Lee and His Army in Confederate History / Edition 1

by Gary W. Gallagher

Overview

Was Robert E. Lee a gifted soldier whose only weaknesses lay in the depth of his loyalty to his troops, affection for his lieutenants, and dedication to the cause of the Confederacy? Or was he an ineffective leader and poor tactician whose reputation was drastically inflated by early biographers and Lost Cause apologists? These divergent characterizations represent the poles between which scholarly and popular opinion on Lee has swung over time. Now, in eight essays, Gary Gallagher offers his own refined thinking on Lee, exploring the relationship between Lee's operations and Confederate morale, the quality of his generalship, and the question of how best to handle his legacy in light of the many distortions that grew out of Lost Cause historiography.

Using a host of contemporary sources, Gallagher demonstrates the remarkable faith that soldiers and citizens maintained in Lee's leadership even after his army's fortunes had begun to erode. Gallagher also engages aspects of the Lee myth with an eye toward how admirers have insisted that their hero's faults as a general represented exaggerations of his personal virtues. Finally, Gallagher considers whether it is useful—or desirable—to separate legitimate Lost Cause arguments from the transparently false ones relating to slavery and secession.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807857694
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	08/07/2006
Series:	Civil War America
Edition description:	1
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.70(d)
Lexile:	1510L (what's this?)

About the Author

Gary W. Gallagher is John L. Nau III Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He has written or edited two dozen books in the field of Civil War history, including The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864 and Stephen Dodson Ramseur: Lee's Gallant General (both from the University of North Carolina Press).

Read an Excerpt

Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia have engaged my interest for nearly forty years. As a young person drawn to the Civil War, I read Douglas Southall Freeman's R. E. Lee: A Biography and Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command. Freeman's works, together with many of the participants' accounts to which his footnotes led me, created a sense that Lee and his army held center stage in the Confederate drama. Indeed, the military conflict in Virginia seemed synonymous with the Civil War as a whole, and Lee emerged as a fabulously gifted soldier whose only weaknesses—including excessive amiability with lieutenants—represented outgrowths of his personal virtues. Subsequent exposure to studies by Thomas L. Connelly and other revisionist historians tested my early reading of Confederate military affairs. These scholars emphasized the importance of the Western Theater and averred that Lost Cause writers such as Jubal A. Early had distorted the record by vastly inflating Lee's abilities and wartime stature.

My own research over the years indicated that Freeman might have been closer to the mark than many of those who insisted Lee and his army had been overrated. Various kinds of Confederate testimony bespoke a national focus on Lee and his operations. Considerable evidence also supported the Lost Cause idea that superior northern numbers and resources played a fundamental role in the Confederate defeat. That Lost Cause warriors sometimes argued from positions of strength not only helps explain why their writings have been tenaciously influential but also raises an important concern. Can we accept part of what Lost Cause authors said about Lee and his army without also lending a measure of authority to their denial of slavery's centrality to secession and the Confederacy, their romantic portrayal of a united white South battling to the end, and their blatant distortions regarding other aspects of the war?

The essays in this collection explore the relationship between Lee's operations and Confederate national morale, the quality and nature of his generalship, and the thorny problem of how best to handle Lost Cause writings about the Army of Northern Virginia and its commander. The four essays in Part I grew out of a belief that most historians of the Civil War, whether pursuing military or nonmilitary topics, have accorded surprisingly little attention to the ways in which Confederates in uniform and behind the lines reacted to Lee's famous campaigns. Hindsight tells us one thing, but the contemporary record often reveals something very different. I offer four case studies to gauge the impact, at the time, of Lee's activities. I selected three battles that seem uncomplicated in this respect: Antietam and Gettysburg, a pair of defeats that ended Lee's two invasions of the North, and Fredericksburg, an apparently unequivocal victory. For my fourth topic, I canvassed sentiment in the winter and spring of 1864, a period typically portrayed as a time of waning will in the Confederacy.

