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Speaker 1: Features on Twitter. This is Behind the Bastards a podcast
Speaker 1: about famous people's genitalia. Yeah, it's also a podcast about
Speaker 1: Robert E. Lee And actually we're about to start at
Speaker 1: an earthquake.
Speaker 2: That just happened.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, we just had an earthquake. Just at an
Speaker 1: earthquake California.
Speaker 2: What a day? All right?
Speaker 1: Speaking of celebrity penises prop this is part four of
Speaker 1: our series on Robert E. Lee and horse Man. When
Speaker 1: you talk about Robert E. Lee, you know, the question
Speaker 1: everyone has is did he fuck his horse Traveler?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: This is something historians have debated about for generations.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm seriously like this whole time. When we
Speaker 3: first started talking about doing these episodes, I'm talking at
Speaker 3: twenty twenty three, when we started doing this, that was
Speaker 3: my first question.
Speaker 1: I was like, are we going to talk about the horse?
Speaker 1: Are we gonna talk about the horse? Now? It's undeniable
Speaker 1: that Lee held a special fondness for his horse Traveler,
Speaker 1: which is why he loved that horse, which is why
Speaker 1: in twenty fifteen, Funnier Die put together a commemorative flag
Speaker 1: celebrating Robert E. Lee's love for his steed, and we're
Speaker 1: gonna put that. We will probably have that image leader
Speaker 1: our episode.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it's great.
Speaker 1: You know the it's the only version of the Confederate
Speaker 1: flag that that I think has some historical value. The
Speaker 1: stars and bars with Lee fucking Traveler right in the moment,
Speaker 1: man pants at his ankles. Oh yeah, couldn't even get up,
Speaker 1: couldn't even get those pants off? Yeah, good god, almighty.
Speaker 1: What if this was on the hood of the General
Speaker 1: Lee bro.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And my dad was still such a real one
Speaker 3: and was like, so you need to see this your.
Speaker 1: Face to see some people really like horses. They so
Speaker 1: let's get into the history of this here. Because Lee's horse, Traveler,
Speaker 1: developed a fan following like during the war, really like
Speaker 1: this horse is people cannot say enough about Traveler, and
Speaker 1: that that fan following really accelerates to kind of a
Speaker 1: ridiculous degree after the war. This kind of obsession with
Speaker 1: Traveler as like the perfect horse. It mirrors this obsession
Speaker 1: with Lee as the perfect Southern man. And it is
Speaker 1: also a part of the Lost Cause mythology.
Speaker 3: Yeah, kind of like a night rider, Yes, Michael knighton
Speaker 3: kit in the car.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the kit of the kit of being a
Speaker 1: traitor as slavehole in truth.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Fitz Hugh Lee's fawning biography of his of his relative
Speaker 1: Robert E. Lee is part of the process of canonizing
Speaker 1: both Robert E. Lee and canonizing Traveler, an animal that
Speaker 1: had no idea what it was doing. Let's be clear
Speaker 1: about that. Traveler is not a bad is incapable of
Speaker 1: understanding what it's fighting for.
Speaker 3: Not the topic of the Bastard episode. No, and it's
Speaker 3: in Bystanderd here.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like a police dog does not realize what
Speaker 1: it's being used, doesn't know it's doesn't know it's racist.
Speaker 2: Just yeah, yeah, biting people, does it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Now that biography by fitz you Lee cites a letter
Speaker 1: that Lee wrote to his daughter when she asked him
Speaker 1: basically like, Hey, I've got an artist friend and like Traveler.
Speaker 1: Everybody's talking about how noble and wonderful your horse is.
Speaker 1: My artist friend wants to draw a picture of Traveler.
Speaker 1: Would you send along a description? Now, I want you
Speaker 1: to listen to how Roberty Lee describes his horse, and
Speaker 1: you tell me if this is These are the words
Speaker 1: of a man who is not fucking his horse.
Speaker 3: He's been a give fifty shades of gray, honest. Right
Speaker 3: now he about to stand in a supermarket.
Speaker 1: Ye, here's Lee. If I was an artist like you,
Speaker 1: I would draw a true picture of Traveler, representing his
Speaker 1: fine proportions, muscular figure, deep chest and short back. Strong haunches,
Speaker 1: flat legs, small head, broad forehead, delicate ears, quick eye,
Speaker 1: small feet in black mane and dale. Such a picture
Speaker 1: would inspire a poet whose genius could then depict his
Speaker 1: worth and describe his endurance of toil, hunger, thirst, heat, cold,
Speaker 1: and the dangers and suffering through which he passed. He
Speaker 1: could dilate upon his sagacity and affection and his invariable
Speaker 1: response to every wish of his writer. Now sure, when
Speaker 1: he uses the word dilate, dilate, it could be using it.
Speaker 1: Definition number three in the American Heritage Dictionary is to
Speaker 1: speak or write at great length on a subject. Perhaps
Speaker 1: that's what Lee means, but one could also read this
Speaker 1: as him admitting that his horse could dilate on command
Speaker 1: to the every wish of his writer, you know, to
Speaker 1: make their forbidden love making easier. And this is the
Speaker 1: interpretation of his words that I choose to take. That's
Speaker 1: why you read original sources, kids, You learn stuff like
Speaker 1: this because yeah, he said what he mean.
Speaker 3: There's definitely very much a sounded like sir mix a
Speaker 3: lot of the eighteen hundreds on some like Baby Got Back.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, it's it's kind of like, you know, the
Speaker 1: song Joelene. It's a great, great song. But also my
Speaker 1: head cannon for the song Joelene is that the woman
Speaker 1: singing that is less worried that her man's gonna leave
Speaker 1: her from Joelene and more nursing a crush herself, because
Speaker 1: you simply you don't describe a romantic rival that way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she's into Jolene. Yeah, and Roberty Lee is into his horse,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, that's the only that's that's my interpretation.
Speaker 3: So I mean, that's the only one I'm willing to accept,
Speaker 3: you know, already weird and yeah, well you know what,
Speaker 3: never mind, I'm not gonna call him.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna call it weird, Okay, forgive me. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna be more tolerant. But that poor horse, Yeah, that
Speaker 2: poor poor horse.
Speaker 1: Uh if only we'd had like a mister Hands sort
Speaker 1: of situation with Roberty Lee.
Speaker 2: But alas.
Speaker 1: So, now that we've gotten the horse fucking out of
Speaker 1: the way, it's necessary that we spend some time talking
Speaker 1: about Lee's actual performance in battle. His personal nobility, which
Speaker 1: I think we have deflated in the preceding episodes, is
Speaker 1: one part of the pillar that bears him as the
Speaker 1: central figure of the lost cosmethology. But obviously you can
Speaker 1: be a shitty person and a great general, right. History
Speaker 1: is full of bad falls. I would go so far
Speaker 1: as to say most great generals probably sucked as human beings.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: One of the things you have to be in order
Speaker 1: to be a great general is willing to send a
Speaker 1: lot of people to their deaths.
Speaker 2: You know, yeah, the job requires it.
Speaker 3: It's like being a billionaire, Like, at some point you
Speaker 3: have to not give a shit about human value.
Speaker 1: We can debate, there's arguments as to like how much
Speaker 1: of the of the Soviet death toll was necessary? Did
Speaker 1: Zukov was he too kind of loose with the lives
Speaker 1: of his men? But also the Nazis had to be stopped,
Speaker 1: and at a certain point you had to just throw
Speaker 1: lives at the problem. So, like, you know, I'm not
Speaker 1: saying that making the decision to send men off to
Speaker 1: death is necessarily a moral Sometimes it's necessary, right, But
Speaker 1: what I am getting at is like another pillar of
Speaker 1: lost cost mythology is this idea that Lee was not
Speaker 1: just a noble man, which I think we busted, but
Speaker 1: that he was the greatest field commander that the US
Speaker 1: produced in the nineteenth century. That is law. That is
Speaker 1: how you will Yeah, that is how you'll see him described.
Speaker 1: And this is how jubil Early, one of Lee's generals,
Speaker 1: eulogized him. Our beloved chief stands like some lofty column
Speaker 1: which rears its head, among the highest in grandeur, simple, pure,
Speaker 1: and sublime. Biographer Roy Blunt Junior described Lee as one
Speaker 1: of the greatest military commanders in history, although he noted
Speaker 1: that Lee was quote not good at telling men what
Speaker 1: to do, which would seem to be a contradiction. Like
Speaker 1: a great commander is definitionally about commanding troops. So like
Speaker 1: Blunt is doing kind of some lost cause. Shit here,
Speaker 1: I don't know how you he was a great commander.
Speaker 1: He couldn't order men to do stuff though.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's almost like he's a comedian, Like, yeah, our
Speaker 3: humor is so like I think there is a possibility
Speaker 3: that he's like kind of like cracking a joke here,
Speaker 3: he's like greatest commander of all time.
Speaker 2: It wasn't really good. I like telling people what to do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was the greatest. I was the
Speaker 1: greatest basketball player of my generation. I couldn't dunk or
Speaker 1: make three pointers, you know, good it was a really
Speaker 1: good at dribbling either, never actually played much basketball, but
Speaker 1: telling you greatest, telling the very best.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: Now, the best book length summary of Lee's actual strength
Speaker 1: and weaknesses as a commander that I have read is
Speaker 1: Lee Considered by Alan Nolan, and it is, by the way,
Speaker 1: really good book, very readable. I recommend it heavily. It
Speaker 1: gives a wonderful rundown of some of the most extreme
Speaker 1: superlatives thrown Lee's way in post lost Cause history books.
Speaker 1: The nineteen eighty nine edition of Encyclopedia Americana states that
Speaker 1: Lee was one of the truly gifted commanders of all time,
Speaker 1: one of the greatest, if not the greatest soldier who
Speaker 1: ever spoke the English language. The entry for Lee in
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighty nine Encyclopedia Britannica reflects a similar judgment.
Speaker 1: According to the nineteen eighty eight revised edition of the
Speaker 1: Civil War Dictionary, Lee earned rank with history's most distinguished generals. Now,
Speaker 1: what the kind of easiest reppost to this is like,
Speaker 1: he lost? How you be that good of he fucking lost?
Speaker 1: I will actually push back against that a bit, not
Speaker 1: in Lee, but that I don't think you have to
Speaker 1: have won your war to they claim to being one
Speaker 1: of the greatest generals in all of history. Most contenders
Speaker 1: for that greatest general title did conquer a lot of land,
Speaker 1: did win a bunch of wars, right, Napoleon wins a
Speaker 1: number of wars, conquers most of Western Europe, defeats multiple
Speaker 1: nations and decisive battles. He does eventually lose, but he
Speaker 1: wins a lot before he loses. And that's the sheer
Speaker 1: number of field battles that he won is like a
Speaker 1: big part of like, you can't really argue the man
Speaker 1: was put one of the best to ever live at
Speaker 1: commanding armies in the field.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, absolutely put up numbers. There's another way around that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And there's there's a number of generals like that.
Speaker 1: Irwin Rommel is an example. His cult of personality is
Speaker 1: kind of similar to Lee, right, where like there's this
Speaker 1: at it need to like he was one of the
Speaker 1: good Germans in that war. He was a fundamentally moral
Speaker 1: man within an evil system. And he was also just
Speaker 1: this genius, brilliant tactician. That is not accurate. He was
Speaker 1: not as good as his historical reputation, but I think
Speaker 1: the consensus is he was not like a bad field commander,
Speaker 1: like he just it gets exaggerated well past the point
Speaker 1: of rationality.
Speaker 3: And I would even say too, like, I mean, at
Speaker 3: the end of the day, you got to check the scoreboard.
Speaker 3: But you know, when it comes to something like as
Speaker 3: complicated and messy and unpredictable as war, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 3: there's so many other factors that factor into you know,
Speaker 3: freaking weather, like you're saying, like this could be the weather.
Speaker 3: You know, just so many things factor into it that
Speaker 3: don't necessarily.
