January 19, 2007
Robert E. Lee Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:10 PM EST Today is Robert E. Lee’s 200th birthday.
Surely not since Hannibal has a general on the losing side of a war achieved so much immortality. The reason for this immortality, of course, is that both Hannibal and Lee were superb and daring masters of tactics. The battle of Cannae (216 B.C.), when Hannibal annihilated a larger Roman army, is still considered perhaps the tactical masterpiece of all time.
At Chancellorsville (1863), Lee, facing a vastly larger and better equipped army, nonetheless divided his forces—usually a suicidal move in those circumstances—and achieved a smashing victory. Abraham Lincoln’s reaction was typical. Given the news, he said, “My God! My God! What will the country say?”
In both cases, the winning generals had the losing generals’ numbers. Hannibal chose a day when he knew that the impetuous Roman consul Terentius Varro would be in charge of the army, not his more cautious co-consul Aemilius Paulus. Lee played Joseph Hooker like a fiddle, bluffing him into a defensive posture when he had overwhelming superiority.
But tactics, however imbued with genius, cannot defeat in the long term an enemy possessing superior resources, unless that enemy abandons the fight. The Romans, sadder but wiser, built a new army, avoided large battles where Hannibal’s tactical genius could come into play, and slowly wore Hannibal, whose supply lines were tenuous at best, down. The Union utilized its greatly superior financial and manpower resources and, finally, found some competent generals.
It is one of the great what-ifs of American history that Lee was offered a major command in the Union Army just as the Civil War was starting. Lee had opposed secession and was willing to take that command as long as Virginia remained in the Union. When it did not, he resigned his U.S. Army commission, his loyalty to his native state overriding his loyalty to the Union. Had he seen things the other way, the Civil War might have been a lot shorter and a lot less bloody than it was.
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