Robert Edward Lee
Robert Edward Lee(January 19, 1807 – October 12, 1870) was a career U.S. Army officer and the most celebrated general of the Confederate forces during the American Civil War. Lee at first opposed the Confederacy and nearly accepted a major Union command, but when his home state of Virginia seceded he chose to join with his family and neighbors and fight for Virginia. His first major command came in June 1862 when he took over the Confederacy's premier combat force, the Army of Northern Virginia, with responsibility for defending Richmond.
Lee's greatest victories were in the Seven Days Battles and at Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, but he suffered reverses in his two invasions of the North. Narrowly escaping defeat at the Antietam in 1862 Lee was forced to return to Virginia. He was decisively defeated at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, with his escape routes cut off by flooded rivers. Because of a desultory chase by General George Meade, Lee escaped to Virginia. There was little further action in 1863, but in spring 1864 the new Union commander, Ulysses S. Grant began a massive war of attrition with multiple battles designed to wear away Lee's army. In the Overland Campaign of 1864 and the Siege of Petersburg in 1864–65, Lee inflicted massive casualties on a foe superior in terms of men and matériel, but was unable to replace his losses and his army crumbled away. Lee was forced into defensive trenches and had no resources to mount a significant offensive. Vastly outnumbered in spring 1865 Lee was forced to flee but was soon surrounded. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, marked the end of the war. His victories against numerically superior forces won him enduring fame as an astute and audacious battlefield tactician, but his strategic decisions—such as invading the North in 1862 and 1863 and neglecting the Mississippi Valley—have generally been criticized by military historians.
In 1865, as manpower reserves drained away, Lee promoted a plan to arm slaves to fight for the Confederacy (and free them); the first black Confederate combat units were in training as the war ended, though one unit is known to have fought during the retreat from Richmond in April 1865. He blocked dissenters from starting a guerrilla campaign to continue the war after his surrender at Appomattox.
After the war, as a college president, Lee supported President Andrew Johnson's program of Reconstruction and inter-sectional friendship, while opposing the Radical Republican proposals to give newly freed slaves the vote and take the vote away from ex-Confederates. He urged reconciliation between the North and South, and the reintegration of former Confederates into the nation's political life. Lee became the great Southern hero of the war, and as his popularity grew in the North as well after 1880. He remains an iconic figure of American history.
His Legacy
Among white Southerners, Lee came to be even more revered after his surrender than he had been during the war (when Stonewall Jackson had been the great Confederate hero.) Admirers pointed to his character and devotion to duty, not to mention his brilliant tactical successes in battle after battle against a stronger foe. Military historians continue to pay attention to his battlefield tactics and maneuvering, though many think he should have designed better strategic plans for the Confederacy. His reputation continued to build and by 1900 his cult had spread into the North, signaling a national apotheosis.
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