Speaker 2: Mean you were a good or bad general. It's just
Speaker 2: things happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And because of that there are great like
Speaker 1: the best example of a guy who lost his war
Speaker 1: who was nonetheless rightly regarded as among the very Charles Barkley. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: the Charles Barkley of Carthage, Hannibal Barka right. Hannibal loses
Speaker 1: his war against the Romans. He loses the Battle of Zama,
Speaker 1: which is the final battle of the Second Punic War,
Speaker 1: and he loses. After that, he continues to fight a
Speaker 1: naval war against Rome for some other people, and he
Speaker 1: loses a number of battles there. He is still universally
Speaker 1: there's really no argument that he is one of the
Speaker 1: most talented and skilled field generals who ever ever existed
Speaker 1: in the history of human conflict. And there's it's because
Speaker 1: when you look at what he actually did in the field,
Speaker 1: you simply can't deny the brilliance. The Battle of cane I,
Speaker 1: which is his like crowning moment, is basically this massive
Speaker 1: Roman army larger than his he is able to double envelope.
Speaker 1: He completely encircles them and massacres them to the man
Speaker 1: at the loss of very few of his troops. It
Speaker 1: is such a victory that if you read what German
Speaker 1: generals were writing in like the early stages of World
Speaker 1: War One, like why they were ex secuting the plans
Speaker 1: they were executing twenty two hundred years after the Battle
Speaker 1: of can I, all of these German generals we're talking
Speaker 1: about wanting to do a can I, right, Hannibal bark
Speaker 1: At was like the it was the like the high
Speaker 1: watermark for generalship for longer than Christianity has.
Speaker 2: Been, long as Christianity existed. Yes, it is as long
Speaker 2: as there's been the faith.
Speaker 1: He's been Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think too, like just the fact that
Speaker 3: like history essentially, like the only reason we know what
Speaker 3: we know is because some dude kept a diary. You know,
Speaker 3: so if a dude like was that impressive to the
Speaker 3: points of where somebody wrote it down, like Yo, this
Speaker 3: Hannibal kid, the kid is a cold piece of work, y'all.
Speaker 2: And you know what I'm saying, and it lasts he's like,
Speaker 2: we won, yeah, but dang god, damn. Yeah, the kid
Speaker 2: is cold.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he made it all the way to now it's
Speaker 3: just some dude' john diary right to his wife like yeah.
Speaker 1: Shit, yeah, this guy scary as was whooping my yeah.
Speaker 1: And Lee gets compared to Hannibal a lot because again,
Speaker 1: they both lose their war, but they're both seen as like, well,
Speaker 1: they fought so well despite they were outnumbered. The other
Speaker 1: nation had a much better industrial base. You know, it
Speaker 1: was a doomed cause from the beginning, but they still
Speaker 1: almost pulled it off. And that's what makes them great.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That's true for Hannibal. I don't think there's any realistic
Speaker 1: I'm sure you can find some historians, but I think
Speaker 1: the vast consensus is, yeah, the man was a fucking
Speaker 1: genius at war. That is not true for Robert E. Lee,
Speaker 1: And it's not true based on his very clearly documented record.
Speaker 2: Robert E.
Speaker 1: Lee was one of the first four generals named for
Speaker 1: the Confederate States, but he was not as soon as
Speaker 1: Virginia gets, you know, integrated into the Confederacy. He is
Speaker 1: not the top general yet, right, He's actually below two
Speaker 1: other generals, Samuel Cooper and Albert Sidney Johnson. And in
Speaker 1: the early days of the war, because he's kind of
Speaker 1: trying to give his thoughts on everything, like what should
Speaker 1: we do here, what should we do here? He gets
Speaker 1: ignored by other commanders a lot. But there's a point
Speaker 1: where like they're looking at like Manassas, which they think
Speaker 1: the Union is going to attack. They know the Union
Speaker 1: is going to attack, and Lee is like, I think
Speaker 1: we should fortify Manasses and hold it in a defensive action,
Speaker 1: and PGT. Beauregard declines to fortify Manasses as Lead had advised,
Speaker 1: and then said, counter attacks the Union advance. This is
Speaker 1: the Battle of bull Run, and the Confederacy wins the
Speaker 1: Battle of bull Run. So Beauregard ignores Lee's advice and
Speaker 1: wins one of the earliest critical battles for the Confederacy.
Speaker 1: I mean, everyone's heard of bull Run right, Yeah, that is,
Speaker 1: he wins it doing the opposite of what Lee had
Speaker 1: suggested he do. Now, you can't call this a failure
Speaker 1: on Lee's part, right, because like that's just part of
Speaker 1: any functional military. You're gonna you guys proposing. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: it is an example of two commanders, because it was
Speaker 1: I think Johnson and Beauregard at bull Run. It's an
Speaker 1: example of two commanders ignoring Lee's advice and then winning, right,
Speaker 1: which is certainly does not suggest like the greatest miliity
Speaker 1: terry mind America ever produced. Right, Yeah, Now, Lincoln responds
Speaker 1: to bull Run by moving Union troops into Western Virginia,
Speaker 1: which was at the time just part of normal Virginia. Right,
Speaker 1: We're talking about like the region, not the state, state,
Speaker 1: the physical location, yeah, of the place. Now, this is
Speaker 1: going to be where Lee has his first combat command
Speaker 1: of the Civil War. His opponent, initially McClelland's going to
Speaker 1: get transferred to. His opponent initially is George McClellan, and
Speaker 1: likely McClellan is a Mexican War veteran. In fact, during
Speaker 1: the Mexican American War, McClellan had reported to Lee as
Speaker 1: a junior lieutenant and he and Lee are kind of
Speaker 1: mirrors of each other in a way, and that they
Speaker 1: both owe this sudden rise to command into like being
Speaker 1: generals to the Civil War. McClellan is also like personally,
Speaker 1: he's really sympathetic to the South. He likes Southerners better
Speaker 1: than he likes Northerners. But he's also just not a
Speaker 1: fucking trader.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not a great general either, but he's not a trader. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he has some initial success in West Virginia. He
Speaker 1: overruns another Confederate commander's forces in West Virginia right about
Speaker 1: the same time Beauregard and Johnson win Bull Run. Now,
Speaker 1: because the Union has suffered this defeated bull Run, but
Speaker 1: McClelland has had this kind of smaller success. This is
Speaker 1: just basic propaganda, right. Lincoln's people are like, well, we
Speaker 1: got our asses kicked here, but like this guy saw wins,
Speaker 1: so we really need to hype this, right. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: this is also probably where we should pour more resources into. Right,
Speaker 1: we had one win. Maybe if we give we put
Speaker 1: some more men into this, we put some more power
Speaker 1: behind this, they can crack in further.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So Lee gets sent to counter this Union advance, right,
Speaker 1: and Jefferson Davis orders Lee to strike a decisive blow
Speaker 1: in West Virginia. Lee takes command of the Confederacy's Northwest Well,
Speaker 1: he doesn't quite take command of the Confederacy's Northwest Army,
Speaker 1: but he's sent there, right, he's sent there, and people
Speaker 1: who treat it as if he's going to be in
Speaker 1: command of the army. And this causes a fever pitch
Speaker 1: if it, excitement to build back in the Confederate Capitol. Now,
Speaker 1: remember Lee had been lauded prior to the start of
Speaker 1: the war as the best soldier in the United States, Right,
Speaker 1: That's was the the buzz around him, And so there's
Speaker 1: this excitement like, man, yeah, Johnson and uh and Beauregard
Speaker 1: did great at bull Rum, But like Lee's really gonna
Speaker 1: fucking kick there.
Speaker 2: Like he's gonna really start getting hot.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, Okay, So this is a big news
Speaker 1: story that Lee's about to be, you know, finally in action,
Speaker 1: and people at the time follow it kind of like
Speaker 1: they follow celebrity gossip today. When he's finally sent into
Speaker 1: the fight, his fans are so certain that he's gonna
Speaker 1: be like huge that they write a song about him.
Speaker 1: Oh God, who dare invade our homes and country braggarts,
Speaker 1: though the villains b will dose them well with shot
Speaker 1: and bullets, to the tune of General Lee, I don't know,
Speaker 1: not a great song, but uh yeah whatever Lee's father.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I went to that one.
Speaker 1: So Lee's fought had once owned most of this state,
Speaker 1: like most of West Virginia. Right when lighthorse Harry's trying
Speaker 1: his like land buying schemes to get rich like he
Speaker 1: this is where like his million acres are, and obviously
Speaker 1: it does him no good. He loses it all, And
Speaker 1: Robert E. Lee is about to make losing West Virginia
Speaker 1: a family tradition because he follows his dance footsteps here.
Speaker 1: He may have had some inkling of this when he
Speaker 1: wrote this to his wife while traveling the countryside with
Speaker 1: his army. What a glorious world, Almighty God has given us,
Speaker 1: How thankless and ungrateful we are, and how we labor
Speaker 1: to mar his gifts. He's just being a little emo there, like, Wow,
Speaker 1: the world is so beautiful. Why are we wasting all
Speaker 1: of our time in lives fighting this hideous war?
Speaker 2: O for it? Yeah in Virginia.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm saying he was making fun of the trees
Speaker 3: in Virginia early. They'll be pretty without me, now, you
Speaker 3: see it. Huh.
Speaker 1: So the army, the Northwest Army that he kind of inherit,
Speaker 1: and we're building to like the degree to which he's
Speaker 1: actually in command, but he kind of inherits this army.
Speaker 1: It's in really bad shape. Again, it's still basically it's
Speaker 1: like halfway between a militia and being turned into a
Speaker 1: proper fighting force. Okay, shit's so primitive right now. He
Speaker 1: doesn't have a uniform, right, he's just like wearing he
Speaker 1: just guys like kind of a gray jacket that he's wearing.
Speaker 3: Right, Hey, guys, just pair comfy shorts, some good strong boots.
Speaker 3: It just just a way for me to be able
Speaker 3: to tell which one of y'all is us. Okay, So
Speaker 3: just yeah, don't shoot me please, like you're about to ude.
Speaker 3: It's stonewall.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he's also to make matters worse. Everyone's gotten measles.
Speaker 1: Like the whole army is sick as hell. That's not
Speaker 1: his fault, that happens to everybody. Yeah, I was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: welcome to the eighteen hundreds. All of these people are
Speaker 1: shitting themselves to death as they're fighting the civil war
Speaker 1: and to make matters worse, and this is what really
Speaker 1: is promised. Jefferson Davis is a fucking dipshit, right, so
Speaker 1: he orders Lee to smash the Union forces here, but
Speaker 1: he doesn't actually put him in command of this army
Speaker 1: Right league. Lee is an advisor to the Northwest Army Right,
Speaker 1: and so the senior officers who he's trying to give
Speaker 1: orders to, he's not technically directly in charge of them,
Speaker 1: and they don't want to listen to him. I think
Speaker 1: in part they may have been aware that he was
Speaker 1: wrong about bull run so like. And this is again,
Speaker 1: this is not specifically Lee's fault, because Davis made the
Speaker 1: bad decision to not actually put him in proper command,
Speaker 1: but also a better general. One of the things people
Speaker 1: will say about Lee, and we kind of mentioned this earlier,
Speaker 1: he's actually really bad at giving direct orders to people,
Speaker 1: and he's not good at personal conflict. You got some
Speaker 1: of this in the last episode where he can never
Speaker 1: admit that he's turning trade with friends.
Speaker 2: Daniel Square, you got a coat.
Speaker 1: He's a little bit of a coward. He can't actually
Speaker 1: stand up for himself, and so he's unable to master
Speaker 1: this situation. I think a stronger commander, even if you're
Speaker 1: not legally in command, just be like, look, man, I
Speaker 1: will fucking beat the shit out of you myself if
Speaker 1: you don't do what I'm saying right, I will have
Speaker 1: a moment of my boys fucking cap you. You are
Speaker 1: going to do this? You know.
Speaker 3: I wonder if any of the like dudes in the
Speaker 3: ranks kind of heard how he even got it, got
Speaker 3: the position that like he did it in kind of
Speaker 3: like a coward way where it was like, oh, you
Speaker 3: wouldn't even tell him no, and like you said you
Speaker 3: was gonna you just didn't respond Like gods sound like
Speaker 3: God sound a little soft to me, homie. Like I
Speaker 3: wonder if they like caught wind of that and they
Speaker 3: was like os flowin, got no backbone whatever.
