School of War - Ep. 5: Wayne Hsieh on Robert E. Lee

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

Biography Wayne Hsieh is a history professor at the United States Naval Academy. He served on the State Department's provincial reconstruction team in Iraq from 2008 to 2009 and is the recipient of multiple awards and honors, including the Army's Commander's Award for Civilian Service and the State Department's Meritorious Honors Award. Hsieh is the author of numerous articles and the co-author of The Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War. Times 01:17 - Introduction 06:50 - Hostility toward studying Robert E. Lee 12:50 - Lee and West Point 15:18 - Senior leadership of Confederate and Union armies at West Point 17:17 - Lee's job as a junior officer in the Army Corps of Engineers 19:17 - Lee's rise during the Mexican War 23:27 - Ulysses Grant 26:21 - Stereotypes and temperaments of Civil War leaders 31:50 - What drives Lee's tactical decision-making 34:07 - Lee's strategic mistake Recorded October 6, 2021

There have been days recently when it seems like Robert E. Lee is as divisive a figure in our own era as he was a century and a half ago, when he led a rebel army devoted to the preservation of slavery. Long portrayed in the romantic revisionist memory of the defeated South as a gentlemanly and near-perfect Christian warrior on behalf of the old ways. Lee was certainly a creature of his time. But he was also trained as an engineer at the United States Military Academy, in his army career before the Civil War tracked closely with the modernization of the American way of war. Who was Robert E. Lee? How much of the old revisionist fantasy has any purchase on reality? And how much was Lee as much an innovator and creature of modernity as the man who ultimately defeated him?

His fellow West Point graduate, Ulysses Grant. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. We continue to face a grave situation in it. Iran. And the people who knock these buildings down will hear all of us soon. We shall fight on the beaches.

We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi. I'm Aaron McLean, and this is the School of War. I'm delighted to be joined today by Professor Wayne Shea. He's a professor of history at the United States Naval Academy. He has a PhD from the University of Virginia.

and his dissertation, it's worth saying because it's relevant to what we're going to be talking about today was called the Old Army and War and Peace West Pointers in the Civil War era, 1814 to 1865. He's the author of numerous articles. He's the co-author of a fantastic book from about five years ago that I recommend to all of our listeners. It's called Savage War, a military history of the Civil War. He co-authored it with Williams and Murray. And it's a kind of grand strategic analysis of the war. with a particular emphasis on the Western Theater of War and its significance.

Wayne, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, Erin. Thanks, you so much. Another thing that's really interesting about your background, I want to talk to you a little bit about before we get into Robert Lee in the U.S. Army, which is our subject for the day, is that in addition to your academic career, you served with the State Department in Iraq on a provincial reconstruction team.

Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that experience, and just your background in general. How did you decide that you wanted to be a historian? What took you to Iraq? What took you to the Naval Academy? Give us some sense of how you came to be who you are today. Yeah, sure, thanks. Also, I just want to preference these comments.

You know, none of these, all these comments I'm going to make today are my own private opinions or should not be construed in any way, shape, or form as official, you know, statements by the Navy or the Naval Academy or anything like that. I was trained as a military historian. I was always interested in the Civil War. I arrived at the academy in 2005, which is obviously post 9-11, and I ended up on that PRT in Iraq, I guess basically because I was part, I was sort of on the tail end of the so-called surge, which people may or may not remember now.

So Iraq kind of fell into increasingly catastrophic chaos starting in 2006. There was a response by the Bush administration to surge larger numbers of U.S. Army and U.S. military forces in general. And there was a civilian surge, which is not as well know. So there was an attempt to mobilize more civilian expertise to deal with things like economic development, rule of law, nation building, so to speak, right? So I was part of this, I was part of the whole population protection coin thing. Right, right, right. I was been there between the summer of 2008 and 2009. So basically attached to most of the time an infantry company. Basically, anything not security, related was in my zone. So that in my area, that would have mostly involved talking and meeting