I based my findings almost entirely on letters, diaries, newspapers, and other wartime sources—as distinct from postwar accounts informed by full knowledge of how the war unfolded. I drew on the writings of more than 300 witnesses, among them soldiers and male and female civilians. Although I tried to find evidence from a broad spectrum of society representing various geographical regions, my sample was not scientifically constructed. My conclusions thus should be considered suggestive rather than definitive.

Having offered that caveat, I will say that Confederates often responded differently to news from the battlefront than we have come to assume. They relied on fragmentary accounts from relatives and friends in the army, often inaccurate reporting in newspapers, and rumors spread behind the lines. Most did not see either Antietam or Gettysburg as a military disaster; a number expressed some unhappiness with the outcome of Fredericksburg; and many exhibited a tenacious belief in ultimate victory during the winter and spring of 1864. The essays in Part I collectively accentuate the importance of relying on evidence from the time, rather than reading backward with all we know about the war's outcome, to fathom the complexity of attitudes and morale at specific times. They also underscore a remarkable faith among soldiers and the citizenry in Lee and the prowess of his army. Well before he and his troops marched toward Pennsylvania in June 1863, the Confederate people looked to them as the nation's best hope for winning independence. That conception of Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia in turn cushioned reaction to Gettysburg and fed optimism in early 1864.

Other historians have reached conclusions quite different from mine. Knowing eventual defeat awaited the Confederacy, many scholars have taken their cue from Union opinions about military operations. Northern soldiers and civilians in September 1862 and July 1863 typically considered Antietam and Gettysburg successes (although some demurred from the prevailing views), which lends credence to the argument that these battles marked major mileposts along the road to Appomattox. Similarly, northerners manifested a strong expectation that Ulysses S. Grant would achieve success against Lee as the spring campaigning season approached in 1864.

How can we account for strikingly divergent Confederate and Union reactions to the same events? Were white southerners engaged in self-delusion? Did they proclaim false optimism in a desperate effort to maintain national resolve in the face of an obviously failing struggle for independence? Some newspapers friendly to the Davis administration undoubtedly tailored their editorials and coverage of events to boost morale. Just as surely, some Confederates wrote letters to relatives designed to buck up spirits. But I believe it is a mistake not to accept roughly at face value a good part of the written record. The notions that participants often failed to record their true opinions and that we, at a distance of more than a century and a third, can detect what they really thought strike me as highly problematical. Northerners and Confederates simply perceived some events differently and responded accordingly.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Essay Credits

Part I. Lee's Campaigns
The Net Result of the Campaign Was in Our Favor: Confederate Reaction to the 1862 Maryland Campaign
The Yanks Have Had a Terrible Whipping: Confederates Evaluate the Battle of Fredericksburg
Lee's Army Has Not Lost Any of Its Prestige: The Impact of Gettysburg on the Army of Northern Virginia and the Confederate Home Front
Our Hearts Are Full of Hope: The Army of Northern Virginia and the Confederacy in the Spring of 1864

Part II. Lee as a Confederate General
An Old-Fashioned Soldier in a Modern War?: Lee's Confederate Generalship
I Have to Make the Best of What I Have: Lee at Spotsylvania
Fighting the Battles of Second Fredericksburg and Salem Church: Lee and Jubal A. Early at Chancellorsville

Part III. Lee and His Army in the Lost Cause
Shaping Public Memory of the Civil War: Robert E. Lee, Jubal A. Early, and Douglas Southall Freeman

Index

Author Biography: Gary W. Gallagher is John L. Nau III Professor of History at the University of Virginia. His previous books include The Confederate War and Lee and His Generals in War and Memory.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

This paperback reprint of one of his collections of essays provides another welcome look at Gallagher's perspectives on compelling aspects of Confederate historiography.—Military History of the West



Gallagher demonstrates in his latest book that he is, without question, the foremost historian of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia today. . . . Gallagher has proven adept at standing established scholarship on its head and posing important new questions that are bound to revise our understanding of the American Civil War.—Journal of Military History



