150 years later people are finally starting to speak the truth:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Said truth is that Lee was not in fact a saintly angel with anachronistic  views on race or a gloriously skilled general overwhelmed by Marshal Zhukov's overwhelming damned radical horde er-that is to say the Army of the Potomac commanded by Ulysses S. Grant.

He was also a traitor. Educated at West Point, Lee served with distinction during the Mexican War, but when offered the command of the Union Army shortly after the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, he declined and accepted a leadership role in the Confederate Army instead. A man who never questioned the values of his class, one reason Lee took up the sword for the eventual losing side was because he believed in the “pure, Christian, white commonwealth” the Confederacy was meant to become — a commonwealth in which poor whites and enslaved blacks played secondary roles.

http://www.miller-mccune.com/media/robert-e-lee-without-the-halo-26412/-the above text in italics is from this article. One of the most pernicious myths of the Lost Cause has been that Lee was not merely different from the other Southern generals in his social views, which the above reminds people was never the case, but also that he was the greatest single general of the war.

These days books have come along that point out that this, too, is just a just-so story Southerners told themselves to feel better about being whipped by Lincoln's "greasy mechanics".

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1016079.Uncertain_Glory

http://www.bevinalexander.com/books/robert-e-lees-civil-war.htm-I might note I also find it heavily amusing given the Contemporary Right-Wing's obssession with a tendency to remove all vestiges of losing from society as it is that they claim Lee, whose strategy ultimately caused the Confederacy's defeat by his tendency to attack headlong into superior numbers over and over again led to the surrender of the Confederacy and the end of the Southern dream of a society whose "cornerstone is that the Negro is the inferior to the white man," the "great moral truth" that Jefferson got wrong. What was referred to in the other post, the lies about Confederate black soldiers, is negationism/falsification of the historical record.

This is the purely academic sense of revisionism, where the consensus tales change due to the historians' sources also changing. And after 150 years the United States should be mature enough to accept that Lee was the architect of costly Pyrrhic victories but it prefers to demonize the general who captured three Confederate armies, Lee's the last, won three major strategic victories, and bottled Lee in Petersburg after eight weeks after three years of trying by five other generals to do that same exact thing instead. However, the difference is that this is based on actual events, not on Stalinizing photographs to make the past be what we want it to be, as opposed to what it actually was.

Comments

[404.livejournal.com]

I might note I also find it heavily amusing given the Contemporary Right-Wing's obssession with a tendency to remove all vestiges of losing from society

[Citation Needed]

No doubt all of these comments are secretly plots of Soros due to his brain-frying laser beams:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

http://sickupandfed.com/index.php/2009/03/liberals-hate-capitalism/

http://i-hate-liberals.com/why-do-liberals-love-weak-people-and-hate-the-strong-people/.htm

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread554851/pg1

http://www.stonemarmot.com/rantrave/rantscap.html

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/comments/1168

http://www.usmessageboard.com/economy/47390-why-do-liberals-hate-the-free-market.html

http://i-hate-liberals.com/why-do-liberals-hate-bankers-so-much/.htm

Re: No doubt all of these comments are secretly plots of Soros due to his brain-frying laser beams:

[404.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, the link dump defense. Isn't it a liberal idea that everyone should get a prize for playing, not a conservative one?

As I remember it the Conservative idea:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Is that playing is for sissies. Real men cheat.

Re: As I remember it the Conservative idea:

[404.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you know that cheating goes across party and ideological lines. Just could't resist a cheap jab.

Re: No doubt all of these comments are secretly plots of Soros due to his brain-frying laser beams:

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Let me guess. You typed 'liberals hate capitalism' on Google and then pressed Search.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Actually I typed "why do liberals hate winners" into Google and pressed search. Is that a bad thing, now?

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

It's a commendable thing.

[reality-hammer.livejournal.com]

Keep revising that history until you feel comfortable with it!

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Far be it from you to refute facts with counter-facts. Do tell me how anything of Lee's record starting with Malvern Hill on to the second day of the Wilderness showed him capable of learning the military equivalent of tying his shoes. Do explain to me why the only two times he tried to take the war to the supposedly inferior US barbarians he got drubbed badly both of them. Do explain to me also why it is that after five generals tried and failed Grant bottled him up at Petersburg in all of eight weeks.

