Nitpick: Isoroku Yamamoto, Tojo was the Emperor. Tojo Yamamoto was a wrestler. 
Other than that, I agree with moving Lee and Jackson from any wall of honored United States generals. Like the land used to make Arlington, they forfeited being entitled to that the day they decided to fight against said country. In my mind, it’s that simple.
The U.S. Civil War is rather unique in that to a large extent, the losers wrote the histories. The “Lost Cause” version of the U.S. Civil War became accepted fact to a large extent; how many times have you heard or read someone claim that the Civil War “wasn’t about slavery”? How often are Confederate generals portrayed as noble gentleman, while Northern generals are alcoholic doofuses?
I’ll disagree with what some other here have said about the relative geniuses of Civil War Generals and state it very plainly; Grant was the greatest general to ever wear the uniform of an American officer, in any war, full stop. The full extent of his innate genius clearly isn’t understood by most observers; people tend to mistake tactics for strategy. But even if you were to make a compelling argument that Lee or Sherman were greater, the Lost Cause mythos essentially paints Grant as a complete incompetent and Sherman as equivalent to Hitler, while Lee was infallible, all of which is silly. Yet it’s a remarkably popular position.
And perhaps you should read what I said about honoring enemy soldiers on the battlefield.
I don’t recall Richtoffen being interred in the Australian Military School.
Eh. If you’d give me, say, three extra queens, I could beat Magnus Carlson. That doesn’t mean I’m better than him.
Grant lost more troops fighting Lee than Lee had in his entire army. His strategy was “We can replenish our losses. They can’t.”
It was the correct strategy, but hardly genius.
Grant was also fighting an offensive war, while Lee was on his home turf. So there are swings and roundabouts.
Well, Grant was an alcoholic. Whether he was a doofus is another matter.
Some of us would like to. We’ve already gotten rid of similarly named things, for instance, Stonewall Jackson School in Arlington County was renamed.
Is there NOTHING wrong you feel you can’t wave away by pleading political correctness?
When I read the OP, my first reaction was that of course they should take down portraits of Lee and Jackson. After all, they were traitors who played a big part in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the name of protecting slavery. I’m sure they were brilliant tacticians, but they are among the villains of history. But when you step back and look at some of the ‘heroes’ of history, I’m not so sure we should stop with just the Confederates. For example, our hero among heroes, George Washington was a slave owner himself, and while the revolution was not fought over slavery, it seems absurd to consider anyone a hero who was content to own other people.
History is extremely messy and if you look in detail at any historical figure, notions of being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ are just too simplistic. This is certainly not to excuse anyone for their misdeeds, but if you want a portrait gallery of historical figures (especially military leaders) that unambiguously upheld only the highest moral values, you’re going to have a lot of empty walls.
So yes, they should take down the portraits of Lee and Jackson, but they should also take down the portraits of pretty much everyone else too. People running a war college should be mature enough to understand that we can and should study the titans of the subject, but it’s a huge mistake to lionize them.
We can make choices. Our heroes don’t have to be perfect. They were imperfect people doing good things. But there’s really nothing good about confederates. They were traitors AND they were fighting for a cause that was really about nothing more than one of the worst evils imaginable - slavery. Take them down and leave George up.
Good post. I’ve often wondered if men like Jefferson and Lee realized guerrilla war was the only way they could beat the North, and chose not to do it, or of they never considered it.
Of course, it is also the case that LEE lost more troops than he had in his entire army. Over the course of the war, The Army of Northern Virginia suffered more losses than its highest nominal strength.
Grant’s armies in fact inflicted more casualties than they took, as fairly convincingly shown by the records.
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
There is a strong argument to be made the North essentially followed Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan”, and it just took awhile for the right generals to get into place to execute it.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think you totally understand what the Anaconda Plan was, but Grant and Sherman were sure as heck not following it.
The idea behind the Anaconda Plan was to avoid exactly what you claim Grant did. Scott’s plan was to cut off lines of communication from the ocean and the Mississippi and then avoid direct battle, not give it. Scott believed that by cutting the South off, they would eventually sue for peace. Actually invading the South was very much NOT part of Scott’s plan, who devised it very consciously with a mind towards avoiding bloodshed. It’s clear in retrospect it would not have worked that way; the South could have held out more than long enough for the North to give up.
