Happy Sedition Surrender Day

Lee should have been hanged as a traitor.

 

Somebody said "Winners get to write the history". After the Civil War the white people of the country reconciled in part by allowing the losers to write the history. So when I hear this outcry about Critical Race Theory I think about the tortured attempts to make Jefferson Davis a hero.

 

The whole Lost Cause movement makes me want to beat the shit out of someone.

 

If I had a time machine, I would go back to the end of the civil war and make sure all these f****** got hanged for their treasonous behavior.

 

I believe strongly in Lincoln's "Malice towards none; charity towards all" version of reconstruction, but it spawned 100 years of placating Southerners.

 

Along with Davis, the surviving members of the Confederate cabinet and Congress, and several other senior Confederate military leaders.

 

In the early aftermath of the Capitol assault in January when GOPers were saying that we needed to let trump and his allies not be held accountable in order to not tear the country apart, what you just wrote bounced around in my head. Basically, we let the traitors off with a light slap on the wrist in the name of reconciliation and promptly screwed over generations of minorities in the process.

 

I’m more angry about the Compromise of 1877 than any other action of this country.

Our original sin was heinous. But to throw away the blood and labor of generations, to undo the work of freeing a people for short political gain is even more unforgivable.

 

Lee's reputation as a general is so inflated by whom he faced for most of the war. Once he faced someone competent (and willing to throw away so many Union lives,) the end was near.

 

McClellan approached war like a 17-year old working the late shift at Taco Bell.

McClellan definitely would’ve turned off the sign at 1:46 a.m. and refused to answer the drive-up speaker.

 

Meh. Lee navigated the politics of Army command more successfully than most others on both sides.

And he did a good job of frequently steering the AoNVa in a way such that the AoP was compelled to attack. Being on the Strategic Offensive but the Tactical Defensive was a very good posture in the 1860s, when we were just trying to figure out how to fight wars World War I style.

I think Lee was very good. And I agree: Had the Union stumbled into a Grant-like commander earlier, the war would have been over sooner.

In thinking about the Overland Campaign, Antietam and Chancellorsville in particular AoP commanders were just too willing to throw their hands up in defeat and retreat.

Grant didn't win big in the Wilderness, but that he didn't say "Welp we didn't win the entire war today. Guess we gotta limp back across the Rappahannock" was a singular turning point in the war in the East.