Who was the commander of the Confederate Army in the American Civil War?

Robert E. Lee, of the Army of Northern Virginia - not of all Confederate forces until the last weeks of the war. He had been offered command of the Union army first, by Lincoln's emissary, and turned it down because he would not fight against Virginia.

His reputation was then constructed deliberately. The Lost Cause movement, promoted by Confederate veterans and organisations from the 1870s, recast the war as a noble struggle over states' rights rather than slavery, and made Lee its saintly figure - reluctant, gentlemanly, opposed to slavery, defeated only by numbers. The historical record is less flattering: he owned enslaved people, oversaw brutal treatment of those who escaped, and his army seized free Black people during the Pennsylvania campaign and sent them south into slavery.

Most of the statues came much later than the war. The great wave of Confederate monument building was in the 1900s to 1920s, at the height of Jim Crow, and a second wave in the 1950s and 60s during the civil rights movement - which is why the argument about removing them is not really about 1865. Lee himself opposed such monuments, writing that it would be wiser not to keep open the sores of war.