http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/369781427

Robert E. Lee

According to Winston Churchill, Robert E. Lee was one of the noblest Americans who ever lived. He inspired an exhausted and out-numbered army to achieve greatness on the battlefield. He was a brilliant strategist and a man of unyielding courage who, in the face of insurmountable odds, nearly changed forever the course of American history. In early 1861, President Abraham Lincoln invited Robert E. Lee to take command of the entire Union Army. Against his better judgement, Lee declined because his home state of Virginia was seceding from the Union. Lee's initially served as a senior military adviser to President Jefferson Davis. His first field command for the Confederate States came in June 1862 after the wounding of General Joseph E. Johnston at Seven Pines, following which he took charge of the Confederate forces in the Virginia, which he renamed the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee's greatest victories were the Seven Days Battles, the Second Battle of Bull Run, the Battle of Fredericksburg, in 1862, and the battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. However, both of his attempts to invade the North ended in failure. Barely escaping defeat at the battle of Antietam in 1862, he was forced to return to the South. In early July 1863, he was decisively defeated at the battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. His insistence on the full frontal assault of Pickett's division on Union positions on Cemetery Ridge on the third day of that battle was his greatest failure. It was only due to ineffectual pursuit by Major-General George Meade, commander of Union forces, that he managed to escape south again. In the spring of 1864, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, the new Union commander, began a series of campaigns to wear down Lee's army in order to at last capture the Confederate capital. In the Overland Campaign of 1864 and the Siege of Petersburg in 1864-65, Lee inflicted heavy casualties on Grant's larger army, but was unable to replace his own losses. In early April 1865, Lee's depleted forces were finally ousted from their entrenchments around Richmond, Virginia, and he began a strategic retreat. Lee's subsequent surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, represented the loss of only one of the remaining Confederate field armies, but it was a psychological blow from which the South would never recover. By June 1865, all of the remaining Confederate armies in North Carolina and Texas had capitulated. Lee's victories against superior forces won him enduring fame as a skillful and daring battlefield tactician, but some of his strategic decisions, such as the invasion of the North in 1862 and 1863, have been criticized by many historians. After the war, as a college president, Lee supported President Andrew Johnson's program of Reconstruction and inter-sectional friendship. Lee became the great Southern hero of the war, and his popularity grew in the North as well after his death in 1870.

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