For the entire series of videos see Lynn Lockhart's YouTube channel:

or go to our blogspot:

In these videos, James and Mescaline examine the Lee Jackson Monument, since removed from Wyman Park Dell, and discuss the importance of the placement of the statue, the symbolism of various elements of the design and inscriptions, and the consequences of the statue's removal.

One more video remains to be edited, captioned and posted.

-Lynn Lockhart

One thing that I seem to have omitted from my verbal description is the fact that Lee's horse, Traveler, is hanging its head, downcast, in stark contradiction to Jackson's warlike steed. In the annals of great men and their horses, Traveler is the second horse, with the only steed better known being Alexander's Bucephalus, which meant Ox-head, who would have been a great mount for Jackson, not Lee. Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forest had something like 30 horses shot out from under him, precluding any chance that one of his doomed steeds might have gone down in history as an equine hero.

I would also like to note that Lee not only refused the offer to command the Union Army, but also refused to command the Army of Tennessee and take overall command of Confederate forces in the West, which is where the war was to be won or lost and he knew that. The front between the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia very much predicted the First World War, with static battles of attrition and eventually trench warfare around Petersburg. By way of contrast, the war in the West, meaning from the Appalachians to the Mississippi, [1] would come to resemble WWII, with Nathan Bedford Forest's regimental-strength force doing more to slow the Union advance than the army of the Tennessee and other corp-sized formations he was sometimes attached to, as their leadership consisted of such military mental midgets as Braxton Bragg and John Bell Hood. If Lee had not refused to fight outside of his Virginia home state, and had agreed to being shuttled between commands along interior rail lines [which Longstreet once did with his entire corp] the Confederacy might have won a negotiated peace.

I have participated in numerous tabletop simulations of the Civil War, in which it has become apparent that paring Lee and Forest in the West would have stopped the advance of Grant and Sherman and turned the West into the same type of war which reigned in the East and may well have cost Lincoln his bid for reelection and resulted in a negotiated peace. Also, keep mind that in the North, this war was as unpopular as the Vietnam War later was, with virtually none of the upper class taking part, with Harvard and Yale fielding full athletic teams drawn form what would have been the officer class in a European Nation, while in the South general officers drawn from the super wealthy class were regularly killed leading their men. Lee, by far a better general than any of us gamers, surely realized that his refusal to fight outside of Virginia [including forays into Maryland and PA to acquire supplies and set the Yankees on their heels] doomed the Confederacy. Lee fought as a Virginian, not as a Confederate, and when interviewed after the war, contended that had Forest been of his rank, rather than being relegated to serve idiots like Bragg, the war might have been won for the South.

-James

1. The third major theatre of operations was The Trans-Mississippi. After the fall of Vicksburg, with the Union controlling the Mississippi with their ironclad fleets, the Trans-Miss was sometimes called Kirby Smithdom, after Kirby Smith, the regional commander, essentially operated as an autonomous state, being both out-of-supply and out-of-communication, in military terms. Smith had under his command General Joe Shelby, who won the last battle of the war at Brownsville/Matamoras, Texas on the Rio Grande and retreated into Mexico, where he served as a mercenary commander.