Newt may be Bragg in mental stability. In regards to Lee, his focus on Virginia and the East might have been the strategic blunder that lost the war. The Confederacy was destroyed in the West. Lee’s failure to realize that and his two offensives to the North that wasted valuable resources that the South did not have. Lee was a brilliant tactical commander, but he lacked the strategic picture. Jefferson Davis had a better handle on that in his advocacy of a purely defensive fight, and a Davis had his eye on the West more than Lee did.
Would have been interesting to see a campaign in the west.
Texas ended up nearly saving the whole kit’n’kaboodle.
The problem is purely logistics. Concentrations of troops over to the west would have taken a long time, and the threat was a union knockout blow in the east. Lee would have had to build fortifications to stop the Army of Virginia, who’s sole job was to tie up Lee in the East.
Lee saw things this way. He couldn’t knock the north out with a Western Campaign, he had to fight and win in the East, and he knew that a long struggle would lose the war. The war was lost not with the armies but the Navies. The north could afford to build both, while the South couldn’t.
This was the Anaconda plan. Any western offensive wouldn’t have solved the strategic problems in the South wrt supply + munitions.