Leave it to Lee-Jackson Day to bring out the crazies. According to Henry Kidd, Robert E. Lee saved this country by agreeing to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox rather than disband it to fight in a guerrilla war that would have turned this country into something like Bosnia. Perhaps I am mistaken, but wouldn’t a Confederate victory also have led to the fracturing of the United States? So much for Lincoln, Grant, and the Union army playing a role in saving this nation. At some point I was hoping to see the interviewer bust out in uncontrollable laughter in response to such a ridiculous statement. That we live in a society that grants any legitimacy to such a position is all the reason I need to continue to teach.
Robert E. Lee: The Last Best Hope of Earth
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If Lee had not surrendered at Appromatox, all the men under his command would have been killed, with justification, and as the guerrillas sought to hide behind their women’s skirts, they would have mad their women and children into targets. Lee didn’t give up. He was beaten.
I remember Lee as a rapists, as a torturer, as a kidnapper. His father was a swindler and a thief.
That’s a rather narrow view.
Most Northern politicians in Washington saw Lincoln as man who wore shirts with sweat stains in the armpits and they called him the baboon at the end of Pennsylvania Ave, This from the book Facts and Falsehoods Concerning the War in the South 1861-1865. published in 1899.
Apparently Mr. Kidd’s historical novel on the Crater <a href="http://www.henrykiddart.com/novel.htm"includes Silas Chandler. That’s interesting.
Fortunately, I didn’t see Silas in his print of the Crater: http://www.henrykiddart.com/images/RTCWm.jpg