Washington Post Death Spiral Watch (Richard Cohen Edition)

Outsourced to Publius of Obsidian Wings:

Obsidian Wings: Robert E. Lee - Not a "Bitter-Ender": Richard Cohen pens an odd column today arguing that Clinton’s refusal to stop campaigning is evidence of her “leadership qualities.” Great leaders, Cohen argues, don’t quit. But then he uses a rather odd historical example to support his point — Robert E. Lee:

In the end, no one begrudges a bitter-ender. Robert E. Lee is not vilified because he fought on too long, wasting lives -- and all of it, mind you, in the cause of slavery.

Maybe I’m being nitpicky, but one of Lee’s greatest virtues is that he quit long before he actually needed to. In this respect, Lee directly refutes Cohen’s argument.

In April 1865, Lee had a fateful choice. Sure, the war couldn’t be won in the traditional sense. But Lee could have turned his battle-hardened army into a guerrilla outfit that could have harassed federal armies for decades. To his eternal credit, he declined to do so. Choosing guerrilla war would have made post-war North/South tensions even more poisonous than they were (with longer lasting effects).

In short, the United States would have had a dramatically different history — not for the better — if Lee had indeed been, as Cohen claims, a “bitter-ender.”

Comments

[Doctor Jay]

Hillary's ability to still win lots of votes on the last day of the primaries doesn't exactly make her a guerrilla warfare leader either. Nor does her concession and endorsement yesterday.

[cheezit]

Clinton (Hillary) is a leader and her continued campaign until the end rewarded her supporters' faith in her. She's no Al Gore - now everyone knows it.

[Ed Baptist]

The U.S. would have had a dramatically better history if other white Southerners had followed Lee's lead in spirit (not that necessarily followed the letter, either) and had stopped using violence to limit the freedom of African Americans. In such a case, Reconstruction would have been a success and the history of the South and the nation could have been much different.

[Bloix]

Hillary didn't go the bitter end - that would have meant taking the fight to the convention, as Ted Kennedy did in 1980, when he tried to persuade candidates pledged to Carter to vote for him. Prof DeLong is old enough, I think, to remember how Kennedy skipped around the stage at that convention in order to avoid appearing in a photograph grasping hands with Carter. That was a true dead-ender performance and no one does begrudge him for it.

[Bloix]

Hillary didn't go the bitter end - that would have meant taking the fight to the convention, as Ted Kennedy did in 1980, when he tried to persuade candidates pledged to Carter to vote for him. Prof DeLong is old enough, I think, to remember how Kennedy skipped around the stage at that convention in order to avoid appearing in a photograph grasping hands with Carter. That was a true dead-ender performance and no one does begrudge him for it.

[Bloix]

Hillary didn't go the bitter end - that would have meant taking the fight to the convention, as Ted Kennedy did in 1980, when he tried to persuade candidates pledged to Carter to vote for him. Prof DeLong is old enough, I think, to remember how Kennedy skipped around the stage at that convention in order to avoid appearing in a photograph grasping hands with Carter. That was a true dead-ender performance and no one does begrudge him for it.

[George J. Georganas]

R. E. Lee gave two reasons for quitting when he did :
One, to prevent Union forces from reaching and torching parts of the South they had not reached until then. Two, to prevent the soldiers of the Southern armies turning into marauders, by leaving then to fend for food (and ammunition) for themselves without proper command and logistical support. A third factor in that decision was the flight of the Confederate President from the Southern capital, Richmond, Va., and the breakdown of the chain of command from the Confederate President down. The Confederate President, of course, was prepared to die fighting and it was a fortunate coincidence that he was captured while his family was present, so that his urge to fight to the last was moderated by the presence of his wife and children and the thought that they would be harmed in a fight.
One must not confuse that decision of Lee with his later urging of Southern armies' veterans to pledge allegiance to the United States, nor with Lee's well documented doubts about the South going to war before the Civil War started.
Looking at the facts as we know them, it is out of place to compare Hillary with Lee. Cohen was wrong to attempt the connection and Professor DeLong should not, I think, have minded to comment on such a comparison.