Speaker 1: I think that's probably not well known to his guy. Again,
Speaker 1: how many of them can read you.
Speaker 2: Know, touche touche.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Lee, in order to kind of compensate for
Speaker 1: the fact that these guys are not listening to him,
Speaker 1: he winds up having to like carry out reconnaissance missions himself,
Speaker 1: which is an insane thing for a.
Speaker 2: General general zone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because like they won't listen to him, they won't
Speaker 1: do what he needs doing. In September, he's able to
Speaker 1: kind of get everyone to launch an attack, and he
Speaker 1: patterns this attack after the victory that he'd won with
Speaker 1: Scott in the Mexican War in Sarah Gordo. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of excitement in Confederate media over the fact that
Speaker 1: he's about to do this. The Richmond Inquirer predicts that
Speaker 1: his victory would quote stand as a monument to his fame,
Speaker 1: of which any professor of the military art, however gifted
Speaker 1: or fortunate, might well be proud. So again, this slost
Speaker 1: cause shit starts before he's actually done anything. And yeahs
Speaker 1: as it adds up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when I was when I was prepared for the
Speaker 3: Lost Cause stuff, I was like, damn this, we got prequels,
Speaker 3: like we add into a prequel to his mug And.
Speaker 1: As a as a decide, it's a fucking disaster. I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote from. Lee considered here, orders and communications
Speaker 1: went awry, and the attack fizzled. The next day, Struggling
Speaker 1: to retrieve something from the failure, Lee looked for a
Speaker 1: path that would the Federals and put out reconnaissance parties
Speaker 1: all around Sheet Mountain. One of these, John Washington, a
Speaker 1: cousin by marriage, blundered into a Union picket line, and
Speaker 1: in the Fuselata bullets, Washington was shot dead. For the
Speaker 1: first time. The war had reached into the wide circle
Speaker 1: of Lee's relations and struck down one who's intimate asation
Speaker 1: and for some months has been more fully disclosed to
Speaker 1: me his great worth than double so many years of
Speaker 1: ordinary intercourse would have been sufficient to reveal. So not
Speaker 1: only got his cousin kill, Yeah, he gets his fucking
Speaker 1: cousin killed awkwardly like because he winds up blundering into
Speaker 1: the Union lines. Because Lee cannot take command of this
Speaker 1: fucking army like they won't listen when he says to attack.
Speaker 1: It is just comprehensively a disaster. Now, because this is
Speaker 1: such a failure, the papers even start second guessing Lee.
Speaker 2: At this point.
Speaker 1: Jeb Stewart, his former student, even described himself as disappointed
Speaker 1: in Lee. Lee chased that failure with more failures. He
Speaker 1: became despondent, writing to Washington's family that their son was
Speaker 1: better off dead because the Confederacy's current position is so miserable.
Speaker 1: In short order, Lee and the Confederacy had to basically
Speaker 1: flee everything in Virginia between the Blue Ridge Mountains and
Speaker 1: the Ohio River. The ultimate result of this is the
Speaker 1: state of West Virginia. We get West Virginia because Lee
Speaker 1: looses it so ba badly right away. The first thing
Speaker 1: he gets to do is loose West Virginia.
Speaker 3: I tend to think of the Confederacy in the professional
Speaker 3: career length of Nirvana, because Nirvana lasted longer than the Confederations. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and like at this point, like never mind, hasn't even dropped,
Speaker 3: he'den already lost. Yeah, these baby wars, Yeah, you've got
Speaker 3: Dave grow yet he already lost these wars.
Speaker 1: One of the things I will point out is that
Speaker 1: like Rojava, the autonomous kind of quasi anarchist region in
Speaker 1: northeast Syria that like has been independent, has number one,
Speaker 1: won a war against ISIS, and at this point been
Speaker 1: around almost three times as long as the Confederacy, and
Speaker 1: like these people have no industrial base whatsoever. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Like it is the degree to which the Confederacy is
Speaker 1: a shit show. And this really shows it, right, This
Speaker 1: isn't all on Lee, except for the fact that Lee
Speaker 1: chose to join this shit show.
Speaker 2: Of a cause, right.
Speaker 1: They won't listen to him, His boss will not actually
Speaker 1: give him the command he needs to carry things out,
Speaker 1: and Lee is unable to master the situation. He gets
Speaker 1: his fucking cousin killed and then flees West Virginia with
Speaker 1: his tail between his legs. LMAO. Yeah, you know who
Speaker 1: doesn't lose West Virginia.
Speaker 2: Oh, nigga, he's products.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right. In fact, our podcast is sponsored
Speaker 1: entirely by the state of West Virginia. West Virginia, we're
Speaker 1: a state. We're back. So Bobby Lee, our buddy Robert,
Speaker 1: is heartbroken at the loss of West Virginia and at
Speaker 1: the general quality of the Confederate Army. It is unruly.
Speaker 1: The militia is so unreliable. Like one of the things
Speaker 1: he has to deal with is that when he takes
Speaker 1: kind of command of the army, three regiments disappear like
Speaker 1: they were militia who had shown up and then decided
Speaker 1: before the fighting started, actually, we don't want to be
Speaker 1: in the Confederacy because they're not an army. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: it's not an army.
Speaker 2: It's not an army. They just go the fuck home.
Speaker 2: This bullshit.
Speaker 1: One of the things he is good at he's a
Speaker 1: competent organizational leader, and he does have a major role
Speaker 1: to play in the fact that the quality of the
Speaker 1: Confederate Army improves markedly.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Some of this is just people get experience as combat
Speaker 1: goes on. But he formalizes a chain of command, he
Speaker 1: sets up stuff like quartermasters, like he's a major part
Speaker 1: of that. And this is the stuff that he's reasonably
Speaker 1: good at, you know, like it's organizational shit. But that's
Speaker 1: obviously important, right.
Speaker 2: Dwight D.
Speaker 1: Eisenhower, for example, is not I don't think he ever
Speaker 1: sees a shot fired in anger. But he's like a
Speaker 1: really competent as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, his
Speaker 1: job is like administrative, you know, and that's necessary. You
Speaker 1: can't win a war, a big war without it.
Speaker 2: You can't be a brawler only yeah you gotta have
Speaker 2: a book.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is by the way, a lot of people
Speaker 1: the Spartan mythology is so like all based around how
Speaker 1: great they were as fighters. That's not why Sparta when
Speaker 1: Sparta had its period of military dominance, it was because
Speaker 1: of how much better organized.
Speaker 2: They were as staily organized.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, they had they were competently organized and could
Speaker 1: number one, survive defeats and also could like better provision
Speaker 1: and equip their soldiers and keep them in the field
Speaker 1: more effectively. Like it was not because they were just
Speaker 1: all really good at one on one combat. They were
Speaker 1: not really any better than anybody else. But they did
Speaker 1: have a more functional state behind them. That's like, you'll
Speaker 1: get the Roman Empire, right, Why did the Roman Empire?
Speaker 1: Why was it such an unprecedented success for so long? Well,
Speaker 1: it wasn't because they were the best at war, as
Speaker 1: like on a battle to battle basis, they lose all
Speaker 1: of Roman history is like they sent seventy thousand men
Speaker 1: out and all of them died. Yeah, and then they
Speaker 1: sent another seventy thousand.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was a ton of them, and it was
Speaker 3: like it was a bureaucracy. Yeah, it was an amazing bureaucracy,
Speaker 3: because you can't have you can't have outposts all the
Speaker 3: way in Germany and not be a bureaucracy.
Speaker 1: No, Like, what made them great in part is the
Speaker 1: fact that they had this ability to they could take
Speaker 1: a punch like a modern state can. Like back in
Speaker 1: the day, most of their rivals, they have the army
Speaker 1: and if the army loses, that's the army, right, like
Speaker 1: you fucked Yeah, Rome had armies, they have an industrial base. Anyway,
Speaker 1: we're getting off topic here, but like that is that is,
Speaker 1: you know, a big part of his early job. And
Speaker 1: this is not something he's bad at, right, He's not
Speaker 1: the only one doing this, but this is an area
Speaker 1: of competence for Lee. In June eighteen sixty two, he
Speaker 1: takes command of the Army of Northern Virginia and in
Speaker 1: an extremely effective campaign he fights off several federal offensives
Speaker 1: and saves the capital, Richmond. This is where a lot
Speaker 1: of like the you know, the genius Lee thing comes from.
Speaker 1: And this is an efective campaign one of the things
Speaker 1: we're building towards because I am going to make the
Speaker 1: case I think he was bad at his job, but
Speaker 1: he is not bad at every part of his job.
Speaker 1: He is a competent not the best we ever produced,
Speaker 1: but a competent field commander of armies. He orchestrates a
Speaker 1: campaign in Pennsylvania next and an attempt to take territory
Speaker 1: from the north and threaten the US capital that ends
Speaker 1: at Gettysburg. And during this period from him taking command
Speaker 1: of the Army of Northern Virginia to Gettysburg. He fights
Speaker 1: ten field battles and wins six of them. That's not
Speaker 1: a bad record. That makes him above average. And I
Speaker 1: think if this were an if he were a normal
Speaker 1: general in an army, if he had stayed with the Union, right,
Speaker 1: and he had been under a guy like Grant or O. McClellan,
Speaker 1: or if he had just been under somebody else for
Speaker 1: the entire war as the Confederacy, and if he's just
Speaker 1: like a corp commander, he would probably be remembered as like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he was above average skill. That is not his job, right,
Speaker 1: That's that we're building to that. So Douglas Southall Freeman
Speaker 1: is one of like the premier Lost Cause historians, and
Speaker 1: he writes a biography of Lee in the thirties that
Speaker 1: is like kind of the foundational big not the foundational
Speaker 1: because maybe even fitz Hughley's book, but it's one of
Speaker 1: the most influential Lost Cause history techs about Lee. And
Speaker 1: he summarizes Lee's first two years in command this way.
Speaker 1: During the twenty four months when he had been free
Speaker 1: to employee open maneuver, a period that had ended with
Speaker 1: Cold Harbor, he had sustained approximately one hundred and three
Speaker 1: thousand casualties and had inflicted one hundred and forty five
Speaker 1: thousand holding as he usually had to the offensive. His
Speaker 1: combat losses had been greater in proportion to his numbers
Speaker 1: than those of the Federals, but he had demonstrated how
Speaker 1: strategy may increase in opponent's casualties. For his losses included
Speaker 1: only sixteen thousand prisoners, whereas he had taken thirty eight thousand,
Speaker 1: And that sounds really good when you describe it that way.
Speaker 1: But Freeman is kind of pointing out Lee's combat record
Speaker 1: as this ratio of wins and losses, and Freeman is like,
Speaker 1: you can't just look at it that way though, you
Speaker 1: also have to look at what he prevented by being
Speaker 1: in the field, right, So it's not just a matter
Speaker 1: of like he won this many battles, he lost this many,
Speaker 1: but it's like, what wasn't the Union able to do
Speaker 1: because he was taking other actions that they had to
Speaker 1: respond to. This is fair, but it's also not fair
Speaker 1: to judge Lee just based on his field command performance.
Speaker 1: After saving Richmond, he becomes basically the Confederate war leader, right,
Speaker 1: He's not on paper you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this kind of solidifies and dignata. Dudes believe in it.
Speaker 1: Yeah he is, though, Yeah, Like you have to view
Speaker 1: because he is effectively the guy orchestrating the Confederate primary
Speaker 1: Confederate war strategy, and he is in command of like
Speaker 1: the center of their army and making decisions about how
Speaker 1: to try and win this thing. You have to analyze
Speaker 1: his level of competence not as what did he win
Speaker 1: and lose in individual battles, but how well did he
Speaker 1: do actually prosecuting a war. And I think that is
Speaker 1: where the only responsible the only conclusion you can come
Speaker 1: to is he was bad at it. He was a
Speaker 1: bad general because of the job he is taking is
Speaker 1: not just as a field commander. It is the commander
Speaker 1: of Confederate forces trying to orchestrate a victory, which he
Speaker 1: fails at doing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting going back to your point about like
Speaker 3: had he taken the job in the Union army, it
Speaker 3: might have played to his strengths more. Yeah, and may
Speaker 3: have gone down in history, like you said, in like
Speaker 3: a better scenario for himself because it played to his strengths.