with ethnic political parties who might not have liked each other very much and trying to get them to buy into the democratic process. So that was, that was what, that was what I did. Government in a box, I think you know that term. That was part of your world. I've lived that term. Yes. And so I'm sorry to say I was maybe part of the origins or the complex of that and some of the things, the unintended consequences of it. But that and then so after that, I came back. So I was always part of the academy. I was basically loaned by the academy to the State Department. And I returned and I've been just kind of a regular college professor,

an Elbit at a Service Academy since. Did you learn anything in Iraq or did you take anything from your experiences in Iraq that have informed your scholarship as a historian of the 19th century? That's a great question. I think a strange way it made me more skeptical of historians. There's nothing secret here. But there was a meeting that Deputy Commanding General of M&D North, sort of one-star general was talking to now Lieutenant General Pyatt, who was in the news.

Some people may know that. But at the time, he was a brigade commander in Iraq. And he was talking about Tom Ricks' book on The Surge, which I think it's called The Gamble for more quickly. And Walt Pryatt had been actually the operations officer, which was a fairly senior staff position in M&D North, during a period that Ricks was writing about. And Piat was kind of joking about how, although Rick seemed to be thinking he was writing the first draft of history, None of it seemed to correspond with this actual recollection of what was happening there. I met all sorts of cast of characters, as you know, in the war zone. You have heroes and you have naves and you have a lot of people in between.

There was a company commander I worked with Stephen Weber, who struck me as incredibly impressive in so many ways. But it struck me that his story wasn't going to get out because he had been deploying to Iraq every other year. And I think he later deployed to Afghanistan. You know, while there are a lot of people in the public press who did publish books, And I'm not saying anyone's right or wrong about this. Who did get connections, public platforms because they were Rhodes Scholars, because they had the right connections, because they had the right links to the media establishment.

And their stories were told. And those stories weren't necessarily wrong, but there was definitely kind of a distortions of perspective. And it made me a little bit more, look a little bit more scant at what historians aspire to do. I don't think it led me to despair at it. But it just was a good, you know, there's always a useful humility check. I also made me wonder what I might think of how historians might look at what I had done. That, you know, they gave me some pause because I realized I might not agree with how someone might look at what I was doing. So speaking of narratives and challenging narratives and, you know, comforting stories not quite reflecting the reality of things as they actually are.

Let's talk about Robert Lee. I almost feel like we need a kind of trigger warning. You know, should we, should we ritually? state that we think that the Confederacy was a bad thing and that slavery was wrong. And it is good that the Confederacy was defeated, which of course I do think. But I worry that even talking about Robert Lee, you know, puts one into some kind of mindfield where people will suspect the worst of you. Do you encounter that kind of phenomenon at all in your work?

I personally do not. I mean, I do think that this has become a real. And I say this as someone who once gave us a lecture at what was once called the Museum of the Confederacy. It's no longer, the no longer exists because it was essentially a product of what we call the lost cause or just kind of post-Civil War, white Southerners attempt to create a kind of a positive portrayal of the Confederacy and of the Annabellan period. And they got this museum, right? And that has these essentially, essentially our lost cause are Confederate relics. And I gave a talk there about how Robert Ely's decision to secede was

in fact not predetermined that he really did have a choice. and some of his family members stayed with the union. And I was kind of expecting a hostile reception from what was, I assumed to be a lot of basically a white southern audience. And honestly, they were fine with it. I think now this was about 10 years ago. So I don't know. I think it might have been when the culture wars were not so intense.

But I do think a lot of the discussion about Lee, as you might expect, have been sucked into the discussion of monuments, right? And of base naming. And I think, yeah, you're right. I mean, and I've always been someone, for example, within the military establishment, I think a good rule of thumb about naming bases and statues at places like the Naval Academy is that if someone took up arms against the government of the United States and Robert Ely did that, they shouldn't have a building name. I think that's a reasonable line. But what we now have is this attempt, obviously.

the thing is that's not the only story that involves Sweet. That's our narrative that plugs into our problem, which is which a real, right, which involve issues of race and how we manage that. But as an academic historian, there's also lots of other things going on in the 19th century, which also have implications for us, which are not directly related that question, but which are not talked about as much simply because they don't plug into, you know, basically the intensity of our cultural wars. So, well, let's talk about Lee, who you've been doing a lot of work on recently.

