Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

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[699] the opinion that a great General is he who accomplishes his purposes with small, but admirably drilled armies; who defeats large armies with small ones; who accomplishes great military results by strategy, more than by fighting, who makes of war an intellectual exercise rather than a match of brute force, that title will be given to Robert E. Lee above all men in America, and the Confederate commander will be declared to have been much greater in defeat than Grant in his boasted victory.

The adulation of partisans has no permanent place in the records of glory. The office of the historian is to reduce the exaggerations of the present, and that without reference to the passionate criticisms of the times in which he lives. If the fact be that the North has produced no great General in this war; that the exhibitions of generalship, chivalry, humanity, and all that noble sentimentalism that properly belongs to the state of war have been more largely on the Confederate side; that the Northern people have exhibited gross materialism in the war, have excluded that noble spirituality common to the great conflicts of civilized nations, and worshipped the grossest types of physical power, the fault is in themselves, and not in the pen that writes these things.