Part Four: Was Robert. E. Lee a Good General? | BEHIND THE BASTARDS 

"Our thoughts and prayers are with them, though. Now if only these *radicals* would stop trying to shrilly politicize these trying times."

THOUGHTS. AND. PRAYERS. ONLY.

Just ask Burdimuhamedov.

Ask Jon Oliver or Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow about horses. Apparently horse love not that uncommon and weird

As someone who plays a "horse girl" elf in a dnd game, that is so true. I have seen some wild stuff when looking up inspiration.

But how do you know those people are not also fucking their horses?

Hey, it's Vaush!

It’s funny because Lee then proceeded to immediately Anikan Skywalksr himself.

​@@fredericksmith7942I'm picturing BOTH Kenobi and Skywalker wearing Lee and Grant's beards now. Still replaying Mustafar, but with beards both. It's funny.

Ya lee loved the idea of being in the right and that he was fallowing gods law. Even as everything was crashing down around him and everything pointed to him being on the wrong side of society I e history... To bad he was given a nice post after the war and his name has been turned into greatness. How can anyone idealize such a monster? even growing up in Michigan history class taught us lee was one of the greatest gen in history. Strange society we live in.

Bro stop, Grant stole the Black Hills from the Lakota. All presidents are bastards

I always find the Golden Circle as one of alt-history dumbest ideas, Britain and France would never allow the Confederacy to dominate central and South America

One thing that's always bothered me about his channel is he never seems to mention the hypocrisy and racism of the north. Imo the biggest revision in regards to the civil war was that the north was full of abolitionists.

​@@Colonel_Bat_Guano Oh he does actually. In one of his checkmate Lincolnite episodes he fully agrees with his character Johnny Reb that the north was also racist as fuck. He also made light that there were slaves in the north even.

He also talks abou ma boi john brown.

@@Colonel_Bat_Guano he did, multiple times and on multiple topics.

Yeah, the people who tend to be best at debunking a group belief are people who used to be part of that group. You know what the arguments are and where they come from.

Now THAT is impressive

That’s because most UN motions against Israel are incredibly biased. Like the latest motion the US vetoed called for a ceasefire in Gaza because it didn’t call for the release of the hostages. Releasing the hostages should be a top priority.

@@hopefullynotbutprobably6643We don’t care, hasbarist

Let's place where the real blame lies, Hamas attacking in October and refusing the many ceasefire agreements.

@@rmkensington this is a lie

He wants to BE the Traveller

I'm especially glad for that one dude that comments on every episode about how he's a vaushite

Wut

dude thats crazy

Did you ever find it?

@@runawaysparklers622 No, my copy is in a box in storage right now. But the book does have a wikipedia page, confirming that it existed. The cover art is...something else.

I started hearing about that battle and general after following a comedian who lived in that area. Corey Forrester. Well had some funny standup about the Civil War.

Yeah, when I order sliders at Applebee's they go fast for me as well.

Some people simply don't know shit about history, hear the word "rebel," and that's all it takes for them to become enamoured with the symbol. I used to have a patch with the stars and bars on my jacket when I was a kid because I was really into pantera. Not American so I had zero context. Granted, that was 20 fuckin years and you'd have to have your head shoulder-deep in your ass to not know what it means these days.

@@BOOOOOOOONE For the longest time I didn't think Pantera was a ...problem until I saw that video of Phil Anselmo screaming white power and doing a nazi salute..sure that was 2016 and he "apologized" but some shit needs a longer cooldown before I give them another chance.

@@BOOOOOOOONE When I was a teenager in the nineties here in Germany, many left-wingers and punks were wearing confederate flag patches because all we knew it as was the "rebel flag". We didn't know anything about American history.

I've seen trucks festooned with confederate battle flags in my home state of... Maine. That's right... Maine. Maine. The state that is famous for blueberries, potatoes, lobsters, and holding the Union left flank at Gettysburg.

I saw a house in Bruges with a big confederate flag waving in the back garden. Weirdest place I ever saw one.

Because the arc of this nation's institutions always bend towards the oppressor.