If Lee is indeed some kind of genius he would have won the war in a short timespan. Instead he lost it over a long one and had no ability to command anything bigger than a division.

[montanaisaleg.livejournal.com]

If Lee is indeed some kind of genius he would have won the war in a short timespan.
That's a big simplification. Even a genius can only do so much when faced with a numerically superior, better-equipped enemy. Lee's reputation could definitely do with some down-to-earthening, but there's much more to his successes and failures than his own genius (or lack of it).

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Numbers mean bupkiss in modern war. After all in World War I the Germans had the biggest, best-equipped army in the war and they lost utterly and completely. Lee, had he listened a time or two to both Jackson and Longstreet could easily have guaranteed the Yankees would be required to attack him at a place and timing of his own choosing. Instead like Grant WRT Spotsylvania he let Stuart do WTFever he wanted to do with uniformly negative consequences.

It would also have really helped Lee's army if the man had bothered to give a clear order once in a while. Even with good subordinate generals (when that category included more than Longstreet) that didn't work very well. By the end of the war, against a general of at minimum equal quality like Grant that made him hurt to the point he was crippled for the rest of the war as far as contributing to the Confederate war effort was concerned.

Unfortunately for Lee, Lee was a splendid defensive general but he never came to understand headlong charges into defensive works were a bad idea. Grant did that once and learned his lesson and never did that again. Lee did that at Malvern Hill, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Chancellorsville.....it only worked once, at Chancellorsville, and that was because Joe Hooker was too addled to fight a battle but not addled enough to be removed from command.

[montanaisaleg.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately for Lee, Lee was a splendid defensive general but he never came to understand headlong charges into defensive works were a bad idea.
This is pretty much my opinion of him. He did great on defense and much less so on offense, though on defense he was blessed in that he commanded an army whose soldiers were defending their own homes.

Numbers mean bupkiss in modern war.
You exaggerate, especially considering that 1860s armies were pre-mechanized and somewhat unwieldy. Heck, even in 1941 one of the big reasons Germany didn't march into Moscow was that the Russians could absorb unexpectedly large numbers of casualties. Numbers mean far less today than they did 50 years ago, and meant less in 1865 than they did in earlier wars, but when your primary mode of transport is the feet of soldiers and horses, and your primary weapon is a muzzle-loaded rifle, a large disparity in numbers is going to matter. Not as much as it would if the armies were shooting arrows and swinging swords at each other, but you can't just say "numbers mean bupkiss."

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Your analysis of warfare is so simplistic that one wonders if you're learning history from comic books.

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

Leave it to you to defend the hero of the Confederacy.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

South Postpones Rising Again For Yet Another Year (http://www.theonion.com/articles/south-postpones-rising-again-for-yet-another-year,377/)

"The way things stand, things in the Deep South almost have to get better. Otherwise, the people who live there will devolve into preverbal, overall-wearing sub-morons within a century," said Professor Dennis Lassiter of Princeton University. "Either Southerners will start improving themselves, or they'll be sold to middle-class Asians as pets."

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It's scary how many Onion articles are coming true as of late.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Isn't that Britanny's first husband? If it is, his recent photos are rather tragic.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is Kevin Federline, in his hysterically funny Super Bowl commercial a few years ago. Anyone who can make fun of themselves this way earns a sort of respect from me.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

He was still a better general than I am.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying he was General Failure, I'm simply saying he was not a Mary Tzu.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

"Mary Tzu"

I think that was the most witty thing I've ever heard you say.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That's the greatest complement I've received all year.

[kgbman.livejournal.com]

it prefers to demonize the general who captured three Confederate armies

Who demonizes Grant?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The people responsible for this version of historical falsification: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy. The way they tell the Civil War gives it an eerie resemblance to the Guderian-Manstein history of the Axis-Soviet War, where the superior armies of the Master Race were ground under bodies thrown by incompetent bumblers. If the Lee of history was half of what the one of the Lost Cause was, he would have drubbed McClellan at Glendale and gone on to win another victory in Maryland, and the war's over.