in droves, filling the Union ranks.  That's where we get the idea that it was 'all about slavery'.

Lee could have fought a guerrilla war, and it would have been ghastly.  It also would have ended the United States as it was then seen.  Lincoln had already shown himself ready to trash the Constitution in the name of increasing federal power.  Federal troops occupied and shut down Northern newspapers whose editorial position opposed the war.  First amendment?  What First amendment are you talking about?

Lincoln couldn't, of course, shut down foreign newspapers, and the view from across the pond is enlightening.  Virtually every European newspaper of the day thought the cause of the U.S. Civil War was 'tariff and trade policy', not 'slavery'.  The U.S. heavily tariffed manufactured imported cotton goods.  The South produced cotton as its major crop, sold it to whomever would pay the going price, and that cotton would become shirts and other white goods in the mills of England, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, but the products arriving from Europe were exorbitantly priced due to the added tax.  Eventually, Europe stopped buying cotton from America because they weren't selling any product there, switched to Egyptian cotton, and left the South with only one place to sell their output: the North.  The North, now with no competition for the South's cotton, could squeeze the South on price.  It wasn't slavery that caused the Civil War, it was economics.  The South was getting screwed by the North, and everyone (especially in Europe) knew it.

So, why would Lee prosecute a conventional war with the North?  The South's attitude and expectations were likely a major factor.  Lee felt that if the South resisted assimilation, the North would eventually tire of it and just go away.  The South, it should be noted, didn't want to conquer the North; they just wanted to be left alone.  It was the North that wanted to conquer the South.  The U.S. Civil War thus isn't really 'a civil war' because there were not two factions fighting for control of the whole.  The South just wanted its independence and would have been content to leave the North in peace — and not have to fund a federal government that was already bloating.

At one point, a reporter is said to have asked Lincoln directly: "Why not just let them go?", and Lincoln's reply was: "Then who would pay for the government?"  Lincoln surely knew the 'civil war' was not about slavery.  It was about control, and he meant to have it no matter how many Americans had to die to get it for him.

After the war, Lee and Lord Acton (J. E. E. Dalberg, "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely") kept up a lively correspondence over the course of several years.  The letters back-and-forth are currently available in print.  Acton expressed his belief that the South had the better moral position(!!) in the conflict.  In one letter, Lee casually, almost off-handedly, remarks that had he known how Reconstruction was going to be implemented, he would have dispersed his army into the wilderness to fight on as best they could ('guerrilla warfare') and he would have surrendered only himself to Grant at Appomattox.

We should all be grateful that Lee was such a poor tactician that he did not do that, for had he done so, we would today be seeing roughly what we see with our troops in the Middle East: 4-to-6 deaths a day.

Every day.

For 155 years.