Yea and then he went on to ethnically cleanse the Lakota from the black hills

Now THAT'S a proper tragedy, I love it. Never heard the song though

Peter Principle is a thing for reason. One British officer was said to have been the finest major in the army (or of the century, I forget) an OK colonel, but the worst general alive in his time. Granted that he was getting older and slower as he went up the ranks. The main causes for this are the unwilligness to demote people back to their level of competence and especially for the Confederates: the lack of any better choices. They had whom they had and were trying to build an army with the only officers available being by design, the kinds of men who betray their country and oath.

"Ohio: Like if the concept of Nothing could be racist!"

😂😂😂

There is also the zhao general in warrent state area that was the worst obstacle for chin again and again loosing and in the way, that its on record they had him killed by his own paranoid king via sprreading gossip. Now that is a great feat of a general to not be able be defeated in a battle that you have to resort to court intruige. Yeah great general should be something impressive , not average. Hanibal, napoleon, ceasar, i think the one who resisted ceasar that much in britannia, bodoaca the warrior girlboss. oda nobunaga and him as weird but brillians man, .. thats impressive.

@@marocat4749 Boudicca wasn't born until about 90 years after Julius Caesar died. If you are going to make public comments do a bare minimum of research beforehand.

Atun-Shei did a pretty good video about the myth of the superiority of Confed commanders, with a focus on Lee. He brings up some of the points you bring up here, especially that Lee's losses tended to be proportionally larger than his opponents. As far as I'm concerned, the only time Lee really showed he had a grasp of then-modern warfare was when he finally started using defensive strategy and trench warfare during the Wilderness campaign. And that came too late to make a difference. Otherwise he clung to the obsolete belief that a Napoleonic "one glorious battle" would win the war - which was obsolete in Napoleon's time, as the Russian and Peninsular campaigns proved.

@@TheDarthbinky Yup. I'm familiar with A-S, but didn't catch his Lee video. I'll check it out. I 100% support sober historical analysis - the Lee myth is one of my pet peeves. I think most of the Confederate generals were of the napoleonic tilt - that is, most of them failed to understand the nature of long wars and materiel preponderance. One could make a case that if Lee had been more like Grant, or Mosby (guerilla), he probably would have been unpopular and fired. In sum, I don't the the culture of the South at the time could have accepted a war of attrition conceptually. It was just too alien to their identity.

The difference is that no one pretends that Scipo Africanus was a drunken moron and a butcher who couldn't actually general. For a long period of time, the consensus was that Grant and Sherman were mediocre generals who only won because they threw men at the problem and because of "Yankee tyranny". This was the standard taught in schools for about 100 years. What the Lost Cause people don't understand is by making the Union oit to be a bunch of idiots, they make their side look worse. For Lee to be at the level of a Hannibal, Grant and Sherman would be at the level of the Roman high command Hannibal faced. The question the Lost Cause people have to answer is if these guys were so incompetent isn't it an indictment on Lee that he didn't win.

One of his underlings reportedly told Hannibal something along the lines of "You know how to achieve victory, but not how to use it."

Grant could be a bastard when he wanted to. Granted, this comes from a William S. Rosecrans fan.

Wrote this two minutes before they bring up Vietnam themselves

Well, I mean...yes

"There's a very good argument to be made that Lee was fighting an obsolete style of war. But I think you can level that charge at most men of his day." Yes. Absolutely they were. As far as battlefield command goes, the overwhelming majority were garbage, still fighting war the way they had in the 1840s against Mexican conscript armies that generally didn't want to fight them. They knew from the bloodbath in Crimea in the 1850s that their tactics were outdated in an era of accurate rifles and artillery.

@@TheDarthbinky ah - I wondered what happened to your comment - I tried replying to your earlier version. I know nothing about the Mexican War - but the point about it involving a 'peasant army' is perhaps relevant. I think there's a couple of things to remember here. Firstly - we're looking with hindsight with a modern concept of the value of life, and the idea of how to conduct a war with the minimum loss to your own side (in fact so much so that we've kinda resorted to sending drones to kill people, which is a whole other side of brutality). War was a different matter back then, and dying gloriously in battle was somewhat of an aspiration - better than dying of dysentery anyway. There are many war journals of the time that show a real naive view of what they were getting themselves into, and all of them loving the idea of popping a few of hte enemy. fun times. Secondly, in some ways, this was two peasant armies facing off against each other - volunteer civilians with little or no training. It took time for both armies to accept the reality of war. So yeah - I kinda agree that most Civil War generals were garbage. I just don't see that we can blame them for it and say they were bad generals because they had a particular attitude to death we would find gross today. I'm still not totally convinced Lee was as pony as this video makes out - though some very fair points were raised. I think he was very skilled at manouvring his army to hit the enemy to best effect. But perhaps you need more than that to call him 'great'. He had some good commanders doing the nitty gritty, and troops that were willing to throw their lives away for him, so any 'greatness' he's bestowed with was earned by the help of others.

