Among his accomplishments, there’s also the minor fact that Lee saved the country. Immediately after a bitter, bloody civil war, pitting brother against brother — four of Mary Lincoln’s five brothers fought for the Confederacy — the landscape littered with the dead, Lee ensured that the South would accept defeat.
When Lee surrendered at Appomattox, he was at the height of his powers, idolized throughout the South. The president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, wanted to fight on, telling his officers, “I think we can whip the enemy yet, if our people will turn out.”
But Lee, not Davis, held the hearts of his countrymen. When one of Lee’s own officers urged him to lead a guerilla war against the North, Lee remonstrated, “as a Christian people, there is now but one course to pursue. We must accept the situation; these men must go home and plant a crop, and we must proceed to build up our country on a new basis.”
He could easily have pulled a Trump and told his supporters, We got screwed! Take to the hills! They would have followed. Hundreds of thousands more lives would have been lost. The country might never have recovered.
But Lee said no, it ends now.
