re: #33 Quoth the raven, Covfefe.

It was only recently that I came to the realization that Lee wasn’t the immense strategic genius that the whitewashed history books make him out to be. He gets talked up so much because he was winning, but his opponents up until Grant were borderline incompetent. The Lost Cause authors gave him a reputation that I feel is undeserved, but it sticks around because we can’t disparage this noble, honorable warrior general.

He was widely hated in his duties earlier in the war, where he made the dashing cavaliers in the western forts dig entrenchments, which was no kind of a job for heroes such as themselves—“The King of Spades”, he was known as.

As developed later by Longstreet in particular, field fortifications like that—reaching full flower in WWI—were the main Confederate contribution to the art of war. Nobody wants to talk about that, though.