Was Robert E. Lee a Northern 5th Columnist?

This conjecture about General Robert Lee may seem preposterous, yet stranger events have occurred in history that a Procopius might enfilade from the standard historical accounts, and none other perhaps.

This is only a theory, it could use substantial research perhaps, or perhaps not, in order to validate or invalidate it's veracity.

Robert E. Lee; Northern Agent or Tool of Teleology
Riding a bike through Delaware, Maryland and Virginia in 2005 and crossing through many of the historical battlefield regions of the American Civil war, a thought regarding the nature of General Lee's amazing historical paradoxes or coincidences arose such as to create a certain skepticism that he was a true son of the confederate south's principals of enslaving human beings and shamelessly exploiting their cheap labor and reproductive utility for recreational purposes in some instances. Could General Lee have been a secret agent by design filtered into southern leadership in order to misdirect and sabotage rational southern plans to seceede from the Union if souch could be made to exist considering the place in history of the slave labor versus machine labor economy?
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First, General Lee's birthplace just ten miles from that of George Washington in Virginia and a natural selection rather than one of conviction...a selection ready made to lend credibility to the idea of a new leader for the southern half of the United States.
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Second; the time of nearly a hundred years of nationhood and the ripening of the issue of slavery toward decision by combat...the north had time to groom a leader to coopt the rebellion and it might have been General Lee.
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Thirdly is the name Lee, as in the leeward side or the weak side...a name well chosen for a future deated enemy leader and representative of the pre-determined effort to have the slavers swiftly or decisevly defeated a priori.

Fourth is the impossibly silly selection of battle strategy that Lee choose to lose the war with...attack Pennsylvania, Maryland and the north enough to stir up a hornet's nest, retreat to Virginia and try to hold a rough Pattomick or Rappahannock River or North Ana River line generally until whenever while the north with vastly superior tech infrastructure need only build up forces and war machinery, counter attack and eventually flank Lee's lines until sending breakaway Sherman to march to Atlanta and Savannah at an optimal time of year.
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One would think that Lee chooseto make a hamburger hill for the south in perfect for war Virginia fields, on the east of the Appalachinan trail, while Lincoln was free to send raiders by sea to Mississipi and other deep southern locations to fight. lee's strategy was so inadequate in historical hindsight that one wonders if he choose to fight just enough to let southerners believe ity was a real war for the trophy of trying to exploit an obsolete labor force while the north could send war equipment and raiders to support insurrections for dozens of years ahead and actually moving to spend confederate war powers in such a way as would assure defeat.
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The fifth point I'll mention here, is Lee's choice to appropriate plot the edning of his war as a northern agent at Appomatox on the Appomatox River, and apposite site for surrender obviously., so much so that one wonders when Lincoln or Lee planned that end to the pre-determined conclusion of the southern war epic. The vehicular homocidally inclined truck drivers (seemingly) of Virginia's highway 460 seem no less determined a priori to reach their destinations at Richmond than Lee and the confederates were to reach Appomatox, or was it teleologically planned by God so everyone would have no trouble in deciphering the players in the horrendous conflict and how they stood in U.S. history?
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Voted for by GaryCGibson.
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Lee of Virginia

Your concept of the war hardly qualifies for such. It is not the same war.

No, Lee was none of the things you suggest. He was a Virginian like Washington (his kinsman) and was committed to standing, First for Virginia and Second for the Union.

The War was not about Slavery. It was about whether a State was free to leave The Union if it proved advantageous to do so. The Authors of The Federalist papers had held the opinion that it would always be possible.

Lee's was among the best Strategists ever to take the field aginst the odds and against overwhelmingly superior numbers.

You really should learn a LITTLE about that war before writing of it. Read Benet for a start.

Voted for by Ironfeather.