Speaker 3: It's like you're not asking you to do something you're
Speaker 3: not good at.
Speaker 1: His early successes get him promoted. Essentially, he's put in
Speaker 1: a position because he's like the winningest general the South
Speaker 1: has for a while. He's put in a position where
Speaker 1: he's far in excess of his capabilities. If he had
Speaker 1: always if he had stayed a core commander and someone
Speaker 1: else was telling him, this is the broad someone like Grant,
Speaker 1: who is good yeah at grand strategy, had been telling him, like,
Speaker 1: you know, I want you to command this the left
Speaker 1: wing of our army in this battle. He would have
Speaker 1: been fine, I think, because he was not incompetent at
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. But he regularly needed to be overruled.
Speaker 1: He had terrible instincts about a lot of things. And
Speaker 1: in the book Lee Considered, Alan Nolan makes this eloquent
Speaker 1: assessment about how this fact that like, you can't view
Speaker 1: Lee as a field commander because he was overall the
Speaker 1: guy in strategic command of the Confederacy gets ignored in
Speaker 1: analysis of Lee quote his campaigns and battles are typically
Speaker 1: considered almost as disembodied, abstract events, unrelated to the necessities
Speaker 1: and objectives of the war from the standpoint of the South,
Speaker 1: and without regard to whether they advanced or retarded those
Speaker 1: necessities and objectives. It is as if a surgeon were
Speaker 1: to be judged on the basis of his skillful, dexterous,
Speaker 1: and imaginative procedures, incisions, and sutures without regard to whether
Speaker 1: the operation actually improved the patient's chances for survival.
Speaker 3: That's a quote, that's a call quote. Listen, man, this scar,
Speaker 3: the scar from my surgery. It's beautiful, curvy, it's so gorgeous.
Speaker 3: The heart didn't work, but yeah, but the scar, yeah,
Speaker 3: barely see it.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like wow, look at the quality of these sutures
Speaker 1: on my dead cousin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, telling you man, the heart failed.
Speaker 1: Still, But to properly analyze Lee and his level of
Speaker 1: competence and success, we have to accept one thing first off,
Speaker 1: that is going to be hard for some people. The
Speaker 1: Confederacy could have won, right, This is the thing A
Speaker 1: lot of people are.
Speaker 2: Like, oh, it was always hopeless.
Speaker 1: Look at how much bigger the industrial base, the population
Speaker 1: base of the Union is. I think that's very silly.
Speaker 1: I think that ignores some really crucial facts. And to
Speaker 1: be clear, when I say victory, I'm not talking about
Speaker 1: like some counterfactual where the Confederacy conquers the North. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'm like that was ever in the cards. Victory
Speaker 1: is a succession. Yeah, yeah, they continue to exist, right,
Speaker 1: the Confederacy continues to exist and the war ins right,
Speaker 1: That's that's what I mean by victory. That was within
Speaker 1: their capabilities. A big problem people make is like they
Speaker 1: get kind of like video game brain about this, where
Speaker 1: they're just sort of like looking at the assets of
Speaker 1: each side and like a ledger and like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: they never could have won this. The Civil War wasn't
Speaker 1: a video game. Public opinion was a huge factor in
Speaker 1: how this war was going to go, and in the North,
Speaker 1: public opinion teetered for large pieces of the war. It
Speaker 1: was not impossible that Lee could have done enough damage
Speaker 1: to force Lincoln to come to the table because the
Speaker 1: people of the Union were not willing to continue fighting. Right,
Speaker 1: that was possible. There were strategies that the Confederacy could
Speaker 1: have taken that might have secured this ending, and Lee
Speaker 1: did not take them. Historian Bell Wiley is one of
Speaker 1: the first people to make this case as a ripost
Speaker 1: to the lost Cause narrative, and it's key to the
Speaker 1: lost Cause narrative that you believe they couldn't have won, right,
Speaker 1: It's a noble doom struggle. He did the best anyone
Speaker 1: could have done, but it was unwinnable because that means
Speaker 1: that he couldn't have done better than he did, and
Speaker 1: that is bullshit. That's why you have to repost this.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to quote from Bell Wiley here. The
Speaker 1: North unquestionably had an immense superiority of material and human resources,
Speaker 1: but the North also faced a greater task. In order
Speaker 1: to win the war, the North had to subdue a
Speaker 1: vast country of nine million inhabitants, while the South could
Speaker 1: prevail by maintaining a successful resistance. To put it another way,
Speaker 1: the North had to conquer the South, while the South
Speaker 1: could win by outlasting its adversary. By convincing the North
Speaker 1: that coercion was impossible or not worth the effort, the
Speaker 1: South had reason to believe that it could achieve independence.
Speaker 1: That it did not was do as much, if not more,
Speaker 1: to its own failings as to the superior strength of
Speaker 1: the foe.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Again, like I always have to come back to reality,
Speaker 3: and like you're still fighting about my people, and I
Speaker 3: think that this is where like a lot of my
Speaker 3: history knowledge kind of falls in into like the role
Speaker 3: that like black regiments played in making sure that this
Speaker 3: ended the way it did. And it's like their own
Speaker 3: ignorance and racism shooting them in the foot, like the
Speaker 3: fact that you were so racist and could not even
Speaker 3: think of the idea of fighting alongside a person of color, right,
Speaker 3: and then the obviousness of African Americans like black people
Speaker 3: at the time being like, which one of y'all are
Speaker 3: going to set us free?
Speaker 2: We'll fight for y'all.
Speaker 3: So a union man, I guess I'm a union man,
Speaker 3: Like I don't care what the fuck you actually believe.
Speaker 3: All I know is I ain't going back to this
Speaker 3: goddamn plantation, you know. So if that's the case, then shit,
Speaker 3: give me one of them, give me one of them things,
Speaker 3: you know what I'm saying. And the Union having sense enough,
Speaker 3: which I believe again is like all hell, sweet brother
Speaker 3: of Frederick Douglass, you know, who was such a huge
Speaker 3: influence on Lincoln to get to move Lincoln from like
Speaker 3: saving the universe.
Speaker 2: Universe, that's what we think about, right.
Speaker 3: Saving the Union to an abolitionist is a lot of
Speaker 3: times the effects of Frederick Douglass and then him being
Speaker 3: like we're humans too, and we're willing to fight for
Speaker 3: our own freedom, like you understand, We willing to die
Speaker 3: for this shit too, Like give them some fucking guns, maam. Like,
Speaker 3: and that playing such a role in the in the
Speaker 3: in the Union's victory being a thing, but also to
Speaker 3: your point, could have also swayed the northern public.
Speaker 2: Who wasn't any less racist. They just was like, Slavery's
Speaker 2: clearly wrong, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: So like him enlisting black soldiers could have also played.
Speaker 2: Against the Union's winning, is what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, it was. Yeah, there were a number of
Speaker 1: ways in which, like it could have been fucked so
Speaker 1: and I think that's that is so important to accept
Speaker 1: it because number one, a lot of people in the Union,
Speaker 1: Lincoln and Grant chief among them, had to make the
Speaker 1: right calls to win, and also Lee had to make
Speaker 1: the wrong calls to lose.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Yes, Alan Nolan quotes analysis from four different historians who
Speaker 1: carried out an in depth review of Confederate defeats, basically
Speaker 1: analyzing all of the times the Confederacy lost in the field,
Speaker 1: and they concluded, quote, no Confederate army lost a major
Speaker 1: engagement because of the lack of arms, munitions, or other
Speaker 1: essential supplies. And this again there's this big argument that like, well,
Speaker 1: they just didn't have they couldn't didn't have the industrial
Speaker 1: base necessary to win. The reality is the Confederacy actually
Speaker 1: some of the people in the Confederacy who did their
Speaker 1: fucking job were the people who were responsible for creating
Speaker 1: an industrial base to sustain the war effort. The Confederacy
Speaker 1: created a very effective industrial base given the poor state,
Speaker 1: not an objective sense, but given how shitty it was
Speaker 1: at the start of the war, Right, they had weapons.
Speaker 1: What they did not have was men, right, And so
Speaker 1: when you're in that position, yeah, we've got guns, We've
Speaker 1: got enough guns, right for the number of men we've had,
Speaker 1: But we just don't have enough men.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That was the thing that the Union had on them.
Speaker 1: And I do know prop we've talked around this, I
Speaker 1: am focusing purely on matters of like strategy of what
Speaker 1: could have happened, rather than the moral dimensions, just because
Speaker 1: like that's not a factor and winning or losing right facts,
Speaker 1: I'm just because it's just the only way to like
Speaker 1: kind of analyze this. But the industrial base was sufficient
Speaker 1: for the number of men that they had. When you
Speaker 1: know then that your primary issue is you don't have
Speaker 1: the man power, right, Yeah, the most sane tactic, if
Speaker 1: you want to give yourself the best chance to win,
Speaker 1: is to set up a grinding defense, right, force the
Speaker 1: North to bleed for every square inch of territory it takes.
Speaker 1: At this point, weapons have advanced a significant degree. We
Speaker 1: have rifles, right, so not muskets that you can't accurateate
Speaker 1: like you can hit, you can snipe. We have cannon
Speaker 1: with like much better shells that are accurate at a
Speaker 1: much longer range. The Confederacy could have set up like
Speaker 1: we're talking like World War One style like static defenses
Speaker 1: and may basically adopt the strategy of if we can
Speaker 1: bleed them white, they will lose public support for the war.
Speaker 1: Lee is not willing to do that. He becomes obsessed
Speaker 1: with the idea that we have to end the war quickly.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: His attitude is and you can see why he feels
Speaker 1: this way, that we have to end the war quickly
Speaker 1: because of how much bigger their industrial base is. Hey, everyone,
Speaker 1: Robert here, I wanted to be clear. Lee's not trying
Speaker 1: to like take DC because it's far too fortified for
Speaker 1: that to be a realistic possibility, but he's hoping that
Speaker 1: kind of by consistently advancing in that direction, he can
Speaker 1: pull Federal troops from other theaters, which will allow Confederates
Speaker 1: to make gains there, and that if he defeats a
Speaker 1: Union army right at basically the gates of the capital,
Speaker 1: that that will have kind of the morale impact on
Speaker 1: the populace that he's looking to have and help force
Speaker 1: an end.
Speaker 2: To the war.
Speaker 1: And defensives always cost more lives than defensive operations. Right,
Speaker 1: the attacker should always have numeric superiority because of this. Right,
Speaker 1: you can offset this in some ways, right, if you
Speaker 1: can get their firstest with the mostest. Right, it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter that your army has less men if you have
Speaker 1: more men at the point where it matters, right, And
Speaker 1: that's what Lee is trying to do. But by doing
Speaker 1: that he kind of throws away the option of like, well,
Speaker 1: if from the beginning our goal had been to cost
Speaker 1: as many lives of the North as possible, maybe a
Speaker 1: year or two of like nightmarish casualties and much less
Speaker 1: losses from the Confederacy. Lincoln, Yeah, Lincoln loses that popular
Speaker 1: support you know wow. Now, there is some debate among
Speaker 1: scholars as to whether or not this should be considered
Speaker 1: the Confederacy's official grand strategy, because they never lay out
Speaker 1: and say, like Jefferson Davis never says, this is our strategy.
Speaker 1: One school of thought is that the official strategy of
Speaker 1: the Confederacy was a defensive weight out the clock option,
Speaker 1: and Lee was not acting in concert with the overall plan.
Speaker 1: Other historians will argue, well, Lee was obviously the one
Speaker 1: orchestrating the Confederacy's grand strategy. One historian notes that his
Speaker 1: basic shortcoming was his failure to map an overall strategy.
Speaker 1: So basically Lee had an overall strategy that we can
Speaker 1: see from his actions he was pursuing, but he never
Speaker 1: straight up wrote that out or tried to get the
Speaker 1: rest of the state organized around it, which is another
Speaker 1: failure as a subarate general.