And my impression is that, you know, there was, there was once a view of Lee that he, whether one, you know, took it in a positive or negative light, that he was this sort of representative, a kind of last dying representative in the American context of this old agricultural, you know, sort of pre-modern, pre-industrial politics that in the American context happened also to be, you know, a slave state. And he fought a battle, again, depending on one's point of view, you know, either heroically or villainously, against an industrial, modern north, right? My impression of your work is that you find this view just as an analysis, again, taking the good or bad aside, as an analysis of what Lee was, who he was,

was in the career that he led, just woefully insufficient. Yes. I mean, the short answer is I see Lee as very much a part of the modern world. And that starts with his education as an engineer at the United States Military Academy at West Point. That starts with his association with the United States Army, which I kind of argue as an incredibly important modernizing institution in early American history. history because of its connection to American industrial development. Many army officers are

become important members of the early managerial class of railroads. The Army Ornance Bureau is significant for early American industrial manufacturing, the so-called American system of replaceable parts. A lot of that starts out at things like the Springfield Arsenal where they're making guns, right? And that Lee is part of that. His early career involves things like helping improve navigation in the Mississippi and St. Louis. That's part of his engineering task. It's not just a military engineering. There's also a lot of civil engineering work that the U.S. Army does.

The narrative you describe of Lee as being kind of this throwback to kind of a prior feudal age. As you point out, for some Americans, right, he's a hindrance to progress. But for people who are like the lost cause, he's kind of the last defender of what was in fact a superior social order, right? That was then wrecked by the civil war. And I think a lot of even academic work on the Confederacy and Lee has been kind of trapped in that kind of those two dueling stories. When in fact, there's a larger story where both the North and the Confederacy, the Union and the Confederacy are both actually part of this larger story of the rise of the modern world. world. And they're both they're both of a piece with it, even though, of course, one side loses, but that's, that's kind of a different issue. It's still modern.

I know in your work you're focused on the sort of the transformation of the U.S. Army between, you know, what we'll describe as a middling performance. Maybe you would modify that in the war of 1812 up through the Mexican War and then ultimately the Civil War, you know, a period which essentially tracks with Lee's career. What takes Lee to West Point and what does he discover when he gets there? What's happening at West Point when Lee is a student? West Point starts in 1802, but it isn't really solidified. The so-called theory system isn't really established until shortly after the work 1812. And by the time Lee is that, it himself appears at West Point. It's pretty well-chelled there. So in Lee's era, West Point is fundamentally an

engineering school. It's it's the country's first real engineering school. Just to get people context. If you went to a school like Yale or Harvard in this period, you learn a lot of Greek and Latin, you learn a lot of classical languages. You do a lot of focus on kind of what we now call the liberal arts. And this is related to the fact that these schools were in many ways originally designed as training schools for the for the ministry. If you wanted to go to an engineering school originally, you have to go to a place like West Point. And so, now this is, the West. West, point itself, though, Sylvain is there is modeled on the French Nicole Polytechnique, these French military schools, right? So as one might expect, a lot of early engineering education

comes out of armies because armies need people who know how to build forts. Armies need people who know how to cast cannon and calculate ballistics. There are lots of obviously kind of technical and scientific aspects of it. And so Lee goes into what's essentially the premier what we would call STEM school in America. One thing I want to emphasize, though, it's not just the subject matter. It's the kind of the culture he's inculcated in.

West Point cadets are very strictly disciplined. Their behavior is very strictly monitored, and their lives are quantified, right? You know, we think we have it bad at surveillance and the Facebook algorithm and things like that. the cadets are put into this kind of hot-out-out-out system where if they misbehave, they get a demerit, their class standing is kind of calculated, and then they're ranked, and their careers are judged. And by the way, the Services Academy still do this.

Class ranking is still very important. So he's in this environment where everything is kind of rationally and systematically calculated. And for me, this is part of Lee's modernness is that he's put into these systems where everything is carefully weighed and measured and things like that. And that's why he's an engineer. He stands very high in his class. And then he goes into what in that period is essentially the elite of the army, which is the core of engineers.

