With the scuttling of the Lost Cause , there's been a lot of piling-on of old Rob't. A pretty good recent book on him is Ty Seidule's musings in Robert E. Lee and Me. Seidule teaches history at West Point, and he's pretty dismissive of Lee's reputation. Seidule points out that an enormous number of his men were killed , and were killed for no good purpose. The South knew it could not conquer the North. The grand strategy of the South was to use force of arms to win either good terms for independence from the North, or good terms for re-admittance into the Union- and those terms were, primarily, acceptance of slavery. Those plans were pretty much null and void after the dual Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg: after that, there was no conceivable way the South could triumph. So , all the battles after the summer of 1863 were pointless. Yet, the South fought on.

But that was not entirely Lee's fault, because behind Lee was the uncompromising Confederate government. They wanted him to keep fighting. Jefferson Davis' administration should get at least as much blame, if not more. But Seidule's accusation of Lee being wasteful of his men is still a fair point. Lee knew the Union position at Gettysburg was very strong, and he could have maneuvered to try to choose another place for the battle, but Lee liked to fight, and so instead he attacked. After two days of attacking, trying without success to roll up the Union flank , he decided on a frontal charge, and that was an absolute disaster: a waste of men, acknowledged by not only himself but his generals. And even before this, Lee's consideration for the men in his army generally was quite poor. For the Maryland campaign of the previous year he dismissed the idea of bringing up supplies for the soldiers, saying that there would be plenty of green corn for them to eat. The Union had a Commissary Corps, but every small town on the way to Antietam had hungry-to-starving Confederate soldiers banging on doors begging for food. After the battle, the town of Shepherdstown became the field hospital, and the residents there were horrified at how few and how useless the Confederate field surgeons were, compared to needs of the wounded ( the Confederate neglect of their wounded was noticed by many Union officers). After the Battle of Cold Harbor, Grant tried to negotiate a truce to allow retrieval of the wounded, but Lee pointlessly quibbled about protocol for hours- resulting in many hundreds of needless deaths. The battle earned Grant the reputation of a butcher, but not Lee: which is likely why Grant reprinted their exchange of messages in his Memoirs- to show how callous Lee had been.

James MacPherson has suggested that some of Lee's victories were due to Union generals essentially slacking off, contenting themselves with taking and holding Southern territory instead of trying to find, attack and destroy the Confederate armies, and that therefore some of the vaunted dashing reputation of Confederate leadership was based on the slow-and-steady pace of Pope and MacClellan, who never kept up. That's a valid point against the Union generals- at least before Grant. But that does not mean Lee was always a bad tactician or strategist, like, say Braxton Bragg. His victory at Chancellorsville was real. His defense of Richmond was stubborn and carefully managed. His tactical and strategic mistakes, really, were nothing compared to the enormous mistake of wasting men for no good reason after July 1863, and there were plenty of others that should held accountable for that along with Lee.