[anne]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/the-road-to-appomattox/

June 8, 2008

The Road to Appomattox
By Paul Krugman

I have an assertion/question about military history.

You see, my understanding was that after the fall of Richmond Lee marched westward in an attempt to get around Grant, so that he could then move south and join with Johnston. The combined army would then have been in a position to continue the fight, or possibly launch a guerilla war.

But Grant pursued relentlessly, and effectively surrounded Lee at Appomattox. There's even a description — I don't remember whether in Bruce Catton or in Shelby Foote — of how Lee's forces pushed through a screen of dismounted cavalry, thinking they had broken out; and then over the ridge came the long, long lines of blue uniforms, blocking their escape.

If this is right, Lee's decision to surrender wasn't quite as much an act of abnegation as some * suggest.

* a http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/06/washington-po-3.html

b http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2008/05/robert-e-lee--.html

[anne]

http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2008/05/obama-clinton-vote-usa-media

Evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, American men like to delude themselves that they are the most macho in the world. It is simply unthinkable, therefore, for most of them to face the prospect of having a woman as their leader. The massed ranks of male pundits gleefully pronounced that Clinton had lost the battle with Obama immediately after the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, despite past precedents that strong second-place candidates (like Ronald Reagan in his first, ultimately unsuccessful campaign in 1976; like Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson and Jerry Brown) continue their campaigns until the end of the primary season and, in most cases, all the way to the party convention.

None of these male candidates had a premature political obituary written in the way that Hillary Clinton's has been, or was subjected to such righteous outrage over refusing to quiesce and withdraw obediently from what, in this case, has always been a knife-edge race. Nor was any of them anything like as close to his rivals as Clinton now is to Obama.

The media, of course, are just reflecting America's would-be macho culture....

-- Andrew Stephen

[Q the Enchanter]

So...Cohen "compliments" HRC by comparing her to the leader of a cause reviled by all Democrats. Publius *accepts* the absurd presuppositions of this comparison (including that a political campaign primary is relevantly like the U.S. Civil War), then repines that HRC isn't sufficiently like the figurehead of the reviled cause. Great work.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/us/politics/09legacy.html?hp&pagewanted=print

June 9, 2008

Campaign Adds to Complicated Clinton Legacy
By JOHN M. BRODER and ROBIN TONER

But she also made comments that divided voters along racial lines, ... and last month raised the specter of assassination as a justification for remaining in the race to the bitter end despite a mathematical near-certainty that she had lost weeks earlier....

[anne]

So...Cohen "compliments" HRC by comparing her to the leader of a cause reviled by all Democrats. Publius *accepts* the absurd presuppositions of this comparison (including that a political campaign primary is relevantly like the U.S. Civil War), then repines that HRC isn't sufficiently like the figurehead of the reviled cause. Great work.

-- Q the Enchanter

[Perfect.]

[Gene O'Grady]

The scene Anne recalls is basically the standard account, except that I don't think Lee's troops actually broke through Custer's cavalry, they just discovered that even if they did there was a full infantry corps in front of them. It was at that point that Lee realized with great reluctance "I must go see General Grant."

However, the chief of Longstreet's artillery, Porter Alexander, did in fact make the suggestion that Lee disperse the army to fight a guerilla war and Lee emphatically rejected it. Presumably Alexander's thinking was that under cover of surrender a significant cadre might get away into the hills.

In Alexander's defense, he was, although very intelligent -- later writing what is probably the best memoir of the Confederate armies by a participant -- he was still very young and carried away, and later publicly regretted the suggestion and was anything but an exponent of the "Lost Cause" mythology.

[kaleidescope]

How much "Lee's Army" would've been willing to fight a guerilla war is open to question. The Army of Northern Virgina had been bleeding troops for months. Desertion was decimating the army as the working class and yeoman farmer soldiers could see they were not going to win while back home they were needed to protect their farms and to get crops in. Once released from the fear being shot for deserting, how many would actually show up to fight as guerillas?

And besides, as both anne and Gene O'Grady have pointed out, "Lee's Army" was on the verge of being obliterated. Grant had to hold the blood thirsty Sheridan back, as Sheridan just wanted to attack and wipe Lee's Army off the map.