It's one of the ironies of the civil war and of the class of senior leaders on both sides of the war, right? That Lee is ultimately, you know, one of the model students, a model graduate of West Point, is ultimately defeated by a man who also attended West Point, you know, with him or more or less with him, and who themselves chafed at the system and did not do well by the standards of West Point of the Day, right? That would apply to both Grant and Sherman, correct? Yes. I mean, I would say that Sherman did well, but could have done better because Sherman was, I mean, Sherman could have been an engineer. Sherman was indifferent as a cadet to the demerit system.

So if he had made more of an effort to stay in compliance, he probably could have been an engineer. But because his grades were so strong, you still ended up being artillery officer, which is actually pretty good. Grant was in many ways, I think, hostile and did not like his experience there. And it was not an issue of a lack of ability. It was that he did not like the system of restraints. It was the kind of constant surveillance, the incredible rigidity of discipline and things like that. He kind of rebelled against it. And that's why he ended up being a lowly infantry officer.

And that is, you know, that's, you know, that's definitely part of this story. You know, and then, you know, it's an irony, isn't it then that Grant, the near-do-well cadet who chafes at the system becomes, you know, the paragon of the modern form of war. That's sort of grinding technological war of attrition, war of numbers. And Lee is, you know, again, you're sort of, you know, you're pushing back against this in your work. but Lee is the avatar of an aristocratic, old-fashioned way of fighting on the battlefield. He goes into the Corps of Engineers, which you describe as the elite of the Army at the time. What is the work of an Army engineer? What is his job as a junior officer?

His job is a mixture of, I believe his first assignment is at Fortress Monroe, where he's actually in charge of helping design coastal fortifications. So part of the Army Corps of Engineers job, as you might expect, is to build a network of forts that are designed to protect American port cities, right? So Fort Sumter, where the Civil War breaks out, that's another one of these places where someone like Lee would do the planning and supervision of construction of improvements of forts. The Corps of Engineers is also because of the scarcity of engineering expertise as a whole

and the Army's own kind of political savvy, quite frankly, is also then provides officers to work on civil engineering projects. So in Lee's case, this would be an early job to basically improve navigation for St. Louis. In terms of combat, which then Lee sees in 1846 during the Mexican War, engineer officers have a more direct, I guess from what we call now an operational role, frequently as scouts. They would be very important for things like maps, making maps. you know, now the American military can pull maps off satellites and kind of all the sort of geospatial

intelligence. In this period, you'd have to send someone out to just make a map and they would have to have drafting skills and the necessary things. And also to do things like planning and supervise the building of things like fortifications, not just fortifications, but also roads. So if you look at Lee's first combat posting, a lot of what he's actually doing is making maps. And he's also, supervising road construction to allow the army to pass. And these are all skills that he would have learned at West Point as part of this very technical curriculum. And he really distinguishes himself in the Mexican War, correct? I mean, he has a sort of meteoric, if not meteoric rise. He comes to everyone's attention as a result of his work in the war. There's two parts of

his career, right? There is the engineer, the expert, the technician. But there is also the the soldier that draws on kind of more, for lack of our term, romantic or, and this is actually where he gets more fame, and it's usually what's better remembered. So he, he becomes an important staff officer for Winfield Scott. So the American war starts out in 46th, the U.S. military, the U.S. Army does pretty well. The Mexican government refuses to capitulate. So what finally ends the war, essentially, is the United States marches on Mexico City, which involves amphibious landing at Veracruz, and there's a need to march England and fight your way in. and Lee becomes an important staff officer on Winfield Scott's staff.