I felt my original response came across harsher than I intended, so I deleted it, thought about it, and started over. We're all friends here and it was not my intention to act like a dick. "I know nothing about the Mexican War" That's the thing - all these high ranking officers in the ACW cut their teeth in Mexico in the 1840s (or at the very least, they were trained by the guys who did). It's key to understanding their leadership during the ACW. Additionally, as I noted above, the Crimean War happened, and thanks to telegraphs and early photography, everyone was aware of what happened. Military commanders, including American ones, closely studied that war and knew what worked and what didn't. So they knew going into the ACW that their old Napoleonic style warfare wasn't going to work anymore, at least not without being unnecessarily bloody. "but the point about it involving a 'peasant army' is perhaps relevant.: It is, and that point got lost in the editing process. Mexico in the 1840s was a chaotic mess. There were deep political divisions, regional issues (eg people in Zacatecas didn't really give a shit what was happening in Coahuila, and vice versa; and the Yucatan tried to secede... again...), and Santa Anna had taken advantage of the instability to become dictator again. So when the Americans showed up in 1846, the US Army was more or less a professional army, and the Mexican army was largely conscripts, mostly peasants unwillingly drafted to fight a war they had no interest in fighting. The officers were a trained, professional corps on par with the American ones, but the soldiers were not. So low morale and desertion were serious problems that plagued the Mexican forces for the duration of the war. At the battle of Buena Vista, Santa Anna's army was three times the size of Taylor's force - but thanks to starvation, desertion, poor morale, and rumors of a rebellion in Mexico City, Santa Anna declared that he won the battle and his army withdrew, thus leaving the puzzled Americans to control the battlefield and claim victory too. "Firstly - we're looking with hindsight with a modern concept of the value of life," I understand what you're saying but that's not really the issue. The issue is manpower. Sure, officers may not have cared all that much about the lives of their soldiers (I don't really agree but let's just assume it's true for sake of argument)… but they did care about having enough men to fight. Losing 1/5 of your men in a single battle, with diminished ability to replace them, is not a winning strategy, and this has been known since at least the time of Pyrrhus. Lee clung to the idea of the "one glorious victory" to utterly defeat his enemy like Frederick the Great or Napoleon, and that wasn't feasible anymore (and it wasn't really even feasible during Napoleon's time, as the Russians can attest). "There are many war journals of the time that show a real naive view of what they were getting themselves into" True but the generals knew what they were getting into. They had served in Mexico and studied Crimea. They knew. They didn't adapt. And a lot of men died for it. " think he was very skilled at manouvring his army to hit the enemy to best effect" He got lucky that the Union commanders arrayed against him were also morons (or unwilling to utterly crush him, as some believe). He was also more of a good organizer, as the podcast mentions. He was pretty talented at that and I'll concede credit for that. But he was shit as a battlefield commander, indecisive and unimaginative, and his armies did well despite him, not because of him. And yeah, as you go on to say, his subordinates were often more competent. JEB Stuart in particular was great at scouting for Lee - until his cavalry ran off and left Lee behind to get beaten at Gettysburg. As this podcast points out, Longstreet was the only one who was like "yo, Pickett's Charge is a shit idea" and he was right. The only time Lee really exhibited any real understanding of then-modern warfare was during the Wilderness Campaign when he actually used the defensive tactics and trenchworks that he should've been using since the beginning. And even that came way too late, because he still lost that campaign and wound up limping around Virginia until he got cornered at Appomattox.

