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.

Disagree with that assessment of Lee: his contemporaries (FWIW) widely regarded him as an outstanding military leader (even given the paucity of really competent commanders - Blue or Grey - in the ACW to set the bar by), and historians have generally given him props for doing as good as he did with the handicaps he had to work with. Manpower issues were only one of them: the Confederates had a number of structural disadvantages (inferior manufacturing capability, a crappy transportation infrastructure, minimized export capability, etc.) - the amazing thing was thought to be that Lee was able to do as good as he did.
Of course, as you point out, his record wasn’t spotless - few Civil War generals’ were: but overall, it was fairly successful. Aside from the collapse-and-surrender part, that is….