Winfield Scott is the commanding general. And Lee is basically, he's using those technical skills I described, but a lot of these involved, for lack of a better term, a lot of sort of daring to, right? There's a famous story where while on a scout, he is hiding under a log in a waterhole. And unbeknownst, there are all these Mexican troops who show up, and Lee quickly has to sort of hide himself to not be captured,

and he basically has to sort of conceal himself and be silent for hours upon hours as all these Mexican troops are watering their horses and sitting on the log and doing all these things. So he gains a justified reputation for being a courageous and skilled officer. And the analogy I use is, you know, those scouting things, that's something like out of the night raid and the Iliad, right? This is not, this is not actually something that would have been taught at West Point. It's actually something that's different and evolved. And it plugs into older notions of martial courage and honor and kind of personal distinction that don't fit in the box of the scientifically trained engineer.

So surely at West Point, there's, even in this period, there's some sort of appeal to and immersion of the students into, you know, traditions of personal courage and personal valor. Surely. I mean, you tell me if I'm missing something. There is, but there is, what's curious is there is an odd disjunction. There is a conflict between that and the extraordinarily restrained. Part of it is because 19th century Americans of the officer class are very touchy, for lack of a better term, about their honor, right? And part of their honor is usually an absence of, part of being an honorable gentleman is to actually be free, meaning having kind of control over one's physical person in conduct.

And there are aspects of the West Point disciplinary regime that actually clash with that. This is why Sylvain is there, that very important early superintendent. He is actually fired essentially by Jackson over disputes over discipline. By the way, you have other controversies and other 19th century pre-Civil War colleges where there's attempts to kind of discipline student behavior. And the students see themselves. University of Virginia had this issue famously. you know, this is still a world where dueling is not so common, but still exists. And the kind of very regimented system actually provokes a reaction from many West Point cadets, right?

You know, Jefferson Davis, for example, is a cadet, and he famously has huge, let me give you, I can't remember what year would have, I think it's 1828. There is, I mean, there's a, there's a riot during Christmas, the infamous egg knock riot. This is in the late 1820s at West Point, where cadets get drunk. And that's exactly what it is. They riot. Firearms are discharged. It's just kind of this.

It's actually in some ways far more extreme than anything we would have seen at the Naval Academy. It's a mutiny. I mean, that's actually what happens because there's kind of explosion that occurs. There's a recognition, I think, in the army that you, that's that high spiritedness, for lack of a better term, is actually needed for success in war. But it actually conflicts with attempts to build a more bureaucratized, rationalized bureaucracy. So as Lee is distinguishing himself and, you know, paving his path to high command in Mexico,

what's Grant up to? Grant is a superb junior officer. He does fine in Mexico. He distinguishes himself also, wins a brevet. That's the way Army officers back then win kind of valor awards, essentially. But unlike Lee, who goes on to a successful post-war career, Grant finds garrison life in the Army, to be insufferable and ends up being in the 1850s essentially bouncing around from unsuccessful jobs and it's and would have been if it wasn't for the civil war would have been sort of died in

obscurity but hit that you know that is one of the ironies he doesn't he never really kind of finds his place until the war actually breaks out right and then lee after the war he he transfers to the cavalry correct yes right so the the army sets up some new cavalry regiments and so he goes from his staff position as an engineer to and then switch is posted most of the time in Texas. And that's that's basically what he is. That's what's the that's his posting until the civil war breaks out. Is that a good thing for his career? Yeah.

I mean, the short answer is less. I think it's frustrating to him though because, you know, we're talking about irregular warfare. Part of his job is to deal with the Comanche in various American Indian tribes that are filtering back and forth across the Texas to the Mexican border. And like most U.S. Army officers, he generally finds that very frustrating to me. He wants to bring them to heal and to fight them. And they usually raid and then disappear into the bush. And you just kind of rinse and repeat the cycle. Right. And he has to deal with kind of truculent frontier white settlers who can also be difficult. Right. And, and, and I think it's actually in many ways a mixed experience for him. So, you know, I mentioned when we were introducing you that you've written. this fantastic book with Williamson Murray about the strategic conduct of the civil war on both sides. And I wanted to ask you about, you know, Lee's style as a general, which in the general,

you know, understanding of him as this, you know, aristocratic old-fashioned figure, you know, part of the evidence that's popularly, you know, adduced for this is his conduct on the battlefield, you know, pickets charge, you know, sort of wars of, um, uh, uh, a kind of war of maneuver that emphasizes a kind of heroism as contrasted with, you know, the unheroic conduct of Grant's army in the final years of the war, you know, the relentless, attritional grinding of the South down in the face of Superior Northern Resources. Now, those are both sort of broad stereotypes. I don't know if I've heard anyone, though, call them, you know, fundamentally wrong.

