North Carolina’s Legal Holiday Observes Lee’s Birthday January 19th
Lee the Matchless American Hero:
Lee the Matchless American Hero:
In discussing Pompey’s greatness on the field of battle, Cicero, a master of ordered thought, asserts that four qualities are united in supreme military chieftains. These, as he thinks, are Military knowledge, Valor, Authority and Good fortune. No soldiers will long fight whole-heartedly for an unlucky chief.
Did Lee possess these traits? Knowledge? How otherwise, with an army necessarily diminishing, did he compel President Lincoln to try McClellan, Halleck, Pope, Burnside, Hooker, Meade, Grant in an effort to match him in the field, and this, too, when these capable officers excelled him in every material equipment of war?
Valor? It is needed only to recall how, with McClellan still lying at the doors of Richmond, Lee sent off Jackson to jar Pope’s complacency and then followed himself with the larger part of his army to complete Jackson’s task, or how, when fighting in the ratio of only two to five, he divided his army at Chancellorsville and overthrew the self-sufficient Hooker. The last quality mentioned by Cicero, good fortune, is a relative term. Although Lee was fought to a standstill at Sharpsburg, and baffled at Gettysburg, the admiration, even veneration, of his soldiers was undiminished. They still believed that, while circumstances might prove too much for him, no skill of an antagonist would ever surpass his battlefield strategy.
Such was the chieftain the North Carolina troops, in common with the soldiers of the South, were henceforth to follow until Appomattox came. Bomb-proof critics might assail him with shallow criticisms, but the “hardiest troops that ever laughed at hunger, cold or danger,” never wavered in their conviction that their leader was matchless.”
(The History of the War Between the States, Volume II, Bethel to Sharpsburg, Daniel H. Hill, Edwards & Broughton, 1926, pp. 91-92)
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