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GaryCGibson
January 6, 2006
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Robert E. Lee is an interesting historical figure, and your comments are somewhat paradoxical at least for me, an perhaps a bit biased too in a way that misses the salient features of what most people believe the American Civil war 'was about' regardless of if my 'concept' of what the causes of the civil war were 'qualify as such'. **** Character references for Robert E. Lee perhaps could not be made to support the thesis that he was a loyal federalist and was a fervant Virginian patriot that also felt more in common with any state that supported slavery as a matter of coincidence, yet it would be disingenuous to advance the notion that in the absence of slavery in the southern states the confederacy would have been formed in order to have the opportunity to war upon the northern states. *** Alternatively Robert E. Lee, in spite of being 'just' a Virginian patriot perhaps with a strong admiration for George Washington, might have felt that by falsely leading, or rather misleading the south into a series of nominal defeats he could keep the union together. Mr. Lee perhaps was aware or believed that some die-hard supremists, firmly established would not yield ground without a fight. *** In considering these people, it is interesting to compare them with the present generation that outsources, globalizes, decays national infrastructure and loses comparative advantages in education, transport, fuel technologies and so forth while building a vast budget deficit. That generation seems to have little regard for national energy indendence, nor for the U.S. environment, it's borders and etc. in their willy nilly abandonment of democratic conservatism for a pure liberal economic globalism that jettions any sort of meaningful patriotism at all-Adam Smith did not feel it very necessary to state that national interests are to be served by capitalism instead of displaced by capitalism. ***** I appreciate your taking the time to respond to this point about history however; many would have no interest at all. In my recent bike journey through Virginia I crossed a place of a battle between Grant and Lee at a railroad junction north of Richmond that Lee sought to hold, and that Grant wished to take returning from the 'wilderness campaign' in order to facilitate logistics and personnel supply objectives. Encountering extensive defensive earthworks/bunkers manned by Lee's forces, Grant quit the battle after a couple of assaults and moved on to ward the Chesapeake some dozens of miles distant for maritime resupply I believe. **** While General Lee may have learned from his mission as a member of Scott's march to Mexico City during the Mexican War (?), the earthworks use and value for defender's advantages were not lost on Grant. In recent reading of the third battle at Ypres during 1919, the author-a Mr. Wolfe, made the valid point that the planners of the First World War campaigns failed to learn from the past about how to deal with the new weapons that plagued the infantry and slaughtered cavalry from defensive position that even artillery had difficulty penetrating. The trench warfare went on 4 years of course, and countless lives were lost by the millions as offensives could not pass defensive earthworks. **** Eventually it was discovered that tanks on dry ground might break through the lines of machine guns and pill boxes, but General Haig nearly to the last believed the right method was human wave assaults following days of artillery bombardment, gas attack etc to gain some ground and eventually horse cavalry could plunge through and flank the enemy wreaking havoc. Fifty years after the American civil war the best Generals of the non-American participants of world war one could not learn the simple lesson that Ulysses Grant learned quite swiftly in a couple of days. I think he was a much better general than General Lee, who had no reasonable plan to stop the northern industrial or manpower capacity, and instead relied on domination of poor whites and enslaved blacks to prop up an elitist ruling class that sought to retreat not only from the union but from the global war on human slavery and serfdom, which had each become fully eclipsed by industrialization, communications, transport and political advances that could not allow subjugated humanity to be a drag on people better off attempting to win their rights civilly against wealthy corrupters of capitalism that sought to transform it into an anti-democratic monopoly as conservative as monarchy if it were possible. **** If I recollect Robert E. Lee attended West point, which was an American institution, and hence he might have had a bit of loyalty toward the union sufficient to overwhelm his tendency toward treason or sedition rather if he had been a bit more inclined toward humanitarianism. Today the Department of Defense has a British HQ'd company building the Bradlye Fighting vehicle, and elements of the joint strike fighter and much more. The DOD has a major premise that defense implements should be built in America, and in a global environment in which Boeing sells jets to Asia instead of to Europe by a factor of 4 to 1, and cell phones are global and cheap, the natural self-interest of liberal capitalists is to invest abroad and create a global sales and production market minimizing the U.S.A. to one puny element albeit with a lot of history and fairly well of people flooded by immigrants. The government unfortunately doesn't invest or encourage sufficient investment in national infrastructure and technologies that liberate America from foreign debt. The role of the government is to keep the nation from freign indebtedness and corrupting permanent foregin alliances that negatively impact sovereignty. Perhaps Mr. Lee's sort of sedition is obsolete in the modern global social structure moving toward one dictatorship of Satan (a Christian point of view), or at least of a proletariat with an elite cadre of corporatist leadership in a warming world-who can say--yet at least Robert E. Lee was aware of his sedition I should think, and of the implicit pimping of human