Lee & his army in Confederate history
By: Gary W. Gallagher.
Series: Civil War America
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 295
Subjects: Lee, Robert E. 1807-1870 -- Military leadership.; Confederate States of America. Army.; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Campaigns.; Confederate States of America -- History.
Other titles: Lee and his army in Confederate history
Description: "Was Robert E. Lee a gifted soldier whose only weaknesses lay in the depth of his loyalty to his troops, affection for his lieutenants, and dedication to the cause of the Confederacy? Or was he an ineffective leader and poor tactician whose reputation was drastically inflated by early biographers and Lost Cause apologists? These divergent characterizations represent the poles between which scholarly opinion on Lee has swung over time.

Here, renowned Civil War historian Gary Gallagher proffers his own refined thinking on the figure who has loomed so large in our understanding of America's great national crisis. In eight essays, Gallagher explores the relationship between Lee's operations and Confederate morale, the quality and nature of Lee's generalship, and the question of how best to handle Lee's legacy in light of the many distortions that grew out of Lost Cause historiography.".

"Relying on contemporary evidence, rather than on hindsight, Gallagher draws on letters, diaries, newspapers, and other wartime sources to capture a fuller sense of how Lee was viewed during and immediately after the war and underscore the remarkable faith that soldiers and citizens maintained in Lee's leadership even after his army's fortunes had begun to erode.

He also engages various dimensions of the Lee myth - not just from the perspective of revisionist historians who have attacked what they consider a hagiographic literature, but also with an eye toward admirers who have insisted that their hero's faults as a general represented exaggerations of his personal virtues."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Preface ix; title: Acknowledgments xv; title: Essay Credits xvii; title: PART I. LEE'S CAMPAIGNS; title: The Net Result of the Campaign Was in Our Favor:; title: Confederate Reaction to the 1862 Maryland Campaign 5; title: The Yanks Have Had a Terrible Whipping:; title: Confederates Evaluate the Battle of Fredericksburg 51; title: Lee's Army Has Not Lost Any of Its Prestige:; title: The Impact of Gettysburg on the Army of Northern Virginia; title: and the Confederate Home Front 83; title: Our Hearts Are Full of Hope:; title: The Army of Northern Virginia and the; title: Confederacy in the Spring of 1864 115; title: PART II. LEE AS A CONFEDERATE GENERAL; title: An Old-Fashioned Soldier in a Modern War?:; title: Lee's.Confederate Generalship 151; title: I Have to Make the Best of What I Have:; title: Lee at Spotsylvania 191; title: Fighting the Battles of Second Fredericksburg and Salem Church:; title: Lee and Jubal A. Early at Chancellorsville 220; title: PART III. LEE AND HIS ARMY IN THE LOST CAUSE; title: Shaping Public Memory of the Civil War:; title: Robert E. Lee, Jubal A. Early, and Douglas Southall Freeman 255; title: Index 283.