McLaughlin insists that Lee wasn’t in charge of grand strategy, and that “it was Davis and his government, not Lee, who imposed the political imperatives that drove Confederate strategy.”

This is only half correct. Lee was not a passive recipient of Davis’s orders; as James McPherson writes in This Mighty Scourge, it was Lee who insisted on the invasion of Pennsylvania as necessary to break the will of the North, and it was Lee whose tactics there were employed in pursuit of that goal, leading to his decisive defeat at Gettysburg. That was a strategic decision that Lee pursued and lobbied for; he was the architect of his own greatest defeat.

But reasonable people can, and do, disagree about Lee’s merits as a military commander. Stranger is McLaughlin’s crediting “Lee’s eminence and gentlemanly surrender for preventing a long-term insurgency, avoiding an aftermath like the French Revolution, and enabling the country to return to being a single, functional political whole in time enough to see the vast rise in American prosperity and power between 1870 and 1945.”

I don’t give Lee credit for this because it would be like giving the security at Ford’s Theater credit for preventing a presidential assassination. The country returned to a “single, functional political whole” in large part because white supremacist paramilitaries restored the dominance of the Democratic Party in the South by fire and the sword, before the eyes of a Republican Party that was unwilling go any further than it already had to protect the rights of black Americans.

This outcome destroyed the brief attempt at non-racial government in the American South, leading to the apartheid of Jim Crow and the neo-slavery of convict leasing. The rise in American power between 1870 and 1945 offered scant comfort to the people of Tulsa, Rosewood, and Atlanta. If I were to give credit to Lee for this outcome, it would serve only to lengthen the already interminable case against revering him.

McLaughlin writes that I “cannot see how anything could have been worse, why national reconciliation after the war had any value, or why anyone would have wanted peace in the America of 1865-76. We can use the distance of history to judge the national decision to fight no further, but we should have some understanding of what costs the people of the day had paid already, and what they spared by laying down the sword.”

Early in his response, McLaughlin persuasively argues that too much early scholarship on the Civil War and Reconstruction suffered “from the myopia of considering only the relationship between white Northerners and white Southerners.” But in his description of the end of Reconstruction, McLaughlin replicates that mistake. The so-called “Redemption” that ended Reconstruction did not come from weary Americans wanting to lay down the sword, it came from the champions of the white South reddening their swords with the blood of the emancipated, and the white North making a conscious decision that the cost of protecting the freedmen’s rights was not worth paying.