Speaker 3: For sure, you're supposed to get us on board. Yeah,
Speaker 3: where we going get us hyped up?
Speaker 1: That probably would mean something. You're also like, you're just
Speaker 1: going to throw lives at this when that's what we
Speaker 1: have the least of as opposed to trying to maintain
Speaker 1: our strength. You know, wow, Lee, Yeah, how are we
Speaker 1: supposed to do this.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, a big part of the loss caused lore is
Speaker 1: that the major fuck ups on the Confederate side were
Speaker 1: made by lesser generals around Lee. Right, he was perfect.
Speaker 1: It was all of these subordinates who bungled his plans
Speaker 1: and cost of the war, right, you know, that was
Speaker 1: the thing he just could. He didn't have enough good men.
Speaker 1: Stonewall Jackson was great, but then he gets shot by
Speaker 1: his own guys, and you know, Alan Nolan points out
Speaker 1: that this ignores a lot of Lee's agency. Quote Connolly
Speaker 1: and Jones, who are two other historians, correctly state that
Speaker 1: although President Davis asserted unity of control over the Confederate
Speaker 1: war effort, there was a large measure of autonomy for
Speaker 1: department commanders. The notion that Lee had little power they
Speaker 1: describe as one of the great myths of the Civil War.
Speaker 1: In point of fact, it was Lee, not Davis, who
Speaker 1: proposed and initiated the movements of Lee's army, movements that
Speaker 1: brought on its battles, including the Maryland Campaign in Gettysburg,
Speaker 1: and he had complete tactical control of that army. So again,
Speaker 1: part of this is a failure of like Davis is
Speaker 1: not exercising the control he technically should be exercising in
Speaker 1: order to like actually have a cohesive war plan. But Lee,
Speaker 1: having this big army that is effectively the center of
Speaker 1: the effort, is exercising grand strategy, but is not act
Speaker 1: like informing anybody. And because he is in such control,
Speaker 1: you have to look at how well he did, and
Speaker 1: you have to see his failures as his not as
Speaker 1: failures of the broader system or of his subordinates. So
Speaker 1: both ways, dude, Yeah, you can't have it both ways.
Speaker 1: And we're going to talk about Gettysburg and Lee's biggest
Speaker 1: failure in tactical control of an army. But first here's
Speaker 1: some ads.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 1: So the definition Alan Nolan uses of grand strategy is
Speaker 1: the use of engagements to attain the objects of war.
Speaker 1: And he cites this piece of writing by Lee as
Speaker 1: the closest Lee came to citing an overall strategic vision.
Speaker 1: If we can defeat or drive the armies of the
Speaker 1: enemy from the field, we shall have peace. All our
Speaker 1: efforts and energy should be devoted to that object. And
Speaker 1: that is a failure. That's a fuck up, because that
Speaker 1: is not how you win. As the Confederacy, you don't
Speaker 1: win by so vague. It's really vague. One thing, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you win by beating the enemy.
Speaker 3: Yes, as you know, didn't say I played basketball. This
Speaker 3: is our game. We just gonna score more points than them.
Speaker 1: What this shows Lee doesn't understand modern war. One of
Speaker 1: the reasons I think Grant is objectively a better general.
Speaker 1: Grant understands modern war. He knows what war is going
Speaker 1: to Grant is one of the people who first sees
Speaker 1: what war is going to be like in the twenty
Speaker 1: first century, and he carries out a strategy based on that.
Speaker 1: Lee is still stuck in this will you win war
Speaker 1: by driving your enemy's armies from the field, And like,
Speaker 1: how did Vietnam beat the US? Did they did they
Speaker 1: smash our armies? No, we won every single pretty much
Speaker 1: every single field engagement.
Speaker 2: Every thought on that one. Yeah, And it.
Speaker 1: Doesn't matter because you can win. Battles are not what
Speaker 1: wins wars. Strategy is what wins wars. Right, You can
Speaker 1: win a war losing every battle if you exact enough
Speaker 1: of a toll from the enemy that they stop being
Speaker 1: willing to fight you, right, And Lee doesn't understand that,
Speaker 1: and that is a failure. You know. His attempts to
Speaker 1: achieve this plan start with the Chancellorsville campaign, which he
Speaker 1: wins despite being out numbered and attacking an entrenched enemy.
Speaker 1: Lee defenders will cite this long odds win as proof
Speaker 1: of his genius. And this is a I think, a
Speaker 1: competently carried out battle, but if you view it within
Speaker 1: the overall strategy the Confederacy had to use in order
Speaker 1: to win, this is a fuck up.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Lee describes it as a triumph most honorable to our arms,
Speaker 1: but it costs him twenty one percent of his army,
Speaker 1: which is a higher percentage. Again, people point out, like, well,
Speaker 1: he killed more. You know, he was outnumbered and he
Speaker 1: still killed more of them they killed of him, And
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, but the Union lost a lower percentage of.
Speaker 2: You understand numbers.
Speaker 1: Vellas's that's what the Confederates. That the Confederacy can jink
Speaker 1: around and move and capture material to make up some
Speaker 1: of that manufacturing capacity, they cannot make up the lack
Speaker 1: of men. And that's what he's throwing away. Despite losing
Speaker 1: this hideous chunk of his army, he carries on the offensive,
Speaker 1: harassing needs retreating army. Just to be clear here, meat
Speaker 1: is not in command at Chancellorsville. He's like one of
Speaker 1: the Union generals who is leading a chunk of the army.
Speaker 1: He is going to be in command at Gettysburg. And
Speaker 1: the rest of the stuff about Lee harrying him and
Speaker 1: harassing his retreating troops is accurate. I just kind of
Speaker 1: didn't say clearly what was going on here. Mead, who
Speaker 1: has lost this battle, doesn't like give up or panic
Speaker 1: or he shows his medal here. Right, Lee reforms his army,
Speaker 1: and Lee tries to go Mead into attacking He basically
Speaker 1: like once Mead reforms, Lee tries to entrench his forces
Speaker 1: in the hope that Mead will attack him and he
Speaker 1: can bleed them white. Right by having his guys on
Speaker 1: the defensive, he can, And Mead doesn't take the bait.
Speaker 1: He refuses to be tricked by Lee, and so the
Speaker 1: Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia
Speaker 1: jockey about for a while trying to get into better position.
Speaker 1: Lee really wants to be on the defensive because then
Speaker 1: he'll lose fewer men, But eventually he has to contend that,
Speaker 1: like Mead is not an idiot, Meads not going to
Speaker 1: let him do that, and so in July of eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty three, Robert E. Lee decides to execute an attack
Speaker 1: on beads entrenched forces at Gettysburg. Now, before this fateful battle,
Speaker 1: we know that Lee was writing to Davis about how
Speaker 1: bad the manpower crunch was and about how it harmed
Speaker 1: Confederate chances. His gamble at Gettysburg was that if he
Speaker 1: could destroy the Army of the Potomac, it would shatter
Speaker 1: the Union's will to fight. Right, We'll never know if
Speaker 1: that would have been the case. The Union could have
Speaker 1: rebuilt another army, could have like, you know, done that thing.
Speaker 1: But also there's a decent chance that if the Army
Speaker 1: of the Potomac has wiped it out, yeah, people might
Speaker 1: like that might end the Union's willingness to actually keep
Speaker 1: prosecuting the war. Not impossible, right, it's almost DC Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're close.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Gettysburg takes place July first through the third, eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty three, and this is the battle that ultimately decides
Speaker 1: the Confederacy's fate. This is the high water mark for
Speaker 1: the Confederacy. This is what destroys Robert E. Lee's shot
Speaker 1: at being George Way Washington right. Yeah, Now, the battle
Speaker 1: starts with a huge Confederate fuck up j E. B. Stewart,
Speaker 1: I like calling him Jeb. His scouting failed to identify
Speaker 1: Mead's proper position, and the Army of Potomac actually gets
Speaker 1: behind Lee between him and his supply lines. That is
Speaker 1: Lee being out general by Mead. Like these are wars
Speaker 1: of maneuver, right, that's part of what determined skill. Mead
Speaker 1: cuts off his supply line, and the fact that Lee
Speaker 1: lets himself get in this position represents a strategic failure,
Speaker 1: you know, that is him being out general. Still, when
Speaker 1: he attacks on July first, he nearly routes meads vanguard.
Speaker 1: The Union position is only saved from like losing access
Speaker 1: to the high ground because of a major general named O. O. Howard,
Speaker 1: who had been one of Lee's students at West Point.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: Howard had actually been kind of the nerdy kid at
Speaker 1: school and Lee had like defended him from bullies, which
Speaker 1: is an interesting like beside bit that like this guy
Speaker 1: winds up thwarting his aims and thanks to Howard, the
Speaker 1: Union is able to save their position and did on
Speaker 1: the high ground. Now, so because this vanguard doesn't get
Speaker 1: completely routed basically meads army is stationed on a bunch
Speaker 1: of hills, set up dug in with guns and artillery.
Speaker 1: This is a bad situation to attack. You do not
Speaker 1: want to attack an enemy that has the high ground.
Speaker 1: I don't think I need to explain why, but like
Speaker 1: it's it's a it's like the worst thing you can
Speaker 1: do in a war like this. Yeah, have you been
Speaker 1: there Gettysburg?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, getting the getting a feel of the land,
Speaker 3: like and like you said, like the idea of like
Speaker 3: the high ground and just pitch if you could picture it.
Speaker 3: You're just like, yeah, bro, it's a bad move, homie, Like, yeah,
Speaker 3: like you're you.
Speaker 1: If you're confused about it, like even taking not taking
Speaker 1: into account that while you are advancing towards the high
Speaker 1: ground you're getting shot the whole time. Yeah, I want
Speaker 1: you to put on like forty to fifty pounds of
Speaker 1: gear and a rifle and run up a hill and
Speaker 1: then think about trying to stab a man to death
Speaker 1: immediately afterwards.
Speaker 3: First of all, at number one and number two, who's
Speaker 3: watching you run up?
Speaker 1: Yeah, who's watching you run up? And who is not
Speaker 1: out of breath?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Who's sitting there?
Speaker 3: It's just like, hey, hey, hey, come you already, Yeah,
Speaker 3: let me finish the cigar first.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and keep in mind like ifeah, maybe you know,
Speaker 1: if you're in great shape, sure you can do that, right,
Speaker 1: modern people, modern nutrition, modern like you can train for
Speaker 1: a situation like that. These guys all have fucking rickets.
Speaker 1: They're all sick of shit. You know, they've been marching
Speaker 1: in the field like they're not at their best health
Speaker 1: wise anyway. You know, like it's such a bad idea.
Speaker 1: Despite this being a terrible position to attack from, Lee
Speaker 1: felt like he had the numbers right right now, because
Speaker 1: you know, Mead's whole army isn't you know that these
Speaker 1: armies are maneuver and getting in the position and stuff.
Speaker 1: Lee's got. Feels like I've got more men at the
Speaker 1: critical point right now than Mead does. If I don't
Speaker 1: attack now, I'm going to lose that advantage, and so
Speaker 1: he orders the attack now. One of his core commanders,
Speaker 1: James Longstreet, is like, this is a bad idea, Please
Speaker 1: don't order the attack, and Lee responds to him, the
Speaker 1: enemy is there, and I am going to attack him there.
Speaker 1: This would prove to be a terrible mistake, as this
Speaker 1: article for Smithsonian Magazine makes clear Lee didn't know that
Speaker 1: in the night, Mead had managed by forced marches to
Speaker 1: concentrate nearly his entire army at Lee's front, and had
Speaker 1: deployed it skillfully. His left flank was now extended to
Speaker 1: Little Round Top, nearly three quarters of a mile south
Speaker 1: of where Lee thought it was. The disgruntled long Street
Speaker 1: never won to rush into anything, and confuse to find
Speaker 1: the left flank further than expected, didn't begin his assault
Speaker 1: until three point thirty that afternoon. It nearly prevailed anyway,
Speaker 1: but at last was beaten gorrily back. Although the two
Speaker 1: pronged offensive was ill coordinated and the Federal artillery had
Speaker 1: knocked out the Confederate guns to the north before Ewell attack.
