Robert E. Lee: His Military Genius Nearly Ended The United States

General Robert Edward Lee was a brilliant leader of the Confederacy whose genius as a military commander and strategist inflicted heavy losses on the Union Army during The Civil War and whose efforts in that conflict sought to end the U.S.A. and replace it in the south with the C.S.A. (Confederate States of America).
Lee was born on January 19 1807 in Stratford, Virginia. He was educated at The U.S. Military Academy where he graduated second in his class in 1829. By 1838 he had risen to the rank of army captain.
During the war with Mexico he fought with distinction and was wounded in the storming of Chapultepec in 1847 after which he was for the third time promoted in his career.
In early 1861 he was summoned to Washington when war between the states seemed imminent. The new President Abraham Lincoln offered Lee command of The Union Forces but he turned him down. One week after his home state of Virginia seceded from The Union he accepted the position of Commander-in-Chief of all of Virginia's military and naval forces on April 23 1861.
In his position he inflicted massive amounts of damage upon Union armies in battles at Antietam, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg both in victory and defeat.
As a commander for the South during the war Lee was almost always facing Union forces that significantly outnumbered his own. His superiority of skill as a commander often meant that he was able to overcome this reality and inflict heavy losses on the North. He made skillful use of his lines of communications and reinforcements keeping them as short and direct as possible on the battlefield. He utilized field fortifications to help him maneuver. What he would do in battle is use a small force of men, protected by entrenchments, to hold off an attacking force much larger in size while he would divide his main body of forces and attack his enemy from either side thereby encircling them. This battle tactic was not only successful but years ahead of its time and it prolonged the war for far longer than it would have otherwise gone considering the North's superior strength of numbers. Lee's outnumbered forces were finally worn down sufficiently in the spring of 1865 and it forced his surrender to General Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9th.
After the war Lee applied for but was denied amnesty by the North. He lived for only five more years after the end of the war. He died on October 12 1870 of heart disease. He had been having issues in this way since the spring of 1863. He was buried in his beloved state of Virginia. He was 63 years old.