Do you think there's some truth to it? Or do you see it a different way? I think the truth to it is, is Lee is incredibly aggressive, right? Lee has a temper. He seems to have a lot of anger sometimes that blows up. So he's sort of complicated that way. But it manifests itself on the battlefield by his kind of his willingness to be very

aggressive, to take risks. And this has been part of the argument critics of Lee to justice generalship, never mind the whole fighting for the slaveholding Confederacy, that this was not appropriate. Here I'm drawing a lot of my former teacher, Gary Gallagher, who used to teach at the UVA just recently retired. You know, he makes the point, and he's right, I think, that though there is something modern about that because Lee's rationale for aggressiveness fits in with what Confederate public opinion wants, and that Lee has a strategic rationale, which is that the Confederacy, because the weakness of its industrial base and its deficit in economic resources, that fundamentally a long war does not

favor the Confederacy. Eventually, the Union Army will overwhelm it, which is essentially what happens. So if the Confederacy needs a path to victory, it needs to actually score, relatively decisive blows earlier in the war that will then essentially force northern public opinion to give up. And I do want to emphasize this as frequently, I do this in my teaching a lot of times. Even after Gettysburg, there are draft riots in New York City. It's a little known fact. 30-some-odd federal conscription officers are murdered during the Civil War in the North. This is how unpopular the draft is. The war by 63, even, by 64, or is in fact wearing down on the willingness of white northerners to fight this conflict.

And Lee's attempt to score a decisive victory in Pennsylvania, right, is there is a logic to it. It doesn't work. That's certainly true. And Pickett's charge has, there's reasonable reasons to certainly criticize that. But it is, it is not a kind of a, there is a logic to it, although it obviously is not a successful strategy in the end. Yeah, I was recently on a, you know, a staff ride at Gettysburg for a, for a civilian organization. So folks without, you know, much military experience kind of going through it for the leadership lessons.

And one of the leaders of the ride made a pretty robust, surprisingly to me, robust case for the logic of Pickett's charge, which, you know, obviously fails. And I, you know, I have always, and I don't think I necessarily think different. today. But I've always sort of sided with General Long Street skepticism of the enterprise. He didn't want to do it. Lee probably should have listened to him. And I've always been colored by my experiences growing up in Virginia. I had a very charismatic American history teacher in high school. His name was Kevin Kelly. And I think he liked to tweak his Virginia audience of students by being critical of generally. Now, granted, this is a northern Virginia audience in the 90s. So I'm not sure how

controversial this really was. But he seemed to enjoy it in his argument, which essentially Lee was along the lines of if General Lee was really so great, why do you lose all these battles and ultimately the war? And there's something to that and there's something to, you know, just taking the failure of Pickett's charge for what it is. But the argument for it, as you kind of point out, is if it had succeeded and it was not entirely insane to imagine that it could succeed in many ways that, you know, the trick he's pulling, you know, you test them on one flank, you test them on the other flank and then, you know, you see your opportunity and you deliver the hammer blow in the center. It's been tried before it succeeded. It's basically what the Duke of Marlborough does at the

Battle of Blenheim successfully. And Lee just, you know, he miscalculates how much resolve there is in the center of the union line and it takes him too long, essentially get his act together and get the attack mounted. But if it had succeeded and there was nothing between his army and Washington, you could see political consequences coming from that that would be very positive for the Confederacy. He makes a miscalculation of the fighting difference, the differential morale between the armies. He asks too much of his infantry and he, he is too contemptuous of the Army of Atomic. But, you know, but this is part of, you know, this is the two sides of Lee's career as both kind of an engineer, the trained engineer. But, you know, of course, war is more than just engineering.

