re: #293 dangerman

one of the responses:

whether he was a ‘hero’ at all, that was just until he became a traitor

he was NOT one of the greatest generals we ever had

as he was on the wrong side, ‘we’ didn’t have him. ‘they’ had him

morans

And frankly, he wasn’t that great a general. Manpower was a precious scarce resource for the Confederacy; in the 1860 Census, there were only about 1.1 million white males between 15-40 in the states that would secede, about a quarter of the number in the free states. And Lee repeatedly launched attacks that cost him huge numbers of men; his 1862 invasion of Maryland was a bloody disaster he barely escaped from after Antietam, and Pickett’s Charge was an utter disaster Lee insisted on attempting.