life that ownership of others entails. **** One might find legal arguments about the causes of the civil war not coincident with the actual causes, and then argue that some abstract desire for secession by an American state was going to be tested in the laboratory of war and death as id Mr. lee were some sort of satanic lunatic, instead of a strong supporter of slavery and a ancient southern oligarchy that sought to retain it's traditional domination of black slaves through terror. Of course I am not an authority by any means on the civil war, and just clep exam'd American history I without studying for it, having received the general American education and occasional forays into that subject. **** As a citizen of the far west the civil war was of course far removed, and more recent history in addition to that of the Nez Pierce and other native groups, George Vancouver, Yamamoto, Jedediah Smith, the Boeings and other individuals of note were of more historical interest as far as they had been prominent in local history instead of the Lee's and others of the failed confederacy. In the state of Washington though, cherry pie was highly valued on Washington's Birthday.
Ironfeather
January 6, 2006
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As to being "an admirer" of Washington -- they were related by marriage and by political persuasion. Had Washington been alive at the time he, too, would have sided with The South. (He described himself as being Loyal to The King but added that "Virginia is my home -- her people are my people -- where Virginia stands, I will stand and where she fights I will fight!") Lincoln meant to preserve The Union at all costs and that is what the fight was about for him. He was a racist who believed blacks should be freed but exiled to some convenient foreign place and not allowed to live among whites. The Emancipation Proclamation was not (as you may mistakenly believe) about freeing slaves -- it was an act of war meant to throw the South into cahos.) Slavery would have continued in any state willing to lay down arms and return to The Union. Go -- read for yourself -- and you will see that the choice in that ultimatum was "Return to the Union or your slaves will be freed!" Slavery was not ended, either then or later. It was RESTRICTED after the war, by an Amendment to The Constitution but was not abolished. It remained legal in certain circumstances. (Read it sometime.) Chattel Slavery is greatly limited (though not gone) in our time and has been replaced by the equally evil spectre of Economic Slavery.
Ironfeather
January 8, 2006
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Hello? I was hoping that we might have begun what could have developed into a very interesting conversation -- what happened?
GaryCGibson
January 9, 2006
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Lee-Leadership Treachery Criteria
I am still riding about the south and multi-tasking on public computers is difficult at time. I haven't the opportunity to read in depth on the subject presently of course, yet did just finish the book on the Ypres offensive. Gen. Haig spent about a half million allied lives in a few months of 1919 to gain about four miles that were retaken by the Germans in the spring, and an additional 40 miles of Flanders/Belgium/France. *** Yet when Haig's command was placed beneath that of Foch of France, the allied forces essentially won the war because Luddendorf of the Germans actually cost nearly 700,000 German casualties in their offensive leaving them easy picking for the disciplined Haig and a hundred thousand Americans to victimize in a counterattack. *** General Lee began an offensive against the North, making the fundamental military error that Sun Tzu noted in not having premises that reach a valid conclusion--that is Lee's plans did not equal victory if executed properly. Instead General Lee attacked the north perhaps emulating the 1812 war's British attack of the capital then in head to head battles was pushed out of Pennsylvania and reduced to fighting on interior lines increasingly. *** Mao wrote a book titled 'On Protracted War' in which he noted that forces on interior lines have an implicit disadvantage, and that guerrilla forces with mobility have an advantage disproportionate to their numbers. *** General Lee's war reminds me of the tactics of Saddam Hussein in the Iraq-Iran war in which he began an offense that wasn't adequately planned then retreated to interior defense lines. *** Grants ability to fight like Haig in a war of attrition to wear down enemy forces is perhaps unimaginative yet reasonable in a gory sort of way if one has superior numbers to start with. Yet Grant also utilized mobility and broke off battle when stalemated to flank his opponent rather often. Of course Sherman made a breakaway run to Atlanta and Savannah eventually. *** I think that if General Lee were to be given a rating amidst historical generals that he would fare rather badly. His initial strategic assumptions were ill founded and precipitated loss, he lost more territory than few other historical generals placing him in an elite rank of losers, and his losses of forces were very high. To postulate that no other strategic opportunities were possible is of course unreasonably--he wasn't backed into a tactical corner like the Jews of Massada. *** 1) Abstract biographical analysis need not conform to prior conclusions but may advance other opinions subject to research and testing 2) Continuing consideration of alternate interpretations of history may develop novel insights with validity or value in some analytical context 3) Treason and espionage activities by important historical figures, like that of minor figures would not be evident unless enfiladed 4) Historical spies or traitors such as General Arnold or Aldrich Aimes created tremendous disaster were they could to support the enemy they covertly worked for. If General Lee had been a northern agent the results would have been as they were with the south becoming burned for Scarlet. 