Speaker 1: Ewele's infantry came tantalizingly close to taking Cemetery Hill, but
Speaker 1: a counter attack forced them to retreat. On the third morning,
Speaker 1: July third, Lee's plan was roughly the same, but Meade
Speaker 1: seized the initiative by pushing forward on his right and
Speaker 1: seizing Colp's Hill, which the Confederates held, so Lee was
Speaker 1: forced to improvise. He decided to strike straight ahead and
Speaker 1: meets heavily fortified mid section, Confederate artillery would soften it up,
Speaker 1: and Longstreet would direct a frontal assault across a mile
Speaker 1: of open ground against the center of Missionary Ridge. Again
Speaker 1: Longstreet objected. Again, Lee wouldn't listen. The Confederate artillery exhausted
Speaker 1: all its shells ineffectively, so was unable to support the assault.
Speaker 1: Which has gone down in history is Pickett's charge because
Speaker 1: Major General George Pickett's division absorbed the worst of the
Speaker 1: horrible bloodbath that turned into and this is that's a
Speaker 1: series of fuck ups, right. That is Lee being out generaled,
Speaker 1: being beaten fair and square. It's not that they don't
Speaker 1: have the material. It's not that they don't eat at
Speaker 1: this point like they used the men, but like they
Speaker 1: make a series of bad calls. Pickett's charge bleeds the
Speaker 1: confederacy of the skilled troops that it needed to have
Speaker 1: any chance of victory. Gettysburg on the whole is kind
Speaker 1: of like what kills any hope they might have had
Speaker 1: it When.
Speaker 3: You yeah, when you okay, this is a I mean
Speaker 3: this this comparisons on the struggle bus, for sure. But
Speaker 3: when you are like you're outflanked, you're outnumbered, and you're
Speaker 3: about to get jumped like the everyone knows, don't let
Speaker 3: nobody get behind you. Like, if somebody gets behind you.
Speaker 2: You're done.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying, Like, get yourself to a
Speaker 3: position to where you can see everyone, right, get as
Speaker 3: many blows as you can get in, and then get
Speaker 3: out of there, because you can't. It's out of your control.
Speaker 3: But for you to think that you're some sort of
Speaker 3: like movie character and you're gonna karate chop all these
Speaker 3: guys is just absurd.
Speaker 2: That's not real. You can't. You watch too many movies,
Speaker 2: like it's not true.
Speaker 3: So so if you're in a position where Yo homie
Speaker 3: is telling you, hey, hey, cut eight, they done already
Speaker 3: spun the block on you. They around the back, bro
Speaker 3: like they're coming down the alley Like you what he
Speaker 3: gets out of here? Fucking run Yeah, get the fuck out,
Speaker 3: DoD Like you can't take this.
Speaker 2: No, man, they gonna feel this. They gonna have to
Speaker 2: see me. I'm like, okay, you.
Speaker 3: Know what I'm saying, Like you about to get your
Speaker 3: ass kicked, like you cannot.
Speaker 2: They've gotten behind you.
Speaker 3: If they got behind you, got side, you ain't got
Speaker 3: the two arms, Like this is not No, he gonna
Speaker 3: leave lumped up. Okay, all right you yeah, yes, you
Speaker 3: lumped up the guy in the middle. Okay, you feel
Speaker 3: better now, yeah, now go home. Lee lumps up Mead.
Speaker 1: But like he loses a third of his army in
Speaker 1: this battle, right yeah, and this is the Confederacy never
Speaker 1: again remain regains momentum or the ability to mount a
Speaker 1: serious offensive because he does this reckless attack. He bleeds
Speaker 1: his army to the point where like it's never going
Speaker 1: to be as effective again, and that hobbles the whole
Speaker 1: Confederate effort as opposed to, like what he should have
Speaker 1: been doing the whole time was doing what Mead did
Speaker 1: most days at Gettysburg, just finding good defensible positions and
Speaker 1: shoot the fuck out of them, you know, just fall
Speaker 1: back and wait. Yeah, yeah, he doesn't. He chooses not
Speaker 1: to do that.
Speaker 3: Steven Seagal like I'm gonna go Chuck Norris this thing, man,
Speaker 3: I'm going like nah, man, Like yeah, album, I'm not
Speaker 3: even yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a lot more battles that, like, maybe it's
Speaker 1: unfair of me that I'm not talking about some of
Speaker 1: the genius moves that he makes. Is he There's some
Speaker 1: things he's very good at when it comes to being
Speaker 1: a field commander. There's some things his army is very
Speaker 1: good at, but it doesn't matter because his job is
Speaker 1: not to be great at those little things. His job
Speaker 1: is to win the war. I don't care, doesn't I
Speaker 1: don't look. Look, look, look, Sophie.
Speaker 2: I don't care.
Speaker 3: How many triple doubles you got? Where's the banner?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Literally literally, where's the banner? Like you know what
Speaker 2: I'm saying. So I'm like, if you ain't got no rings?
Speaker 3: Okare how many points you scored today?
Speaker 2: That's the facts. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And there's two things. First off, while he has some
Speaker 1: competences as a field commander in tactical matters, he's not
Speaker 1: as good as people say. Mead comprehensively outmaneuvers him, not
Speaker 1: even talking strategy. Mead beats him in generalship. But also,
Speaker 1: like Grant, he never I'm always frustrated, like how little
Speaker 1: credit Grant gets. He was described to me as like
Speaker 1: he's just he was just a butcher. He won because
Speaker 1: he was just willing to blindly throw troops into a
Speaker 1: meat grinder. First off, Grant has his excellent campaigns that
Speaker 1: you can read. He's not perfect. He makes his share
Speaker 1: of mistakes, but he gets a chance to show his
Speaker 1: quality in tactical matters, and he is not. He has
Speaker 1: some very good skill there. But Grant understands what modern
Speaker 1: war wins.
Speaker 2: His strategy.
Speaker 1: This both his willingness to like, all right, well there
Speaker 1: are sometimes where we just need to throw men at guns,
Speaker 1: but also this strategy of like we are going to
Speaker 1: Grant understands what total war is going to mean and
Speaker 1: that this is the future of industrialized conf and like, well,
Speaker 1: what we're going to do is destroy their industrial base
Speaker 1: and their agricultural base. We are going to burn the
Speaker 1: country out from under them. That is strategic thinking. That
Speaker 1: is Grant knowing what war he's fighting, and Lee never
Speaker 1: fucking does.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Grant, it's always it's it's it always like works
Speaker 3: against you when you have when you're playing from a
Speaker 3: position of you feel you have something to prove because
Speaker 3: I'm being careful with how I say this, but like
Speaker 3: it's because you actually don't have any self confidence. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 3: so you're actually really trying to prove it to your
Speaker 3: your own self worth, and when you play from that,
Speaker 3: you're not stable, like and and if you already like
Speaker 3: and it clearly he knows his cause isn't just so
Speaker 3: there's like there's you're gonna make dumb ass mistakes because
Speaker 3: you you're not right in ahead. So I feel like,
Speaker 3: you know, you take somebody like you lissens as Grant
Speaker 3: who obviously like I ain't got no ulysses posters on
Speaker 3: my wall like this niggame my hero. But I will
Speaker 3: say he could fall back and say, well, let me
Speaker 3: think about this for a little bit, Like I have
Speaker 3: time to think this too, because I know who I am.
Speaker 3: I understand my position. I don't give a funk a
Speaker 3: by child's glory like week in a Witness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Grant is never fighting the war to like make
Speaker 1: a name for himself. Yeah, grand Daddy issues it. Yeah Yeah,
Speaker 1: Grant just understands what needs to be.
Speaker 2: Done, does it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Lee's defenders are down so bad when it comes to
Speaker 1: explaining the disaster that was Gettysburg that rather than like
Speaker 1: analyzing that because it's just bad for them, they have
Speaker 1: to focus on how stoic and eloquent Robert E. Lee
Speaker 1: was in defeat, which is one of my favorite.
Speaker 2: Bits of cope.
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote from Smithsonian Magazine here, as the
Speaker 1: minority who hadn't been cut to ribbons. Streamed back to
Speaker 1: the Confederate lines, Lee rode in splendid calm among them, apologizing,
Speaker 1: it's all my fault, he assured stunned privates and core.
Speaker 1: He took time to admonish mildly an officer who was
Speaker 1: beating his horse. Don't whip him, Captain, it does no good.
Speaker 1: I had a foolish horse once, and kind treatment is
Speaker 1: the best. Then he resumed his apologies. I am very
Speaker 1: sorry the task was too great for you, but we
Speaker 1: mustn't despond. Shelby Foote has called this Lee's finest moment,
Speaker 1: but generals don't want apologies from those beneath them, and
Speaker 1: that goes both ways. After midnight, he told a cavalry officer,
Speaker 1: I never saw troops behave more magnificently than Pickett's division
Speaker 1: of Virginians. Then he fell silent, and it was then
Speaker 1: that he exclaimed, as the officer wrote it down, too bad,
Speaker 1: too bad, oh, too bad, Like that is so lame,
Speaker 1: just like at first this like, oh you know, it's
Speaker 1: my fault is and it is his fault. But liked
Speaker 1: the fact that the fact that like his defenders take
Speaker 1: this like this was his finest moment, Well, you have
Speaker 1: to view it as his finest moment because he didn't
Speaker 1: fucking win. Yeah right, He's just so magnanimous in defeat.
Speaker 1: He got tens of thousands of men killed pointlessly. Why
Speaker 1: is the fact that he was humble pretended to be
Speaker 1: humble about it good?
Speaker 2: I don't get it, dude.
Speaker 3: Like, of all the things they could have told themselves,
Speaker 3: like the effort you had to go through to create
Speaker 3: the lost cause, which of course grew over time, but
Speaker 3: I'm like it seemed to be more simple, eloquent for
Speaker 3: him to just be like, ah, man, general Lee dog,
Speaker 3: he didn't know what the fuck he was doing. That's
Speaker 3: why we lost. Yeah, Like you could have just said that,
Speaker 3: and like that might have Actually, then you wouldn't have
Speaker 3: to like make up some other fantasy stuff.
Speaker 2: You could just be like, oh, man, he ain't know
Speaker 2: what he was doing. Like you could have just said that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Sure, Jim put his hand into the disposal and turned
Speaker 1: on the blades and it cut his entire hand to ribbons,
Speaker 1: and that was really dumb. But he had such a
Speaker 1: stoic look on his face the whole time. You know,
Speaker 1: I really respect the way he ground his hand into
Speaker 1: hamburger meat so absurd now that article gives us a
Speaker 1: more comical look at Lee than guy's like foot tended
Speaker 1: to want to accept quote. For months, Lee had been
Speaker 1: traveling with a pet hen meant for the stewpot. She
Speaker 1: had won his heart by entering his tent first thing
Speaker 1: every morning and laying his breakfast egg under his spartan cot.
Speaker 1: As an army of Northern Virginia was breaking camp and
Speaker 1: all deliberate speed for the withdrawal, Lee's staff ran around
Speaker 1: anxiously crying where is the hen. Lee himself found her
Speaker 1: nestled in her accustomed spot on the wagon that transported
Speaker 1: his personal materiel, worried about his fucking hen. You've just
Speaker 1: gotten like fucking tens of thousands of men killed and maimed,
Speaker 1: and your stupid fuck up worried about your goddamn hen.
Speaker 2: You lose your guy?
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is he's such a loser. This your man
Speaker 4: like es y'all dude, this is y'all's due. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 4: this is your boy. Huh yeah, words out got you.
Speaker 4: In the end, Lee failed. After almost two years of
Speaker 4: feudal slaughter, he finally found himself checkmated by Grant. His
Speaker 4: fighting retreat started with sixty four thousand men. By April ninth,
Speaker 4: eighteen sixty five, he had less than ten thousand defectives
Speaker 4: in the Army of Northern Virginia. His casualty this like
Speaker 4: I think sixty four thousand casually something like that, cost
Speaker 4: the Union sixty three thousand men. This is a ratio
Speaker 4: that technically favors him, but not to a degree that
Speaker 4: is impressive or noteworthy. The so called greatest American field
Speaker 4: commander of the nineteenth century, as Lost Cause histories claim,
Speaker 4: was defeated in the field by both Lee and Grant.
