Lee was overrated

Robert E. Lee is overrated as a general.  There, I said it. I'm not saying that Lee was a bad general, far from it. There's no doubt that Lee was a great general, one of the finest to take a Civil War army into the field, but to read many histories of the Civil War, you’d think that he was an infallible military genius who was a mix of Hannibal, Napoleon, and Patton, with a dash of Mars himself thrown in for good measure. It's this canonization with which I take issue.

I’ve been reading a lot of Civil War history books lately and Lee as a military genius is often assumed as a given.  He’s the immortal icon of the Lost Cause, the noble Virginian who led a proud and honorable defense of his homeland despite overwhelming odds against the foul and oppressive Union horde.  As the story goes, he won again and again with nothing more than a rag tag army of barefoot country boys facing off against the mighty Union military machine.  It certainly makes for a good story, as long as you don’t let the facts get in the way of a good yarn.

First, Lee’s opposing generals early in the war sucked.  They might have been the worst crew of generals that have ever led major armies on the winning side of a war.  Prior to Gettysburg, Lee faced McClellan, Pope, Burnside, and Hooker.  McClellan was afraid of his own shadow, Pope was so indecisive that it nearly got his entire army killed at Second Manassas, Burnside thought the attack at Fredericksburg was a good idea (across the  Rappahannock against the dug in Confederate troops on Marye’s Heights), and Hooker was more interested in self-promotion than in being a good officer.  It wasn’t until Meade that Lee faced an army with even a passably competent commander, and Meade was just okay (although you could argue that he was actually pretty good, but that's another another story for another day).  When the Union finally found a truly hard-charging commander in the form of Grant, Lee’s winning streak was over for good.

Second, Lee’s subordinate officers, particularly at the beginning of the war, were by and large much better officers than opposing Union subordinate officers.  From the corps commanders to the the division commanders down to the brigadiers and regimental officers, Confederate officers were much more skilled, had better training overall, and were far less political.  The vast majority of southern general officers were military school graduates.  The Union army’s officer corps was stuffed full of political appointees.  On the Confederate side, Lee could lean on Jackson, Longstreet, Stuart, Early, Hood, Ewell, and so on.  The Union got dunces like Dan Sickles, the political general who, without orders, marched III Corps out to the Peach Orchard and the Wheatfield, abandoning the Cemetery Ridge line and Little Round Top on the second day of Gettysburg, and came within a hair of losing the battle for the Union.  This advantage steadily wore down as the war went on, as Confederate officers were killed and Union political generals were sacked or forced into backwater commands.  Certainly by 1864, this particular advantage had largely evaporated, despite the emergence of a few new, solid Confederate generals like Mahone.

Third, at the beginning of the war, Confederate cavalry was vastly superior to Union cavalry. Armies at the time were dependent on cavalry for a wide variety of functions, most notably intelligence gathering and enemy intelligence denial. Brandy Station in 1863 was the first time that Union and Confederate cavalry fought even close to evenly. Stuart stepped up his game a little bit after Brandy Station but the advantage continued to erode as the Union officer corps improved, the organization of Union cavalry forces was improved, attrition worked against the South, and the Union weaponry (e.g. multi-shot carbines) advanced beyond Confederate capabilities.

Even the strategy of Lee’s greatest military campaigns could be disputed as bad ideas.  Tactically, yes, he won a number of victories, but at what cost?  He left a quarter of his army on the field at Antietam and another quarter the next year at Gettysburg.  The South didn’t have those kinds of numbers of men to spare.  The North did and Grant used that grim calculus to his advantage when he put Lee’s army through the meat grinder of the Overland Campaign in 1864.  By the spring of 1865 it wasn’t a question of if the Army of Northern Virginia was going to surrender, only when.  Would Lee have done better by following a Fabian-like strategy, more similar to Washington’s strategy versus the British?  Perhaps. It's an interesting and on-going debate. You can certainly make the argument that it would have avoided the costly invasions of Maryland and Pennsylvania.  However, the political reality was that without recognition from foreign powers, succession was destined to fail, just as the American Revolution might very well have failed without recognition from the French. That being said, there's enough meat on both sides of that particular bone for history students to write doctoral dissertations for decades to come on whether or not Lee's invasions of the North were political necessities.

Lee, especially from a tactical perspective, was a unique and outstanding commander.  He had the initial advantages of incompetent opponents, superior subordinates, and better cavalry but when those advantages eroded, he showed that he was still merely mortal.