Question Home

Position:Home>History> Why is Robert Edward Lee important?


Question: Why is Robert Edward Lee important!?
in the civil war!.Www@QuestionHome@Com


Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:
He was a great southern general!. Lee's first field command for the Confederate States came in June 1862 when he took command of the Confederate forces in the East (which Lee himself renamed the "Army of Northern Virginia")!.

Lee's greatest victories were the Seven Days Battles, the Second Battle of Bull Run, the Battle of Fredericksburg and the Battle of Chancellorsville, but both of his campaigns to invade the North ended in failure!. Barely escaping defeat at the Battle of Antietam in 1862, Lee was forced to return to the South!. In early July 1863, Lee was decisively defeated at the Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania!. However, due to ineffectual pursuit by the commander of Union forces, Major General George Meade, Lee escaped again to Virginia!.

In the spring of 1864, the new Union commander, Lieutenant General Ulysses S!. Grant, began a series of campaigns to wear down Lee's army!. In the Overland Campaign of 1864 and the Siege of Petersburg in 1864–1865, Lee inflicted heavy casualties on Grant's larger army, but was unable to replace his own losses!. In early April 1865, Lee's depleted forces were turned from their entrenchments near the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, and he began a strategic retreat!. Lee's subsequent surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865 represented the loss of only one of the remaining Confederate field armies, but it was a psychological blow from which the South could not recover!. By June 1865, all of the remaining Confederate armies had capitulated!.

Lee's victories against superior forces won him enduring fame as a crafty and daring battlefield tactician, but some of his strategic decisions, such as invading the North in 1862 and 1863, have been criticized by many military historians!.

In the final months of the Civil War, as manpower reserves drained away, Lee adopted a plan to arm willing slaves to fight on behalf of the Confederacy, but this came too late to change the outcome of the war!. After Appomattox, Lee discouraged Southern dissenters from starting a guerrilla campaign to continue the war, and encouraged reconciliation between the North and South!.

After the war, as a college president, Lee supported President Andrew Johnson's program of Reconstruction and inter-sectional friendship, while opposing the Radical Republican proposals to give freed slaves the vote and take the vote away from ex-Confederates!. He urged them to rethink their position between the North and South, and the reintegration of former Confederates into the nation's political life!. Lee became the great Southern hero of the war, and his popularity grew in the North as well after his death in 1870!. He remains an iconic figure of American military leadership!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

Robert E!. Lee was the UNION officer who surveyed the Upper Mississippi River!. He graduated from West Point and he was a Southerner by birth and sentiment who felt the only honorable thing to do, once Civil War broke out, was to renounce his commission in the Union Army to lead the forces of the Confederacy!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

Well one he was the General of the Confederate army and almost won the if "Stonewall" Jackson and if the North didn't win Gettysburg!. But this is my relative your asking about so yeah!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

He was the greatest General to fight in the War of Northern Aggression!.Www@QuestionHome@Com