WHY LEE LOST THE WAR

Modern liberals make much of the fact that Robert E. Lee "lost the war."  But the wonder is not that the war was lost.  The wonder is that it took the entire forces and strength of the United States 4 years to defeat one of the most brilliant commanders in the annals of war.

When the war began, the odds were overwhelming stacked against the South:

• The South had only one-fourth of the railroads in the nation.
• The South had one-third of the population.
• The South had no navy when the war began.
• The South had less than one-fourth of the nation's industry.

By 1865 when Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, his army could be described with the words, "No food, no horses, no shoes, few guns."  The 4 year war of attrition had taken its inevitable toll.  Lee was not defeated on the battlefield; he was defeated by overwhelming superior resources, such as number of soldiers, guns, shoes, food, money, industry, ships, trains--all replaceable.  Lees losses were not replaceable.  

When Lee faced Grant in the Wilderness Campaign, he was in a desperate defensive maneuver to hold the last rail line at Petersburg and to slow the Federal advance upon Richmond.  Many of his soldiers were barefoot and not all of them were armed. By the time the Army of Northern Virginia reached Appamattox in early Apri 1865, the Southern troops were starving, having been cut off from all supplies.

When I taught history, I tried to help my students understand Lee's untenable position by comparing it to a game that they all understood--the game of checkers:

Pretend you are in a checker game.  Your opponent doesn't know nearly as much about the game as you do.  You are by far a superior checker player.  You can counter any move your opponent makes and can defeat him easily.  There is just one rule, however, which you need to note.  When you remove one of your opponent's checkers from the board, he can replace it any time and keep playing.  If you take your opponent's last checker off the board by a superior move, all he has to do is reach and put the checker back on the board and keep playing.  However, you are not allowed to replace your checkers.  When yours are gone, they are gone for good.  The game will go on a very long time because you can out think, out wit and out maneuver your opponent.  But eventually, given enough time, he will defeat you because you have only 12 checkers and your opponent has an infinite number of checkers.  No matter how good you are as a checker player, you are doomed to run out of resources eventually and lose.  Therefore, it is not a matter of who the best player is.  It is a matter of having a limited number of resources.  Such was the case with Lee.

Lee outmaneuvered his opponents, out fought them, ran many of them out of command (Hooker, McClellan, Burnside, Sherman, etc.), and defeated armies twice his size on numerous occasions.  He would have won the war except for one thing:  attrition.  Lee could not replace his losses over time.  He could inflict more damage on a superior number of the enemy than he himself suffered; however, he would also suffer losses and those losses were not replaceable. 

So there is little honor in bragging that Lee was whipped.  That it took 4 years for the mightiest power on the planet to defeat him is a monument to his military genus.

ROBERT E. LEE - BEFORE PROGRESSIVE RE-EDUCATION

 “Lee was the noblest American who had ever lived and one of the greatest commanders known to the annals of war.”   --Sir Winston Churchill

 

Remember Churchill?  75 years ago, when freedom was being threatened by the evil of Nazism, it was Churchill who first led the lonely fight to save Europe. Churchill, at the time, and for decades after, was the most respected statesman in the free world.  I suppose that now Churchill must be thought of as a racist, or an idiot, or a bigot--because his opinion of Lee was so awe-inspiring.  But Churchill was not alone, back before the radicals changed our worldview and rewrote history.

After Lee's death, a Northern newspaper wrote of him:  "We have long since ceased to look upon him as the Confederate leader, but have claimed him as one of ourselves; have cherished and felt proud of his military genius; have recounted and recorded his triumphs as our own; have extolled his virtue as reflecting upon us—for Robert Edward Lee was an American, and the great nation which gave him birth would be today unworthy of such a son if she regarded him lightly".

Robert E. Lee opposed Slavery, and had freed the slaves he inherited from his Wife's estate long before the war. One of them, William Mac Lee, chose to stand by Robert E. Lee's side throughout the war, serving as his cook and confidant. This former slave and friend described Lee with these words, "I was raised by one of the greatest men in the world. There was never one born of a woman greater than Gen. Robert E. Lee".

The following prayer by Robert E. Lee is contained in the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, MO.  It was memorized by Truman as a young man and President Truman is said to have prayed it throughout his entire life:

"Help me to be, to think, to act what is right because it is right; make me truthful, honest, and honorable in all things; make me intellectually honest for the sake of right and honor and without thought of reward to me."

In the post-modern, progressive rush to condemn Lee (something traditional history never did) - the liberals have deserted all of the values that Lee held dear, and lived by.  It is not one man, or even one ideology that they condemn--it is an entire value system, one which apparently belongs to the past but has no part of the present or future.  Or so the liberals would wish.