Robert E. Lee Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Guelzo on Robert E. Lee: “To Err on the Side of Absorbing Society’s Defaulters”

15 November 2021 Comments 0 Comments

Allen C. Guelzo, Robert E. Lee: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2021), 608 pages, illus., $35, Kindle $15.99. First published in The American Spectator, 9 November 2021.

“Who’s that man on the horse?”…

…I asked my father at a young age. “That’s Lee—he led a Southern army in the Civil War.” He gave me a book I still have, Illustrated Minute Biographies, by William DeWitt. Published 1953, it is utterly non-judgmental. Opposite the page on Lee (“Leader of a Lost Cause”) is a page on Lenin (“Father of the Russian Revolution.”)

Among DeWitt’s 150 personalities, Lee fascinated. I’ve always had a soft spot for underdogs.…

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Civil — In 1959, President Eisenhower took Churchill on a tour of Gettysburg. Charlotte Thibault’s imaginative painting captures what they saw in their mind’s eyes. (Courtesy of the artist).

Churchill’s Fantasy: “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg”

1 January 2021 Comments 0 Comments

Excerpted from the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. Why settle for the excerpt when you can read the whole thing ? Click here.

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“Sir Winston’s Gettysburg essay…

...is a fantasy which transcends all my objections to exploring the what-ifs and might-have-beens in that great war.”…

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Lee surrenders, 9 April 1865. “He was a foe without hate, a friend without treachery, a soldier without cruelty, and a victim without murmuring.” (Painting by Thomas Nast, 1895, Wikimedia Commons)

Robert E. Lee and the Fashionable Urge to Hide from History

7 July 2019 Comments 2 Comments

On the tearing down of statues and symbols, Shelby Foote cited a state senator, who got her fellow senators to disallow the use of a Confederate symbol—not the Battle Flag—by the Daughters of the Confederacy. "I don't understand that," he said. "It's a violation of the Greaat Compromise. It's an arousal of bitterness. Now she, along with a great many others, do not want to be reminded. She has every right to want to hide from history if she wants to. But it seems to me that she's trying to hide history from us—and that's a mistake."

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Brexit: Leadership Failures Over Four Generations

1 April 2019 Comments 0 Comments

Quotation of the Season

So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. So we go on preparing more months and years—precious, perhaps vital, to the greatness of Britain—for the locusts to eat. —Churchill, House of Commons, 12 November 1936

Brexit Bedlam

For me the most adroit analysis of Britain’s Brexit Bedlam we can read to date was by Andrew Roberts in the Sunday Telegraph. You can register for free to read the article.…

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Civil War Memorials: What We Need to Remember

26 August 2017 Comments 2 Comments

Of Civil War…

“We think we are wholly superior people,” said the Civil War historian Shelby Foote. The 50th and 75th Anniversaries of the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg were poignant, inspiring moments. The words spoken of those occasions give cause to wonder. In the welter of emotions, have we forgotten what we need to remember?

Footage of Civil War Veterans at 50yr Anniversary in 1913 & 75yr Anniversary in 1938
Watch this video on YouTube “We may be given to meet again…”

Shelby Foote:

We think we are wholly superior people. If we’d been anything like as superior as we think we are, we’d never have fought that Civil War.…

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