Better than any other historian of the Confederacy, Gallagher understands the importance of . . . contingent turning points that eventually made it possible for superior numbers and resources to prevail. He understands as well that the Confederate story cannot be written except in counterpoint with the Union story.—New York Review of Books



Distinguished by the compelling prose, command of relevant primary and secondary sources, and superb insights Civil War enthusiasts have come to expect from Gallagher, these essays deserve wide readership. . . . By bringing them together under a single cover Gallagher and the University of North Carolina Press have performed a valuable service for current and future students of Lee and the Lost Cause.—Civil War News



Gallagher [is] one of the best of a new generation of Civil War scholars. . . . Gallagher's work, both in Lee and His Army and elsewhere. . . sets a high standard for the history profession.—Civil War Book Review



This book is a distillation of years of thought and research by a skillful and respected historian. Its interpretations are thought provoking and solidly grounded in primary research. . . . Not only valuable to professional historians but accessible to the casual reader as well. This book informs and surprises, and all the while it is a pleasure to read. . . . Gallagher has reinforced his position as one of the nation's leading Civil War historians.—Florida Historical Quarterly



Gary Gallagher's Lee and His Army in Confederate History is a wonderful blend of traditional and the 'new' military history, a balance from the perspective of high command, the soldiers, the home front, and their collective memory. By anyone's standards, this is a terrific book.—Joseph T. Glatthaar, University of Houston



Drawing on massive primary evidence, Gallagher has limned attitudes toward Lee and his army from a wide spectrum of Confederate society. The result is a formidable, definitive delineation of the subject. This book punctures the notional and otiose premise that postwar Southerners created an image of Lee that had not existed during the conflict.—Robert K. Krick, author of Lee's Colonels and Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain



In these essays Gary Gallagher once again demonstrates the mastery of sources, elegance of style, and lucidity of explanation and interpretation that have made him the foremost historian of the Army of Northern Virginia. The reasons for the morale and esprit that made this army such a feared fighting force are set forth more clearly here than anywhere else.—James M. McPherson, Princeton University

Editorial Reviews

"This paperback reprint of one of his collections of essays provides another welcome look at Gallagher's perspectives on compelling aspects of Confederate historiography."
-- "Military History of the West"

"A very valuable work."
- "Nymas Review"

"A very valuable work."
-- "Nymas Review"

"Gallagher's work, both in "Lee and His Army" and elsewhere. . . sets a high standard for the history profession.

"Civil War Book Review""

A stimulating and thought-provoking book.

"Journal of Southern History"

Gallagher and the University of North Carolina Press have performed a valuable service for current and future students of Lee and the Lost Cause.

"Civil War News"

Gallagher demonstrates in his latest book that he is . . . the foremost historian of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia today.

"Journal of Military History"

Gallagher has reinforced his position as one of the nation's leading Civil War historians.

"Florida Historical Quarterly"

In these essays Gary Gallagher once again demonstrates the mastery of sources, elegance of style, and lucidity of explanation and interpretation that have made him the foremost historian of the Army of Northern Virginia. (James M. McPherson, Princeton University)

From the Publisher

A wonderful blend of traditional and the 'new' military history, a balance from the perspective of high command, the soldiers, the home front, and their collective memory. By anyone's standards, this is a terrific book.

Joseph T. Glatthaar

Drawing on massive primary evidence, Gallagher has limned attitudes toward Lee and his army from a wide spectrum of Confederate society. The result is a formidable, definitive delineation of the subject.

Robert K. Krick

In these essays Gary Gallagher once again demonstrates the mastery of sources, elegance of style, and lucidity of explanation and interpretation that have made him the foremost historian of the Army of Northern Virginia.

James M. McPherson

Better than any other historian of the Confederacy,Gallagher understands the importance of . . . contingent turning points that eventually made it possible for superior numbers and resources to prevail. He understands as well that the Confederate story cannot be written except in counterpoint with the Union story.

New York Review of Books