The magic of the internet often works in mysterious ways. Just a few days ago I featured the story about the new discussion among historians with regard to the US Civil War's death toll, and today my Google Fu sent me to a wholly different part of the Internet - VFR, not a place I usually tend to visit - where an intriguing point was raised, namely that there's a high (?) chance the pre-war southern way of life - including slavery! - could have survived had it not been for Lee's successful conduct of the war.



I'm just putting this one out here for your consumption and discussion. Is it a plausible assessmnet? David G. writes

One of the most overlooked dates in American history is the 1st of June
1862. This was the day when Robert E. Lee was given command by Jefferson
Davis of the Confederate Army of the Potomac, after Gen. Joseph E.
Johnston had been wounded at the Battle of Seven Pines outside Richmond.
The promotion of Lee changed everything for the South and it would
change the course of the entire nation. Lee renamed his command the
Army of Northern Virginia and infused it with the martial ardor
necessary to win Southern independence on the battlefield.

By May of 1862 the Confederacy was in deep trouble.


The war in the West had been going poorly for the Confederate Army of
Tennessee. It had suffered setbacks in Arkansas and Kentucky and at
Shiloh and Fort Donelson in Tennessee. To make matters worse, the
eastern Confederate army was besieged by Union General George B.
McClellan’s Army of the Potomac on the Virginia Peninsula, the narrow
strip of land between the York and James River southeast of Richmond,
the Confederate capital.



Through superior generalship and sheer audacity Lee maneuvered the Army
of the Potomac away from Richmond during a series of battles known as
the Seven Days, while later directing Generals Stonewall Jackson and
James Longstreet to reach extraordinary heights during the Battle of
Second Manassas. Civil War historian James McPherson notes that had the
Confederacy been defeated in 1862, before Lee took charge of the Army of
Northern Virginia, the South would have remained a viable culture with
slavery intact. Think of that: no Emancipation Proclamation; no 13th,
14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution; and, at worst, a mild,
Lincoln-directed Reconstruction policy.



McPherson notes the irony of Lee’s career. Essentially, all of his
successes—the Seven Days, Second Manassas, Fredericksburg,
Chancellorsville—served to ensure that one day the Southern way of life
would be gone with the wind.

...

Also, on a recent visit to the Seven Days battlefields I came across a marker that read in part:

“By mid-May the Army of the Potomac lay on the outskirts of Richmond,
hoping to capture the capital of the Confederacy and perhaps end the
war. If that strategy succeeded the nation might be reunified, but
without abolition of slavery.”

I'm not well versed enough in the US Civil War and American pre-Civil War history to comment on any of this, so... well... weigh in on it and please don't shoot the messenger.