Historians used to do lots of judging. If you read old guys like Macauley and Taine, they constantly put themselves out in front of the narrative, condemning vice, applauding virtue. History was supposed to teach people, especially children, to make them better. So sometimes in old style histories it can feel like you're walking down a portrait gallery, with the writer applying tar to one side, gold leaf to the other.

And of course, a few steps behind is somebody scrubbing off the tar from one of them and applying gold leaf, or the reverse. Richard III is a villain, no he's a hero, no , he's a villain.......this kind of enterprise can seem endless, because actually people are usually more complex than villains or heroes and so trying to make one only a hero or only a villain doesn't usually work very well. Most historians now ( I hope) would like to understand much more than they would like to either worship or condemn. And that is an important distinction between the Lost Cause writers , and modern historical practice. They wanted to make people like Robert E Lee into heroes, and they did so by being very bad historians- purposefully ignoring the historical record in order to tell comforting stories about how the War was not fought because the wealthiest and most influential Southerner elite made its money from slave labor, trying to imply that slavery was not a grim business but could be kindly. I don't want to worship Lee, but I don't need to try to make him a villain, either. I can understand how a member of the Virginia elite, that had used slave labor for more than 200 years, whose family was mostly named Lee, Carter or Custis, would decide to fight to keep that world going. And then I can fully understand his mistake, and how making that mistake turned into a disaster for him and everyone else in the South.