There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout
Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But
despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a
conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized
North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic
error.
But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he
would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of
Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human
beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part
of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign
designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the
Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost
Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”
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