Lee The Matchless Hero

"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions."
--James Madison
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A venerated American hero, General Lee’s abilities are legendary and even his adversaries would praise him. General Granville Dodge of the Northern military said that Lee’s “unfailing equipoise and sturdy courage prolonged the life of the Confederacy from month to month [and a] dispassionate judgment places Robert E. Lee among the greatest generals of modern times.”

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
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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…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 North Carolina in the War Between the States, Volume II, Bethel to Sharpsburg,
Daniel Harvey Hill, Edwards & Broughton, 1926, pp. 91-92)
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Lee The Matchless Hero

Turning The Trick To Save The Territorial Union

Obsessed with the destruction of the more perfect American Union to the South, and after McClellan’s (105,000 men) crushing defeat by Lee (80,000 men), Lincoln withheld news of military disasters while snookering governors into raising more troops for his army of conquest. To satisfy Lincoln’s endless demands for troops, Seward scoured Europe for mercenaries, Northern governors counted captured slaves from the South against their quotas, and bounties from cities, counties and States put many men in blue who would not otherwise fight.

Regarding McClellan’s defeat at Gaines’s Mill, the Comte de Paris related that “Far from letting the people know what was taking place around Richmond, the Secretary of War…gave out that the Army of the Potomac had undertaken a strategic movement which would result in the capture of Richmond.”

Bernhard Thuersam, Director

Cape Fear Historical Institute

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Turning the Trick to Save the Territorial Union:

“The defeat of General [George] McClellan’s right wing at Gaines’s Mill [June 1862] was a shock to President Lincoln and his cabinet, who were daily anticipating the capture of the Confederate capital. It was hard for them to realize that the expensively equipped Grand Army, on which their hopes and expectations of swiftly ending the war were fixed, had turned its back on Richmond.

President Lincoln, on further weighing McClellan’s despondent telegram, felt assured that the Peninsula campaign was about to end in failure and that a new levy of troops would be necessary. Yet, while he wanted volunteers badly, he was, as he says in a carefully prepared letter to Secretary [William] Seward, fearful that “a general panic and stampede would follow” if he “publicly appealed to the country for this new force”; for the desperate strait of the Federal army on the Peninsula was being withheld from the people. How otherwise than by direct call, queries Bancroft [Life of Seward], “could a hundred thousand new soldiers be obtained? Seward was a master of political strategy, and Lincoln was no novice. Here is the device: it was principally Seward’s.”

Seward, taking with him Lincoln’s letter just mentioned and an equally adroit letter to the governors of Northern States, hurried to New York and other cities for personal and telegraphic conferences with such governors and other men of influence as could meet them. During these conferences Seward so shaped matters that the responsibility for a new levy was seemingly shifted from the President and assumed by the governors of the several States. To give the appearance of reality to the transaction he formulated a petition for the loyal governors to sign.

The petition recites: “The undersigned, governors of the states of the union, impressed with the belief that the citizens of the states which they respectfully represent are of one accord in the hearty desire that the recent successes of the Federal arms may be followed up…that you at once call on the several states for such equal numbers of me …as may in your judgment be necessary to garrison and hold all the numerous cities and military positions that have been captured by our armies and to speedily crush the rebellion.”

To this uniquely contrived petition, the President graciously replied: “Fully concurring in the wisdom of the views expressed to me in so patriotic a manner by you…I have decided to call into the service an additional force of three hundred thousand men.” When the correspondence, “purporting to be the voluntary request of eighteen governors to the President,” was published on July 2, the people were still ignorant of McClellan’s discomfiture.

When they learned that the army had been driven to Harrison’s Landing, the trick had been turned. “The alarm and anger of the North,” adds Bancroft, “were great, but the prospects of having large reinforcements saved the administration from serious embarrassments.” Under this call 421,465 men were secured. To stimulate volunteering Secretary Stanton agreed, at Seward’s request, to go beyond his lawful authority and advance $25 out of the $100 bounty promised to each recruit.”

(The History of North Carolina in the War Between the States, Volume II, Bethel to Sharpsburg, Daniel Harvey Hill, Edwards & Broughton, 1926, pp. 128-130)

The Other Greatest Generation

Civil war (Sic) veteran soldier footage, captured between 1913 and 1938.