Saturday, January 26, 2013

It is all Lee's fault

In the simplistic tv-movie-of-the-week view of the American Civil War, in THIS corner there was superb, gentleman-solider Robert E. Lee.  In the other corner was brutal, never met a frontal assault he didn't like, butcher and drunkard, U.S. Grant.  Lee lost, Grant won, because Lee was crushed under the brutal frontal assaults of US Grant, southern gentlemen buried under a mountain of blue-coated dead.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit; Robert E. Lee was not a good general.  He fiddle-fracked around on campaigns of no possible benefit, wasted the only resource he could not afford to waste - his manpower.  He was a fool, unable to adapt to the changing times.

Grant was a superb general.  Probably the best we've ever fielded.  He knew how to seize the main chance, was adaptable, and understood in his bones how to use the weapons that his country gave him to achieve tactical and strategic ends.
 
If there was justice in this world, those so-called Lost Cause ass-hats would never have gotten any traction, their warped view of that conflict would be as derided as Holocaust Denier thing.  High schools in Virginia would be named after Chamberlin, Grant, Sheridan, Hancock and not that pack of vain-glorious popinjays that styled themselves officers in the Confederate Army.

And 'States Rights' would not be identified with racists and yahoos with St. Andrews flag decals on their trucks.


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