The Historian and the General: Thomas L. Connelly versus Robert E. Lee

THE HISTORIAN AND THE GENERAL: Thomas L. Connelly versus Robert E. Lee Albert Castel The June 1969 issue of Civil War History contains an article by Thomas L. Connelly entitled "Robert E. Lee and the Western Confederacy : A Criticism of Lee's Strategic Ability." In it Connelly, the author of an ongoing study of the Confederate Army of Tennessee,1 contends (among other things) that Lee is overrated both as a man and a soldier, that his selfish preoccupation with Virginia was an important factor in causing the Confederacy to devote a disproportionate share of its limited military resources to the East at the expense of the strategically more important West, and that his ill-conceived and wasteful offensives hastened Confederate defeat if in fact they did not cause it. Connelly concludes with the assertion that "one ponders whether the South may not have fared better had it possessed no Robert E. Lee."2 It is at once apparent that Connelly set out to do a job on Bobby Lee. Now there is nothing wrong with this as such. Scholars should be critical , reassessments are always in order, and Lee need not be regarded as some sort of sacrosanct saint on horseback. Personally I find it instructive to compare him with some of those German generals of World War II, such as Von Manstein, who by all accounts possessed admirable characters, but who gave their military talents to the service of an evil cause—in their case Naziism, in Lee's case slavery.3 And being myself a native of Kansas and having studied somewhat the South's struggle in the West, I can understand Connelly's resentment against what he terms "the colonial status of the western Confederate army in both Civil War writing and thinking."4 Nevertheless I find that most of Connelly's criticisms of Lee are either unfounded, excessive, or pointless. Furthermore I regard his article in general as constituting an example of a type of pseudohistory that has always existed, but which in recent times seems to be flourishing. It is a 1 Thomas L. Connelly, Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 18611862 (Baton Rouge, 1967). 2 Thomas L. Connelly, "Robert E. Lee and the Western Confederacy: A Criticism of Lee's Strategic Ability," Civil War History, XV (June, 1969), 132. 3 To be sure, Lee in his own mind was fighting for his country. But the same was true of Hitìer's generals. * Connelly, "Lee and the Western Confederacy," 116. 50 type most notoriously represented by such works as Charles C. Tansill's Backdoor to War and D. F. Fleming's The Cold War and Its Origins.^ In them the authors, like Connelly in his article, disparage previous writers on their subject as being biased, guilty of superficial research and analysis, and as being members of some ill-defined scholarly establishment with a vested interest in perpetuating an historical myth. Also they, like Connelly, ignore obvious and fundamental truths while marshaling a massive array of carefully selected and one-sided data, all impressively buttressed by footnotes, in order to "prove" that the orthodox view is false and their own supposedly original interpretation is true. Thus Tansill "proves" that Roosevelt, and not the Japanese government , "got us into" World War II, and Fleming "proves" that Truman , and not Stalin, is mainly to blame for the Cold War. Similarly, Connelly "proves" that Lee was a poor strategist who hurt more than he helped the Confederate cause. Connelly begins his indictment of Lee by stating that in spite of the "morass" of biographies and monographs written about him, no Civil War figure "stands in greater need of re-evaluation than Lee," who on "at least three major counts, personality, field success and strategy . . . may have been the beneficiary of special pleading." With respect to the first count, Connelly suggests that Lee's awesome personal reputation may be undeserved, that perhaps it is really the product of the adulatory postwar writings of his former generals and staff officers, the South's need for a "symbol of suffering and resignation," and the "literary ability of Douglas Freeman."6 This is not without an element of truth...