Hey, come on... ;-) Look for the humour in my posts, man. I wasn't criticizing Jeb's spectacular beard, I was admiring it. He was quite a young man, yet he grew a beard that would have struck fear into the hearts of Old Testament prophets had they seen it! And in the 1860's that was being right in style. Beards were popular. To reproduce a beard as magnificent as Jeb Stuart's is no joke. Maybe that's why it looked fake.

"Could the unpleasantness at Gettysburg have been avoided if they had got together and said, Let's settle this sensibly - we'll have a 'Who has got the silliest beard competition?', have a few drinks, sing one or two songs, bit of line dancing, .........?"

Hmmm. Well, yes, it could have been avoided...thus:

Robert E. Lee could have avoided going into Pennsylvania at all, which would have been wise. Longstreet suggested instead that the Army of Northern Virginia should commit heavy forces to the Western theatre, and block Union moves into Tennessee. That would have been extremely wise. As long as the South fought on its own ground it had several tactical advantages...

- the use of interior lines of supply, movement, and communication

- the assistance of a sympathetic local population

- familiarity with the battleground

- the strong motivation of defending one's own soil against the invader

- the advantage of fighting defensively in a war where the well chosen defensive position was usually the key to inflicting tremendous casualties on an attacker and winning the battle.

All those advantages were thrown away by Lee when he moved north into Pennsylvania, as they had been previously when he moved north into Maryland (and fought to a bloody and desperate draw at Antietam). The results were disastrous for the South. The West was irrevocably lost, and the cream of the Army of Northern Virginia was slaughtered in fruitless attacks on the Union's well positioned defence lines on Cemetery Hill and other dug-in locations at Gettysburg. The Union could survive terrible losses in the field. The Confederacy could not. Lee made the biggest mistakes of his life at Gettysburg. He should have listened to Longstreet.

And I'll tell you who had the silliest facial hair: Ambrose Burnside, that's who! ;-)