Speaker 4: Now there were some in Lee's command who had advocated
Speaker 4: that he take his army into a guerrilla struggle. Lee
Speaker 4: rejected this, telling his artillery commander the men would become
Speaker 4: mere bands of marauders, and the enemy's cavalry would pursue
Speaker 4: them and overrun many wide sections they may never have
Speaker 4: occasion to visit. We would bring on a state of
Speaker 4: affairs it would take the country years to recover from.
Speaker 4: And as for myself, you young fellows might go bushwhacking,
Speaker 4: but the only dignified course for me would be to
Speaker 4: go to General Grant and surrender myself and take the consequences.
Speaker 4: And this is the first time he makes a good
Speaker 4: call in this war where he's like, it's done. It
Speaker 4: took him way too long, but he does.
Speaker 2: So it is a long time ago.
Speaker 1: But yeah, all right, man, Yeah. So, contrary to the
Speaker 1: opinions of Wiserman, Lincoln's successors opted for a conciliatory response
Speaker 1: to the traders who survived. Lee, along with Jefferson Davis
Speaker 1: and other major Confederate officers, was subject to some restrictions
Speaker 1: after the war, but these are all eventually lifted. The
Speaker 1: primary long term consequence for Roberty Lee of losing is
Speaker 1: that he and Mary never get Arlington back, and this
Speaker 1: brings us to one of the more amusing parts of
Speaker 1: the Roberty Lee saga. Once Mary had forfeited the property
Speaker 1: for failing to pay her taxes, it went up for auction.
Speaker 1: The US government was the Adam Sandler in this incident.
Speaker 1: To return to our happy Gilmour comparison, yes, and makes
Speaker 1: the only bid. They get a good deal, about twenty
Speaker 1: five percent under the assessed value of the property. Arlington
Speaker 1: is first used as a cemetery two years after the
Speaker 1: US buys it, when Quartermaster of the Army. Montgomery Meeks
Speaker 1: turns to it in desperation from the Smithsonian Magazine. The
Speaker 1: first soldier laid to rest there was Private William Christman,
Speaker 1: twenty one, of the sixty seventh Pennsylvania Infantry. He was
Speaker 1: buried in a plot on Arlington's northeast corner on May thirteenth,
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty four. A farmer newly recruited into the army,
Speaker 1: Christman never knew a day of combat. Like many others
Speaker 1: who would join him in Arlington, he was felled by disease.
Speaker 1: He died of peritontitis in Washington's Lincoln's General Hospital on
Speaker 1: May eleventh. His burial was soon followed by other soldiers
Speaker 1: men who were quote too poor to be embalmed and
Speaker 1: sent for burial.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: It is perhaps fitting then that one of the first
Speaker 1: jerky steps this country took towards a quality happened when
Speaker 1: poor free white men were buried across the field from
Speaker 1: a graveyard for slaves and freedmen of the Leaf and
Speaker 1: Custis families. Right, this is one of the first things
Speaker 1: that happens with Arlington is you have poor white men
Speaker 1: buried in the same place, in.
Speaker 2: A place, Yeah, got a start somewhere.
Speaker 1: I guess. Yeah. The need for burial space only increased
Speaker 1: as the summer of eighteen sixty, war On and Meeks
Speaker 1: recommended that the land around Arlington Mansion be turned into
Speaker 1: a national cemetery. A separate chunk of the property was
Speaker 1: turned into a village for newly freed former slaves. So
Speaker 1: like there's like a little town there for people who
Speaker 1: have just gotten freed on the former custus property. And
Speaker 1: this is done out of spite. Yeah, it's totally done. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Meegs is not just doing this because it's necessary. He's
Speaker 1: doing this because fuck Robert E. Lee. Yeah, exactly. Quote
Speaker 1: Meeg's evicted officers from the mansion, installed a military chaplain
Speaker 1: and a loyal lieutenant to oversee cemetary operations, and proceeded
Speaker 1: with new burials encircling Missus Lee's garden with the tombstones
Speaker 1: of prominent Union officers. The first of these was Captain
Speaker 1: Albert H. Packard of the thirty first Main Infantry, shot
Speaker 1: in the head during the Battle of the Second Wilderness.
Speaker 1: He was laid to rest where Mary Lee had enjoyed
Speaker 1: reading in warm weather, surrounded by the scent of honeysuckle
Speaker 1: and jasmine. By the end of eighteen sixty four, some
Speaker 1: forty officers graves had joined his and in short order
Speaker 1: Meigs adds the remains of more than two thousand unknown soldiers,
Speaker 1: many of them knew immigrants, whose first act, after a
Speaker 1: arriving to this nation in total poverty, was to fight
Speaker 1: and die in the cause of liberty. These men were
Speaker 1: buried in Mary Lee's former garden as well, which is
Speaker 1: you know, a purposeful.
Speaker 3: Move yeah, yeah, a symbol for for yeah generations to
Speaker 3: come yep.
Speaker 1: By October of eighteen sixty four, the war had claimed
Speaker 1: Meegs's son as well. He was shot while scouting in
Speaker 1: the Shenandoah, and while he was not buried in Arlington,
Speaker 1: his loss deepened Meegs's commitment that Arlington should never return
Speaker 1: to the Lee's possession. When Roberty Lee is surrendered on
Speaker 1: April ninth, eighteen sixty five, Meegs wrote this, the rebels
Speaker 1: are all murderers of my son and the sons of
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands. Justice seems not satisfied if they escaped
Speaker 1: judicial trial and execution by the government which they have
Speaker 1: betrayed and attacked, and those people loyal and disloyal that
Speaker 1: they have slaughtered, and I agree with them. We should
Speaker 1: have killed all these guys. Yeah, we should have exec
Speaker 1: acted Lee. We should have executed Davis. It was the
Speaker 1: only ethical thing to do. We didn't do it, and
Speaker 1: that's a lingering mistake. It remains a mistake to this day.
Speaker 1: That said, Meegus in his actions ensures some sort of
Speaker 1: vengeance to Roberty Lee. Not enough, but it's something. Lee
Speaker 1: lives another five years after the Civil War, and he
Speaker 1: is unfortunately widely respected both as a symbol of white
Speaker 1: supremacist rebellion and as a symbol of the attempt at
Speaker 1: unity after the Civil War. That said, he never sees
Speaker 1: Arlington again lost cause. Historians paint this last chapter of
Speaker 1: his life as a crucial period for the United States.
Speaker 1: As biographer Douglas Freeman claimed, Lee the Warrior became Lee
Speaker 1: the Conciliator within less than five months from appomatics, he
Speaker 1: was telling Southern men to abandon all opposition, to regard
Speaker 1: the United States as their country, and to labor for
Speaker 1: harmony and better understanding. Seldom had a famous man so
Speaker 1: completely reversed himself in so brief that time, and never
Speaker 1: more sincerely, And it's true true that Lee regularly expressed
Speaker 1: advocacy for reunification. His last job was as president of
Speaker 1: Washington College, and we can view this as his consolation prize.
Speaker 1: He doesn't get to be the George Washington of a
Speaker 1: new country, but he gets to run a college named
Speaker 1: after him. Yeah. In a letter accepting the job, he stated,
Speaker 1: I think it is the duty of every citizen, in
Speaker 1: the present condition of the country to do all of
Speaker 1: his power to aid in the restoration of peace and harmony,
Speaker 1: and in no way oppose the policy of the state
Speaker 1: or general governments directed to that object. It is particularly
Speaker 1: incumbent on those charged with the instruction of the young
Speaker 1: to set them an example of submission to authority. Interesting,
Speaker 1: I'm like.
Speaker 3: You had a chance, you could have This could have
Speaker 3: gone so different.
Speaker 1: And it is also not accurate to say that he
Speaker 1: was this this configure of conciliation as we're building towards right.
Speaker 2: He was not.
Speaker 1: We have to see that statement he just made in context.
Speaker 1: Reconstruction had just begun and it faced tremendous and often
Speaker 1: violent resistance. Lee did on paper, in some of his
Speaker 1: public statements, seemed to oppose insurgent attempts to fight reconstruction,
Speaker 1: but his heart had not changed, and in private he
Speaker 1: complained to his friend and fellow General EGW. Butler, we
Speaker 1: are obliged to confess that, notwithstanding our boastful assertions to
Speaker 1: the world for nearly a century, that our government was
Speaker 1: based on the consent of the people, which we claimed
Speaker 1: was the only rightful foundation on which any government could stand.
Speaker 1: It rests upon force as much as any government that
Speaker 1: ever existed. And while that's true, what about your keeping slaves?
Speaker 1: And what about the enforcement of a racial hierarchy? Right like,
Speaker 1: Lee doesn't care about the fact that the government enforces
Speaker 1: it shit through violence. He's just angry he lost. You know,
Speaker 1: he and his friends were worse at doing violence. In
Speaker 1: rampant correspondence with influential friends around the country, Lee harangued
Speaker 1: the North for what he viewed as it unconstitutional imposition
Speaker 1: on the South. His reputation as a uniter is based
Speaker 1: on a couple of public statements and at odds with
Speaker 1: his actual behavior. In eighteen sixty six, the old Colonel
Speaker 1: for he was never made general in the army of
Speaker 1: a recognized nation, was interviewed by the Duke of Argyle.
Speaker 1: Here he sketched out the early dimensions of what became
Speaker 1: Lost Cause mythology. The relations between the negroes and the
Speaker 1: whites were friendly formerly and would remain so if legislation
Speaker 1: be not passed in favor of the blacks in a
Speaker 1: way that will only do them harm. Yeah, friendly, friendly,
Speaker 1: Do I need to reread the quotes of you whipping
Speaker 1: people like yeah, yeah, friendly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I cannot wait.
Speaker 3: I cannot wait for when we get to do the
Speaker 3: Lost Cause stuff and that and the role that that actual.
Speaker 2: Yeah well, I mean like sick. Most black people liked it,
Speaker 2: like that was.
Speaker 3: Fine, fine for you guys came out there and told
Speaker 3: them they were slaves.
Speaker 1: They didn't even know now. Alan Nolan goes on to
Speaker 1: summarize Lee then continued that the North was raising up
Speaker 1: feelings of race and argue that laws in behalf of
Speaker 1: the blacks would not work to their advantage and would
Speaker 1: keep alive bad blood in the South against the North.
Speaker 1: The Southeast stated should be left alone. The contrary, course
Speaker 1: was provocative of Southern hostility. He continued, The Southerners took
Speaker 1: up arms. Honestly, surely it is to be desired that
Speaker 1: the goodwill of our people be encouraged and there should
Speaker 1: be no inciting them against the North. And what he's
Speaker 1: saying here is it's not fair we lost, and even
Speaker 1: though we did, we should get to act like we won. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: well just leave us alone. That can you not just
Speaker 1: pretend we won? No, you lost, you lost.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they're trying to do like whoever smelted delted racism? Yeah,
Speaker 3: they're like yeah, yeah, like you know who only talks
Speaker 3: about racism is racist? So yeah, you shouldn't have came
Speaker 3: Downren told him that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like by trying to enforce laws letting black people vote,
Speaker 1: you're the ones being violent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, no, that is what you're Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's got it. It's so the same as the shit
Speaker 1: people say today.
Speaker 2: Right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway, Lee did not keep his activism private. In eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, Union General William Rosecranz, a Democrat, commissioned the
Speaker 1: writing of a letter that would lay out the supposed
Speaker 1: views of the Southern people about their defeat and what
Speaker 1: should come after. It complained that although Southerners had no
Speaker 1: unfriendly feelings towards the government anymore, their rights were being
Speaker 1: infringed by laws enforcing black civil rights. This they insisted
Speaker 1: was not due to racism or their desire to enforce
Speaker 1: a racial hierarchy. They have grown up in our midst
Speaker 1: and we have been accustomed from childhood to look upon
Speaker 1: them with kindness. This change in the relation of the
Speaker 1: two races has brought no change in our feelings towards them.
Speaker 1: They still constitute an important part of our laboring population.
