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New book on Robert E. Lee - sounds interesting
The historian Allen C. Guelzo is a self-described Yankee partisan. In a dozen books on the Civil War and Reconstruction, he has portrayed the Union cause as a righteous enterprise. In the very first sentence of his newest work, he charges Robert E. Lee with treason. This is not a warm recounting of Lee’s life. Still, if Guelzo is critical of Lee, he does not withhold praise when the circumstances justify it. By the end of the book, Guelzo chooses not to pursue the case against Lee for his treasonous choice to make war on the United States.
While the tenor of “Robert E. Lee” is far from that of the 1935 Pulitzer Prize-winning four-volume paean to Lee written by the journalist Douglas Southall Freeman, it is also not a biographical takedown in the style of Thomas L. Connelly’s “The Marble Man” (1977). Nor is Guelzo’s work the evenhanded portrait offered by Emory Thomas in “Robert E. Lee: A Biography” (1995), the best Lee biography currently in print
https://extragoodshit.phlap.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Book-Review-%E2%80%98Robert-E.-Lee-by-Allen-C.-Guelzo.html
25 replies
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Very good writing. You must be like completely sober. 
I'm up to eight hours. 
leading to tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of additional deaths.
Lee was a traitor and enslaver and egomaniac.
The Traitor Robert E. Lee Finally Gets His Just Desserts
A gargantuan monument to the rebel general will come down in the capital of the Confederacy.
https://newrepublic.com/article/163557/bye-bye-robert-e-lee-richmond-statue
Last Thursday, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that a statue honouring one of the greatest traitors the U.S. has ever produced can, at long last, come down. The state of Virginia may now begin to disassemble the behemoth sculpture honouring Confederate general Robert E. Lee that resides on the city’s fabled Monument Avenue, on which statuary to Confederate luminaries (and much later, after considerable discord, homegrown Black tennis superstar Arthur Ashe) has long stood. While the timeline for the ultimate removal is yet to be determined, as Gov. Ralph Northam said upon the announcement of the court’s ruling: “Today it is clear—the largest Confederate monument in the South is coming down.”
The impending removal of Lee’s statue is hardly a panacea for ongoing racial strife in the U.S., not least after the past few years of a president who fractured race relations in unprecedented ways. It is, however, a chance to dismantle the hagiography surrounding a man who commanded troops to slaughter tens of thousands of American soldiers, all in pursuit of shattering the U.S. while expanding the enslavement of millions of Americans. It is a chance to finally place Lee among the pantheon of our nation’s most malignant enemies.
The Richmond statue to Lee—clocking in at six stories high, and some twelve tons in weight—isn’t simply the most prominent piece of Confederate remembrance still standing in the United States. When the statue was initially erected in 1890, in front of over a hundred thousand onlookers, it represented a clear turn in the burgeoning growth of Lost Cause mythologizing. As historian David Blight writes in Race and Reunion, “More than ghosts emerged from the Richmond unveiling of 1890; a new, more dynamic Lost Cause was thrown into bold relief as well.” With the unveiling of Lee’s statue, mewling protests about Northern aggression had given way to muscular Confederate memorialization—with national reconciliation, added Blight, now “dependent upon the dead leader of the cause that lost.” Gone were the days of faction and friction among white Americans, replaced by a white supremacist comity and Jim Crow regime built under the shadow of Lee’s new statue—a state of affairs that would last decades, entrenching an American apartheid of which Lee would have heartily approved.
It’s not as if Lee’s rank treason is any kind of secret. Lee may not have been as histrionic as some of the human enslavers leading state governments into the Confederacy, or as colourful as some of the other former American military officials who elected to lead the Confederacy’s white supremacist insurrection. In many ways, that distance remains part of Lee’s ongoing appeal. Bathed in alleged honour, clad in supposed chivalry, Lee, for decades, has stood as man more sinned against than sinning—a supposed titan of gentlemanly warfare swept against his will into the tempest of his times; the avatar of a willingness to stand in defence of one’s principles, however blinkered (and treasonous) they may be. As W.E.B. Du Bois once wrote, “It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees … will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral.” Du Bois is precisely correct. Rather than joining the hundreds of thousands of white Americans across the South who remained loyal to the U.S. during the Confederacy’s short-lived fratricide, Lee elected to join a traitorous band of effete, elite white Southerners bent on imploding the U.S., carving out new slavery territories across the American West and expanding chattel slavery as far as they could.
snip
A gargantuan monument to the rebel general will come down in the capital of the Confederacy.
https://newrepublic.com/article/163557/bye-bye-robert-e-lee-richmond-statue
Last Thursday, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that a statue honouring one of the greatest traitors the U.S. has ever produced can, at long last, come down. The state of Virginia may now begin to disassemble the behemoth sculpture honouring Confederate general Robert E. Lee that resides on the city’s fabled Monument Avenue, on which statuary to Confederate luminaries (and much later, after considerable discord, homegrown Black tennis superstar Arthur Ashe) has long stood. While the timeline for the ultimate removal is yet to be determined, as Gov. Ralph Northam said upon the announcement of the court’s ruling: “Today it is clear—the largest Confederate monument in the South is coming down.”
The impending removal of Lee’s statue is hardly a panacea for ongoing racial strife in the U.S., not least after the past few years of a president who fractured race relations in unprecedented ways. It is, however, a chance to dismantle the hagiography surrounding a man who commanded troops to slaughter tens of thousands of American soldiers, all in pursuit of shattering the U.S. while expanding the enslavement of millions of Americans. It is a chance to finally place Lee among the pantheon of our nation’s most malignant enemies.
The Richmond statue to Lee—clocking in at six stories high, and some twelve tons in weight—isn’t simply the most prominent piece of Confederate remembrance still standing in the United States. When the statue was initially erected in 1890, in front of over a hundred thousand onlookers, it represented a clear turn in the burgeoning growth of Lost Cause mythologizing. As historian David Blight writes in Race and Reunion, “More than ghosts emerged from the Richmond unveiling of 1890; a new, more dynamic Lost Cause was thrown into bold relief as well.” With the unveiling of Lee’s statue, mewling protests about Northern aggression had given way to muscular Confederate memorialization—with national reconciliation, added Blight, now “dependent upon the dead leader of the cause that lost.” Gone were the days of faction and friction among white Americans, replaced by a white supremacist comity and Jim Crow regime built under the shadow of Lee’s new statue—a state of affairs that would last decades, entrenching an American apartheid of which Lee would have heartily approved.
It’s not as if Lee’s rank treason is any kind of secret. Lee may not have been as histrionic as some of the human enslavers leading state governments into the Confederacy, or as colourful as some of the other former American military officials who elected to lead the Confederacy’s white supremacist insurrection. In many ways, that distance remains part of Lee’s ongoing appeal. Bathed in alleged honour, clad in supposed chivalry, Lee, for decades, has stood as man more sinned against than sinning—a supposed titan of gentlemanly warfare swept against his will into the tempest of his times; the avatar of a willingness to stand in defence of one’s principles, however blinkered (and treasonous) they may be. As W.E.B. Du Bois once wrote, “It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees … will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral.” Du Bois is precisely correct. Rather than joining the hundreds of thousands of white Americans across the South who remained loyal to the U.S. during the Confederacy’s short-lived fratricide, Lee elected to join a traitorous band of effete, elite white Southerners bent on imploding the U.S., carving out new slavery territories across the American West and expanding chattel slavery as far as they could.
Link to tweet
snip
"Lee's Charge" because it was totally his idea. 
:
I wonder who did the re-branding on that? The same Confederate apologists that started "The Lost Cause" mythology perhaps?