@@TheDarthbinky I don't think I can disagree with most of what you said here. I've had a look at a few little articles about American observers in Crimea (including a suspicious site that may or may not be a Russian propaganda site - lol) and found some interesting things. Well - one interesting thing really. One of the members of the American commission observing the war was George McClellon - yeah - that George McClellan. He seems to have had some insightful things to say about the war and it's intriguing to think how his experience there shaped his attitude in the Civil War. No wonder he was reluctant to go out and 'get stuck in'. It does kinda seem like he didn't experience much actual fighting though - he seems to have been impressed with the use of earthworks around Sevastopol when touring the defences in the aftermath of the siege. Maybe I need a deeper dive but he seems to have missed all the major battles and had to rely on reports to form his opinions about the ideal way of warfare. It did get me wondering though - and the thing that stuck out for me was the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade. It occurred to me that that kind of cavalry action - a real throwback to the Napoleonic age - is something we just don't see in the Civil War, where cavalry doctrine seems to have undergone a real transformation. It kinda seems obvious to us today - maybe don't charge over miles of open ground being enfiladed by artillery, and maybe that's the big takeaway regarding battlefield tactics learned by the Americans. To clarify what I said about the value of life. I didn't mean to say that generals didn't care about the lives of their men, just that it was an accepted inevitability that a lot of people were going to die in any given battle, and I don't think we can judge a mid 19th century general on those grounds (Patton, I'm looking at you). I take your point about needing to preserve manpower to sustain strategic goals - a luxury the Union could afford way more than the Rebels. Let's not forget that Grant's 'new model of warfare' (which seems to have been the way McClellan was thinking about war after his experience in the Crimea, ironically) was incredibly brutal when it comes to casualty rates. I've never done a detailed examination of the battles Lee fought - the closest I've come to it is watching a very good series on Gettysburg by AtunShei. Not an academic appraisal maybe, but I think it offers a pretty well sourced look - so I'll take your word for it that Lee lacked imagination and tactical abilities, and we can agree on his logistical abilities. Maybe we might have to give him some credit for picking his commanders, I dunno. I'm happy to call him 'not the worst - not the greatest, probabaly a bit sh1t'. cheers man. It's been fun thinking about stuff I haven't thought about seriously in many a year.

@@TheDarthbinky oh - ps - no worries about 'acting like a dick', I hadn't got that vibe at all. To be honest, I've been worried about accidentally coming across as a lost causer, so I hope you didn't think that of me.

Napoleon understood logistics

Please! Its like listening to a lecture from my grandfather making the same obvious point over and over again, except my grandfather knows about the Punic wars.

Point being, the geography of western Europe is what made trenches so bad, that and machine guns and artillery. The Eastern front in WW1 didn't bog down into trench warfare

You excited for the horse love and p*dophilia? Lee was also known for both like Vaush!

@VooshSpokesman Hey brother, how are you handling the recent situation? I definitely don't believe the outrageous accusations but I'm also really upset that Vaush has more or less thrown away his career. You're stronger than I am to keep defending him.

@@nicolasnamed Thrown away his career? He's made 2 responses to it

I mean, during Jim Crow, to unite the white Americans, northeners threw black people under the bus. America today is arguably such a racist empire that the CSA would not really have a problem with it.

The right to own slaves was built directly into the Confederate Constitution- No legislature, national or state, could pass that kind of law. The CSA placed the right to own people as property on the same level as any other constitutional right.

Yeah, that is true. Didn't think about that.

No, not in the slightest.

fam I know what you saying dawg

No, although as soon as I read your comment, my dog started barking his head off and going crazy, like he could hear a really loud whistle or something. Anyway, I really hope your Traveler cosplay is a big hit.

Edit: did they say "American slavery" specifically? Maybe they meant not "USian" but "American" in the continental sense (like, "the Americas")? I never got the impression they were claiming that slavery inside the USA was the worst form of it in the world, but that chattel slavery was worse than other/previous types of slavery had been (which is why they're talking about social mobility for Roman slaves, etc. rather than trying to contrast US slavery with Caribbean slavery). *** Chattel slavery (slavery in the colonies, mostly in the Americas) was worse than previous forms of slavery had been, because it was permanent and racialized in a way it previously hadn't been. (Like, it's not just "slavery in the US" or even "slavery in the Americas." It's transatlantic chattel slavery specifically, if you compare it to common forms of slavery in ancient times or pre-colonialism. (We literally still have our world deeply affected by the racial categories and paradigm of race and whiteness that developed as a result of chattel slavery, and people still use those categories today. That's a devastating effect.)