That is good information but I disagree as to the level of Lee's decision to surrender. He was a very great general and he knew he had totally depleted forces, lost the railroads and ports, etc etc so surrendering was the thing he had to do to save his men and anymore destruction.
What might have happened to history if Lee the West Point grad would have stayed neutral or even came out against succession as a way to solve political and cultural problems.
We live in a very good country that has made some terrible mistakes by some less than virtuous leaders.
That's a frequent debate. Consider historic examples and that decision was not inevitable. The Spanish did not give up when Napolean destroyed their armies. The surviving soldiers took to the hills, the original guerillas (just the name not the strategy) blended with the civilian population. We fought half the Revolutionary War with guerillas hiding in the very same mountains and then huge forests where the Confederate bitter enders could have hidden. We killed millions of Viet Cong and NVRs but they kept fighting a guerilla war that eventually wore down our country's willingness to fight in Vietnam. Afghanistan, same thing.
There is no guarantee the Northern States would have been any more willing to fight a forever guerilla war in the 1860s and 1870s than we contemporary Americans were to fight forever in Vietnam or Afghanistan. Remember, the war never became popular until the spring of 1865, when US victory was assured...the bandwagon effect.
The Army of Northern Virginia was not surrounded at Appomattox, the road south and into the Appalachians was wide open. There were still 30,000 heavily armed soldiers that could have splintered into hundreds of little guerilla armies. Joe Johnstons army, also around 30,000 had a wide-open road into that same area. This is to say nothing of the large Rebel forces scattered around the swamps in Mississippi, the mountains in southeastern Tennessee, Bedford Forest's army-heading West to continue the war in bayous of Louisiana, Mississippi, then on to the completely wild country in Texas, western Arkansas, southern Missouri and even the Indian Territories.
As for your last statement, think about whatever bad we've done and then compare it to the vast span of human history. More gently judge our country. We are pikers within the scope of human evil. Jesus, within the lifetime of my grandparents, the world saw the rise of Bolshevism and the murder of twenty million "enemies of the people"; the rise of Hitler and the industrialized murder of ten million people in actual death factories; and the rise of Communist China and Mao-they've probably killed close to 100 million for "political crimes" since they poked themselves to historical notice in the 1930s civil war in China. The Mongols killed hundreds of millions before they burned out. Indeed, the Mongols, as was typical in mass migrations, exterminated entire populations by killing all the males and then breeding the women with Mongols. Most people don't know this but approximately 16 million of the entire modern human population is descended from Ghengis Kahn or possibly his brothers. That's just two or three Mongols.
You think about the worst thing done in the name of the United States, slavery, and it pales in comparison to the atrocities of the French revolution, much less history's long list of lamentable crimes. Slavery was a nearly universal human practice when it came to Virginia, so it is hard to morally judge the people of that time for doing what was being done everywhere else and had been since the beginning of time. Not just in Europe and Asia but in the Africa and the Americas. My God, the Aztec's entire culture and religion were built around slavery, keeping far more slaves for more centuries than the United States has been a country. Even when we abolished slavery it was, and remains, extensively practiced elsewhere. Indeed, the Plains tribes kept slaves into the 1890s and the Apache until the 1880s.
Moreover, we are pikers that are generally marching toward a higher morality. Of which other nation in history can that be said? As Randy Newman said, we may not be perfect, but Heaven knows we try.
Obviously, I wanted to be a history professor and my parents made me be a lawyer.
Now, if we get some damn football news to discuss, on anything....