Speaker 1: Without their labor, the lands of the South would be
Speaker 1: comparatively unproduct and without the employment which Southern agriculture affords,
Speaker 1: they would be destitute of a means of subsistence and
Speaker 1: become paupers dependent upon public bounty. It's such a no,
Speaker 1: we don't hate them. We need them to do the
Speaker 1: work that we're not going to do. We just don't
Speaker 1: want them to have any rights.
Speaker 3: Listen, But like, okay, hear me out, if they don't
Speaker 3: have to work our fields, Deman, we have to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's not fair.
Speaker 2: That's not fair.
Speaker 1: Lee doesn't just sign this letter, he actively pushes other
Speaker 1: former Confederates to sign it as well. And while that
Speaker 1: letter is obviously racist as fuck, what Lee said in
Speaker 1: person is even worse. Alan Nolan recounts one incident during
Speaker 1: a visit of Lee to his cousin Thomas Carter. In
Speaker 1: discussing farming, Lee advised Carter not to depend on labor
Speaker 1: for the ninety or so blacks who still lived on
Speaker 1: the place the government would, Lee said provide for them.
Speaker 1: Carter should employ white people, and then drew a comparison that,
Speaker 1: like many racist comments since Delton, stereotypes and completely disregarded
Speaker 1: the cause and effect where race is concerned. I have
Speaker 1: always observed that wherever you find the Negro, everything is
Speaker 1: going down around him, and wherever you find the white man,
Speaker 1: you see everything around him improving. And I think that's
Speaker 1: funny from a man who led his side to a
Speaker 1: defeat so bad that its cities were burnt to the
Speaker 1: fucking ground. Was everything going down around you at the
Speaker 1: in eighteen sixty five? How was the South doing, Bobby Lee,
Speaker 1: after you and your friends were in charge for five years?
Speaker 1: Was it all improving?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, just watching Sherman Burness crops and going, wow, we've
Speaker 1: really improved the South. Things are looking up for us now.
Speaker 3: Listen, man, this had been so much better, like we
Speaker 3: were in charge.
Speaker 5: It's such a funny thing for him, specifically to say,
Speaker 5: like you guys were in charge and you destroyed your
Speaker 5: entire culture.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I should let me be in charge. Wait what.
Speaker 1: Hir? Yeah, so all of this is infuriating. I do
Speaker 1: think it punctures the myth that Lee was this great
Speaker 1: uniter after the war. But because of how infuriating this is,
Speaker 1: I want to end us on a happier note. The
Speaker 1: end of the winding story of Robert E. Lee's supposedly
Speaker 1: beloved plantation Arlington, his wife Mary Lee wrote to one
Speaker 1: friend that the occupation of her family land enraged her
Speaker 1: is so much that she could not write quote with
Speaker 1: composure about it. She howled she was particularly angry that
Speaker 1: the graves of poor men quote are planted up next
Speaker 1: to the very door without any regard to common decency.
Speaker 1: If justice and law are not utterly extinct.
Speaker 2: In the US, I will have it back.
Speaker 1: And again this is part of like there, these are
Speaker 1: poor men, how dare they bury them on my family land?
Speaker 2: Oh? My god, have you no manners?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Like word, that's what you worried about? Okay.
Speaker 1: Bobby Lee tries in secret to get this property back
Speaker 1: for his wife's family. He asks a lawyer friend to
Speaker 1: find a path for him to take retake possession and
Speaker 1: stop the government from burying soldiers there. Robert Poole writes
Speaker 1: quote Lee made a clandestine visit to the old estate
Speaker 1: in the Autumner winter of eighteen sixty five. He concluded
Speaker 1: that the place could be made habitable again if a
Speaker 1: wall was built to screen the graves from the mansion.
Speaker 1: But Smith Lee made the mistake of sharing his views
Speaker 1: with the cemetery superintendent, who dutifully shared them with Meegs,
Speaker 1: along with the mystery visitor's identity. While the Les worked
Speaker 1: to reclaim Arlington, Meegs urged Edwards Edwin Stanton in early
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty six to make sure the government had sound
Speaker 1: title to the cemetery. The land had been consecrated by
Speaker 1: the remains buried there and could not be given back
Speaker 1: to the Lees. He insisted, striking a refrain he would
Speaker 1: repeat in the years since. Yet the Lees clung to
Speaker 1: the hope that Arlington might be returned to the family,
Speaker 1: if not to Missus Lee, than to one of their sons.
Speaker 1: The former General was quietly pursuing this objective when he
Speaker 1: met with his lawyers for the last time in July
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy. The prospect does not look promising he reported
Speaker 1: to Mary and I I love Meigs. I love that
Speaker 1: he's like he sees how important this is to them
Speaker 1: and is like, well, I can't make the government kill them,
Speaker 1: but I can damn sure make sure they never get
Speaker 1: to step foot in that fucking house again. I also
Speaker 1: love Mary's like their cousin Smith is like, well, we
Speaker 1: can make the property. We just have to build a
Speaker 1: wall between the graves of all those deady.
Speaker 2: Walk outside.
Speaker 3: Yard.
Speaker 2: It's wall.
Speaker 1: It's such a just and the degree of what a
Speaker 1: disgusting person to be, like, well, I can't. You can't
Speaker 1: expect me to look at poor men's graves, the men
Speaker 1: who died fighting for liberties graves like I can't. How sickening,
Speaker 1: what a bad imagine.
Speaker 2: How bad you could miss the point? Yeah, just like
Speaker 2: take the l, like just just.
Speaker 3: Take the l and yeah, yeah, shout out megs did
Speaker 3: being like be it like, oh word, hey homie, I
Speaker 3: don't know how it is to tell you it this
Speaker 3: Saint jo Land. Yeah you are not just out of yes,
Speaker 3: like we broke up. Stop texting me like we're not together.
Speaker 3: It's not show Land as a matter of fact, like
Speaker 3: it like good thing means had like some kooth because
Speaker 3: at that point I'm burying somebody like in the living room.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm like, all right, you know you're not getting
Speaker 2: a picture. Mm hmmm.
Speaker 3: Put put this coffee right here on your porch where
Speaker 3: you catch the vapors and drink your sweet tea. Actually,
Speaker 3: no shade on sweet tea. That's one of the most
Speaker 3: things that fact has ever given us.
Speaker 1: Roberty Lee Guys October twelfth, eighteen seventy. Now some will
Speaker 1: argue that this was the tragic result of a night
Speaker 1: of furious love making with this horse traveler. Some historians
Speaker 1: say it's likely that it was caused by a stroke
Speaker 1: in September that debilitated and he died of pneumonia.
Speaker 2: Who is success stroke if you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, the one mercy we have here is that
Speaker 1: his stroke caused of him to have a phasia. So
Speaker 1: we don't know his last words because he wasn't really
Speaker 1: able to talk after he was thankfully right. Yes, one
Speaker 1: claim is that he was like giving orders to his
Speaker 1: old subordinates to advance. You know, we don't really know
Speaker 1: what if he actually got anything out, though by the
Speaker 1: time he died his myth was well established. Frederick Douglas
Speaker 1: expressed rage that the hagiographic reaction to his passing even
Speaker 1: in northern media, quote, we can scarcely take up a
Speaker 1: newspaper that is not filled with nauseating flatteries of lee,
Speaker 1: from which it would seem that the soldier who kills
Speaker 1: the most men in battle, even in a bad cause,
Speaker 1: is the greatest Christian and entitled to the highest place
Speaker 1: in heaven. And uh yeah, I feel you.
Speaker 3: Feel you there, fred Oh, Freddy, Freddy with the Afro
Speaker 3: bro You're keeping it real because it's like this is
Speaker 3: it's so infuriating.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Afterwards, Mary was left alone in her quest to regain Arlington.
Speaker 1: She formally begged Congress to not just revisit federal ownership
Speaker 1: of the property, but to put together a plan to
Speaker 1: remove the bodies of the dead men interred there. Effectively,
Speaker 1: she wanted to desecrate a cemetery, yes, filled with the
Speaker 1: brave men her husband had killed with his treason. The
Speaker 1: proposal lost fifty four to four. Oh of course, it
Speaker 1: is yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: You shouldn't have married him.
Speaker 3: Okay, he's like, this was my daddy's house.
Speaker 2: His dumb ass. It's like, ma'am, that is your husband.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm, that is your husband, so shameful, yes, boohoo.
Speaker 1: So the media farer over her attempt to consecrate or
Speaker 1: to or he attempt to take back Arlington. This is
Speaker 1: what consecrates it as a symbol of the Union, right,
Speaker 1: and like that is part of why, like to this day,
Speaker 1: it's the military cemetery. It's where you can be buried
Speaker 1: if you were a veteran. Freedmen continued to stay on
Speaker 1: the property for decades. They had children, and they built
Speaker 1: lives for themselves and houses built by the army. Meigs
Speaker 1: also remained, but twenty years, turning the property into a
Speaker 1: temple for the honored dead. Mary Lee would see it
Speaker 1: only one more time in eighteen seventy three. She like
Speaker 1: visits to like just kind of look at it one
Speaker 1: last time, and she expressed the feeling that it had
Speaker 1: been so changed that she no longer recognized the place.
Speaker 1: So I'm glad we got to stick that knife in.
Speaker 2: Her own guest. Yeah before you yeah, yeah, before you died.
Speaker 1: The Lee family does. Eventually, there's like court cases and
Speaker 1: it's it's determined that because she made a good faith
Speaker 1: attempt to pay the government hadn't been entirely legal, So
Speaker 1: we have to the government has to pay the Lee
Speaker 1: family like one hundred and fifty grand, which I think
Speaker 1: is bullshit. But they don't ever get the property back,
Speaker 1: and so that's as close to a happy ending. That
Speaker 1: and the fact that they lost the war as you
Speaker 1: ever get on this show.
Speaker 2: So this could have gotten much worse.
Speaker 1: Yes, Yeah, there we go. Man, that is behind the bastards.
Speaker 2: Robert motherfucking e Lee. Yep, what a guy, man.
Speaker 3: I dude, some people were just so obviously a tool
Speaker 3: that you're just like.
Speaker 2: Are we still talking about this guy? He's such a tool. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he sure was.
Speaker 1: But now he's dead and now he's well Prop, that's
Speaker 1: the that's the show.
Speaker 3: Yeah, is that the Anderson.
Speaker 2: Ye dog outside and now she's all yeah, she got
Speaker 2: all Rottweiler on us represent mm hmmm what do you think?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: She said, fuck Robert E.
Speaker 3: Lee.
Speaker 2: I'm glad he's dead and thank you.
Speaker 1: Well Prop, you got anything the plug?
Speaker 3: Yeah, man, prop hip hop dot com. There's some poetry,
Speaker 3: some music, clink you to hood politics, will PROP the
Speaker 3: podcast on cool Zone Media where we're really giving y'all
Speaker 3: a business man and and uh, yeah, it's good times.
Speaker 2: I'm glad to be a part of his.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, we are glad to have you, and we
Speaker 1: are glad to be done talking about Robert E.
Speaker 2: Lee.
Speaker 1: So check in next week where you will have a
Speaker 1: bastard that's not fucking Roberty Lee. Yeah, because we did
Speaker 1: him and he's dead.
Speaker 3: Yes, and we're going to do a Lost Cause episode specifically,
Speaker 3: right yeah, no, that's on my feet.
Speaker 2: Ye yeah you guys.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like we've been talking about around like what it like,
Speaker 3: we're going to do show all the politics that's like, okay,
Speaker 3: this is the Loss Cause, these are the six points,
Speaker 3: this is how it grew, this why is not dead yet? Yep?
Speaker 1: Check that out. So check it out. You can get
Speaker 1: the ad free version of this show if you go
Speaker 1: to cooler Zone Media and you can find my book
Speaker 1: After the Revolution wherever books are sold. Just type it
Speaker 1: into Google with ak press or type it into whatever
Speaker 1: you use Amazon. I don't care ask a bookseller, you know. Anyway, Goodbye,
Speaker 1: We're done.
Speaker 2: Gooses Behind the Bastards is a production a cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
Speaker 2: dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.