No. Grant inflicted about 33,000 casualties on Lee’s army, compared to the 55,000 he sustained. That’s not quite a 2:1 casualty rate, but it’s close to it. More importantly, Grant started the campaign with about 120,000 men. Lee had 64,000. So again, not quite a 2:1 advantage, but close to it.
Grant lost every major battle he had with Lee, or at least didn’t win it; but his strategy was to leave some men behind, and use the rest to try to flank Lee, or get around him. It’s a good strategy, but hardly ingenious, when you have twice as many men.
Lee did reject pleas to take that direction, choosing instead to surrender and begin the reintegration of the Union.
And also, AIUI, because he was too much of a gentleman to make clear to his junior officers that his orders were not suggestions. That’s what I got from Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People, anyway.
Not even Grant would say this about himself. And strategy and tactics are not being confused here. Lee was a brilliant tactician, honestly his abilities as a strategist were not really ever fully tested. He didn’t have as much large scale control of Confederate strategy and he spent much of the war simply trying to fend off attacks aimed at Richmond, he only really had the strategic initiative in the Gettysburg campaign and even that was mostly driven by a desperate desire to delay an impending invasion.
The ability to formulate strategies requires in part that you are not always reacting to your enemy. Lee’s position was so close to the front lines and so bogged down in continuous defensive actions that whatever his abilities as a strategist might have been he never really got to test it.
In July of 1863 Grant became General of all Union Armies and from the on could work closely with Lincoln both on campaign strategies he was personally involved in and theater wide strategies. Lee didn’t receive a similar promotion until 1865, his role isn’t even really comparable to Grant’s. There was an expectation that Jefferson Davis as a former Secretary of War was the best man to lead the overall war effort, or at least I believe that is what Davis felt; and so the CSA didn’t have a chief general til the very end.
I’m not sure you understand what the Anaconda Plan was. It was not a completely passive blockade. Instead it involved a coastal blockade and then a military push to capture the length of the Mississippi and sunder the Confederacy in two. In this vein, from the earliest point of the war naval efforts to maintain that coastal blockade, the early capture of New Orleans, the latter Vicksburg campaign are all pretty much informed by the Anaconda Plan.
It’s a pretty common historical analysis that the North in fact did use the Anaconda plan as a base line for its activities, and that while it modified it to bring about a more rapid end, much of their maneuvering focused on Scott’s plan. Early and continuous attempts to capture Richmond were essentially Lincoln and his generals going for “KO” punches in hopes it could have won the war early, and so in a sense the Peninsular Campaign can be seen as a deviation.
But Grant’s most important campaign was Vicksburg, and that was right out of Scott’s play book. Many today even argue that the campaigns in the West were possibly more important than anything happening in the East and they certainly made the fall of the East a foregone conclusion–splitting the Confederacy in two guaranteed it would never survive, whereas an early capture of Richmond in itself would have probably done nothing especially if the ANVA wasn’t destroyed in the process.
FWIW if the North had actually adhered more closely to Scott’s plan I suspect the war would have ended much sooner. The biggest problem with the plan was it focused on splitting the rebellion in two as a first move, and Northern critics wanted the rebellion crushed immediately. Their belief was a speedy drubbing of the armies defending Richmond and its fall would end the war. To some degree that is why Lee has become a legend, as his expertise was maximally effective in routing invading armies while operating in Virginia. It minimized the effects of the horrid Confederate logistics and subjected the Union forces to essentially the best Confederate forces.
If Virginia had essentially been ignored and more forces had focused on capturing the length of the Mississippi that would potentially have been effected in the first year of the war. At that point the only realistic hope that the rebellion could have succeeded would have been with an offensive, which Lee would have lead and it would have ended much as the Gettysburg campaign did, except it could have come 12-24 months earlier and spared many lives.
An approach that just ignored Lee’s forces or maintained defensive positions against them around Washington and Maryland would have also deprived the Confederacy of its most important PR victories that kept the South committed to the war effort.
Re England and Washington, a better example would be Cromwell, cut the head off the king, ended up ruling as a dictator. When the monarchy was restored, body dug up and dismembered as a traitor, the full head on spike treatment.Today?
Statue outside parliament.
Should we honor all of America’s enemies who were great generals?
If Lee’s picture stays up, they really need to add General Giap to the wall as well. He fought the US as well, and he won, which is something Lee never managed to do.