It's more than, I mean, we just saw that in Afghanistan, right? I mean, we gave the Afghan National Army, all these complicated weapons. We gave them all this material support. But what did it come down to? It came down to who was willing to fight and die to some degree. And does one side have more of that than the other? And I think that's part of something that I think we forget, including the American military establishment, right?

That you can technology your way out of these other problems. And it's obviously not true. So when Lee is making these incredibly aggressive decisions on the battlefield, whether it's, you know, pickets charge at Gettysburg or any of these other, you know, extraordinary bold gambits in which he engages, which, which Lee is it we are seen? Is it the engineer, the model West Point graduate, or is it the, you know, the sort of passionate figure of mythology that is the other stream there? It's the latter.

It's the pugilist, right? It's the, that's, you know, I think he, that drives a lot of the tactical decision making. Sometimes he'll use it. engineering, like, for example, in the seven days campaign, he makes pos-this, this is when he first takes command of what becomes the Army of Northern Virginia. His soldiers grumble about it. He forces them to build a bunch of entrenchments and things like that. But he does that for the sake of basically freeing up troops for an attempt to, for a very aggressive campaign, right? I will also point out that in the Overland campaign in 64, Lee actually proves to be pretty good at fighting on

the defensive. But his belief, and I think it's actually boring out, is that this is actually a long-term mistake because he skillfully fights a defensive campaign, but he's basically forced down into a siege in Richmond and Petersburg. And Lee's position going back at 1862 is that once he's in a siege, militarily he's toast. Eventually the union will win because they've bottled him up. And the superiority of federal resources is going to be overwhelming. There's a there's a, there's a a level critique of his strategy that runs something like, sure, you know, these aggressive plays, had they ever paid off, you know, potentially could have won the day for the Confederacy, but the approach that they then, that can't be taken because you're up, you know, invading the

north and being so extraordinarily aggressive, is to withdraw, you know, to more or less give up on a place like Richmond, withdraw into the vast interior, the underdeveloped interior, very few. few roads, you know, virtually no railroads. The rivers can only get you so far and make the north come for you there. Not exactly a guerrilla campaign, but one which takes advantage, you know, a bit like Russia has had recourse to on a few occasions of just space itself and to compel the union, you know, to get bogged down in you, as opposed to exposing yourself in places where the union is close to its supplies on a regular basis in fighting the war up, essentially on and across the frontier with the union.

Do you think, in retrospect, that Lee makes a mistake by not pursuing a strategy like that? That is, I mean, the dilemma I think the Confederates have is that Richmond is its capital. Once the Confederacy decides to make Richmond its capital, to lose Richmond, becomes politically very problematic. Richmond is also important for a Confederate,

what much of the little industrial capacity that the Confederacy possesses is actually based in Richmond, so that the Tritigar Ironworks. So it actually has an economic importance, too. You are right, though. I mean, the actually other model, it's not just Russia, it's what George Washington does. After losing New York City, Washington deliberately avoids being forced into a pitched battle unless he knows all the ducks have lined up because he knows how risky that is for him. And Washington attempts a kind of an opposite strategy. You know, part of the, I would say, part of the problem for the Confederacy is that they should have done the trade space for time move.

They should have done it in the West. But they don't. They make an attempt to do a court in defense early in the war, and in many ways, they're already on their back foot. But that is, I think, you know, When we talk about our recent failed wars, you know, in the United States, quite frankly, you know, Afghanistan, Iraq, which I guess it's maybe who knows how we want to care. But obviously Afghanistan should be counted as failure. There are always what ifs. And I think a reasonable what if will always be, well, what we did work, maybe it had some reasons for it, but there's always to some degree a reasonable question.

Well, we should have obviously tried something else because what was tried didn't work. If you look at Iraq, I think the two versions are maybe the invasion of Iraq wasn't such a great idea. There's always going to be an argument for that. But later on, the other argument will be, well, maybe withdrawal wasn't such a good idea and not trying to do something to Syria also was not a good idea. Right. And it's just one of those hard counterfactuals. But it's a question that always has to be asked. Wayne Shea, great conversation.

Thank you so much for joining today. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.