re: #301 Big Beautiful Door

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.

Not to mention a shortage of officers who were skilled and literate enough to issue and follow complex written orders.