Gen. R.E. Lee, through good leadership and generalship, was able to keep his army fighting into 1865. This was long past the point at which the South could ever hope to win. The last battles of the war were very bloody-was it a mistake to waste so many lives for a doomed cause? Lee and Davis knew that the North could always outmatch the south…would it have been better if Less surrendered after Gettysburg? All gallantry aside, is it moral to waste lives needlessly?
Considering that he was wrong to fight in the first place… yes. He was wrong to continue fighting.
Well, there was always a slight chance Northern resolve would break, I guess. I suppose the best decision he could have made would have been to accept the offered Union command or just abstain entirely.
Gettysberg is much too early to suppose that someone knowing what was known at the time could not reasonably see any chance for the Confederacy to win. A more reasonable demarcation point would be the 1864 election (the last real chance for the war to end with Confederate victory because the Union had lost the will to fight – IIRC, Lincoln wrote sealed notes directing his cabinet to cooperate with the incoming administration to make peace in the event McClellan won).
The South lost. Get over it.
I’d agree with this.
In the spirit of the OP, though: Once we allow that Lee decided to fight, I think the only option is to continue fighting for as long as possible. It’s easy for people to look back on a war and see that loss was inevitable, but you don’t know that when you’re in the thick of it. Had the South won in 1865, we’d all be saying things like “Lee was amazing in lasting long enough for Northern opinion to change” or “He gave the South enough time to get Europe involved.” These things didn’t happen, but only hindsight lets us say they couldn’t have happened.
Heck, if George Washington had lost the war for Independence, wouldn’t we all be looking back and saying “He never even had a chance!” Washington turned a string of mostly defeats into an ultimate victory. Since he did win, we look back and identify the reasons why - and we often try to cast it in a light of inevitable victory - but it really was a losing proposition for most of the war.
Is there some backstory with the OP that I’m missing, cause this feels like poor form on the first reply.
I’d say as long as Lee could buy time he had a right to keep fighting, if only to preserve the opportunity for the unexpected to happen and reverse the situation, like a boxer who’s beat but is hoping for a lucky punch in the last few rounds.
Once Lincoln was reelected it was over for The Cause.
I will point out though, even after the surrender at Appomattox of The ANV many officers and soldiers alike wanted to continue the struggle as a guerrilla operation. I think Davis had fight left in him, it was Lee who said no.
Like a time traveler with some AK-47s? 
I’m sure there are someone working on a time machine as we speak… you know with a washing machine hooked up to a ford on cement blocks 
I think there came a point where Davis should have stopped the fighting. The principle of civilian control of the military suggests to me, though, that Lee should not be the one making that sort of strategic decision.
Lee did try to resign almost immediately after Gettysburg. He thought the army might be losing faith in him and he was too ill and frail to continue leading them. Davis rejected Lee’s offer.
Lee tried to resign because he thought doing so would give the south the best chance at winning the war. Davis thought having Lee leading the army would do that. Neither appeared to believe there was no shot at winning at that point.
Gettysburg - and esp. Pickett’s Charge - was the end of Lee’s last chance - it was a desperate act to enter the North in the first place - to lose so horribly pretty much settled things.
The CSA had to have either:
- USA loses will to fight (see Draft Riots)
- UK and/or France, desperate for raw cotton, sides with CSA and breaks the blockade and sends weapons, ammo, food…
Gettysburg ended the hope of “loss of will” and the Emancipation Proclamation cast the fight as an up or down vote on Slavery - and neither was going to do anything that overt to endorse Slavery. Then the plantations in India started to produce large quantities of cotton, so the pressure was off.
By 1/1/64, it was over.
I don’t recall the timing of Sherman’s March, but there were certainly other radiers doing damage from 1/1/64 - end of war. All easily avoided.
He wasn’t wrong to fight, nor to go on fighting: one goes on to the bitter end; but he was wrong to go north.
Davis is the guy who told the 17 people still listening to him that the fall of Richmond (CSA Capital) was a good thing, because now the Army (including children, old men and slaves promised freedom) would be free to roam and strike at will.
He couldn’t accept Lee’s resignation and still claim to have an army.
Why does “one go on to the bitter end”? Specific examples aside, I don’t see anything inherently correct in fighting a lost cause.
Yes, he was. His cause was wrong from its beginning. Nothing done in its name could be anything but wrong. He fought for slavers and slavery no matter what he might have told himself.
It’s obvious that Lee’s cause was wrong. But that’s an issue for another thread. As far as serving his chosen cause, the question is when should Lee have realized there was no realistic chance of winning? Or, more accurately, when was there no more realistic chance of the United States quitting? In the context, I’d agree with Steve MB: the CSA’s last realistic chance was the November 1864 election.
My views on the legitimacy of a cause have nothing to do with how well it is fought or the bravery and fighting skills involved, or decisions involved.
Because: Opinion Has Nothing To Do With Truth.
I no more admire the cause of the Boers in the 2nd South African War — although I know their reasons, and the awfulness of their enemy — than that of the South, but I admire de Wet’s Bitter End bit at Vereeniging more than the dull sense of Koos de la Rey. Because ‘Never Give Up, Never Surrender’ has an emotional response all of it’s very own.
General Lee is one of the very few people I put in the category of “hero”.
Nevertheless, I’ve often asked myself the same question.
There is no doubt that many men died, because of General Lee. The war would likely have ended a couple of years earlier, but for him. From my own moral perspective, those lives were more valuable than the principle of “putting up a good fight” (for lack of a better way of putting it).
But I have to respect the fact that Lee had a different moral compass than my own. Some people’s compasses are so far off, I consider them “broken”, but I don’t feel that way about Lee. Lee was a thoughtful man. He lived by a pretty strict set of rules, and one of them - perhaps the most important - was his sense of duty.
He believed he was fighting for his country, and as long as he had a country to fight for, he believed it was his duty to fight. He wasn’t fighting for his own interests - in fact, he lost a lot in the war, including his home, and if I remember right, at least one of his sons. His own life was in danger, throughout the war. But from his point of view, he was not the one who decided when the war was over - that would be the President. Lee, on the other hand, was just a soldier.
I have never been a soldier, and hopefully never will be. But I still respect Lee’s sense of honor, even though it’s not the same as my own.