An Old Fashioned Soldier In A Modern War Analysis

Political leadership guided the North and South landscape, but the military leadership guided the battlefield. The Civil War was a modern war compared to the Napoleonic wars and for the South; Lee is seen by some scholars as a leader out of touch with modern warfare while other generals such as those from the Union were waging a modern style of warfare. In the article, An Old-Fashioned Soldier in a Modern War?: Robert E. Lee as Confederate General, Gary Gallagher takes a historiographical approach of how historians viewed Lee’s method of warfare to answer his question of whether or not Lee was outdated. These historians Gallagher references look at Lee’s aristocratic background, personality, and treatment of civilians as a gauge to determine if Lee was an old-fashioned general as Gallagher puts it. Gallagher recognizes a flaw in the general idea of Lee not being modern because of his unwillingness to wage war on civilians and property while Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan carried out the full-scale destruction of the civilian property. The flaw is as Gallagher states, “But civilians and their possessions had been savaged by countless military leaders from ancient times forward, including eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and American officers who fought against Native …show more content…
Her article tears down Pollard’s Lost Cause idea of the Confederate soldier as she reviews Confederate suicides which humanizes the soldier and removes the soldier off of the noble soldier shelf. According to Miller Sommerville, suicide allowed the Confederate soldier control of his fate and the fear of not displaying cowardice on the battlefield. She further shows how the Culture of the Confederacy protected the soldier by viewing his suicide as a casualty of