5) If Robert E. Lee was a brilliant strategist he would have been able to plan the defeat of the south through treachery and accomplished it, the alternative most apparent is that he wasn't such a brilliant strategist (many Generals have done far more with far less) but instead was a monumental egoist that placed fantasy as fact in distilling arguments pro and con about the effectiveness of his leadership and attack on the Union. 6) Robert E. Lee's character allowed him to participate in sedition and war upon his fellow Americans, and too fight in defense of slavery.,. such a character might be inclined too or able to accomplish other treacherous betrayals. 7) Robert E. Lee had a close geographical with the Washington's- what were his actual motives? Did he just wish to found a new nation like his 'rival' in history 'George Washington? Did General Lee hate the legacy of George Washington and wish to destroy that with revolution? *** On the subject of use-truths in forming historical and even political opinions, that are of some interest in interpreting the causes for the civil war in the United States or amidst holocaust deniers in Germany and elsewhere I would like to write a little bit here. *** The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre developed the concept of organizational use-truth in 'Being and Nothingness' or the 'Critique of Dialectical Reason'. He used examples in the conduct of organizations such as the French resistance or French Colonialists in Algeria. One can here use-truths nearly anytime one listens to Palestinans regarding the Jews in Israel. One would think they'd have their throats cut by Hamas if Gazans said anything good about the Jews. *** It was said in the 1960's that two kinds of dialect existed; regional and class. A third kind of dialect of Standard English developed recently (since 1990) based on broadcast ravers deformation of Standard English perhaps called U.S. standard rave dialect. It is not based on economic class or region. *** Rave does not entirely displace reason or scripted media perorations and it allows plausible deniability historically as the overgrafted message is secondary to the nominal yet main message. Rave's value for government terrorism, global corporate power consolidation and such is obvious. Americans have a tough enough time making accurate political judgments and in critical thinking without listening to the impenetrably dumbifying factors of broadcast rave spin. *** Since the end of the cold war some globalists have encountered less investment resistance from formal government sources, yet good though that may be the effects of radical empowerment of the wealthiest has driven capitalism towards a non-democratic edge with a two-class social order of interconnected, interowned global corporations and consumers. Neocorporatism and broadcast consolidation has influenced American markets in such a way as to desensitize the national electorate to outsourcing of quality jobs, running a vast federal deficit financed with borrowed foreign funds that require 300-400 billion of annual interest payments abroad to allow the President to finance tax cuts for the globalist rich mortgaging the nation's economic independence. *** An aspect of the corporatist globalism is the President's illegal alien economic advantage zone in greater New Orleans that developed when he waive documentation of workers. Honest American employers might find it difficult to compete with the traditional slaver-pimp ethos that hires cheap day labor off the street from Mexico instead of American citizens. *** A philosophy of history could include structural paradigmatic examples of the value of use-truth in controlling masses to the end of advantaging corrupting elements in government. Suppose hypothetically that on Jan 8th 2006 a corrupt H.U.D. executive aired an anti-housing discrimination advertisement in Charleston, S.C. in which broadcast spin attacked some homeless Alaskan for formerly owning a piece of roadless Alaskan real estate, and that the defamation reaching economic and social serialized terror levels (in Sartre's criteria) was done to create a political straw man in Alaska that would persuade blacks in the southeast that broadcast terror and compelling homelessness is o.k. if the federal government does it because some sort of possible racism existed. The actual purpose might instead be to tranquilize black restiveness while floods of illegal Hispanic workers are imported to permit now-unexploitable blacks to be relegated to third place racially in America. The desire some elites that fundamentally hate democracy to have exploitables has no interest in nationalism but in making a profit on someone else's sweat. **** Slavery in the United States wasn't done to give Africans a chance to have better lives...over time with decent people a better social method of advancing economics would have been found I'd guess. Today, a democracy that secured its borders against vast illegal alien immigration to undermine U.S. workers in non-tradable occupations (abroad), and one that believed in Capitalist reliance on equal protection of the laws to allow individual freedom and security to pursue enlightened self-interests in business, science, research and living could also discover a way to promote environmental, economic and social health abroad as well as retaining comparative leadership advantages in the U.S.A. **** It may be that some southerners wish the world to forever believe that Southern whites are so racist that they should be replaced by Hispanics and Chinese until there happy, foreign supported lifestyles fade away into a global corporatist, socialist melting pot in which biologicals are deleted with asphalt and autos, stick frame houses and high tech until even humanity to reaches that fork under the benevolent guidance of out fearless leader...I disagree.
Ironfeather
January 9, 2006
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...caught me at a busy moment here but I will return later today with a more complete response. Obviopusly you are no strategist and not well informed as to American History. Lee did not hate Washington or see him as a rival. He named his son "Custis" in honor of Martha Washington's family name. He is very highly respected among those with even a smattering of military know how. Why don't we look again at slavery?