I absolutely love showing the unvarnished truth about Robert E. Lee. It needs to be exposed as does the truth about any and all of the founding fathers of the United States. Lee sounds a lot like Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln himself was willing to allow slavery to continue if would maintain the union to do so. He spoke about the inferior intelligence of Africans. Many abolitionists talked about the laziness, uncleanliness, intellectual inferiority of people from Africa and their descendants. It was more common than not to hold those kinds of bigoted beliefs back then even amongst those that were opposed to slavery. I think the more we expose this and examine this, the more we see how awful and widespread discrimination can be even amongst those that advocate for some good causes. It puts history in its place. I don't agree with going out and trying to vilify people by holding some of them to our current standards and applying it to the standards of the historical period in which they lived. I think there can be a balanced approach. Lee, Lincoln, Jefferson, etc. all said things on the right side of ending slavery. They were all still bigoted and prejudiced. But some of those people fought to preserve slavery and some fought and acted to end it. That too should be taken into account. Historical figures like all people did both good and bad things. I don't think a person who fought for the south should have their good points ignored, nor the people who fought for the north should have their prejudices ignored. Take it all into consideration and historical context. Just remember that despite all of their good and bad points they all had the same choice to make. Some chose to fight for the side that wanted to preserve slavery, and some fought for the side that wanted to end slavery. How dedicated each person was to their particular cause should be taken into consideration.
Great post! As someone who also grew up in Texas and heard a lot about romanticizing the Old Confederacy and even hearing in my history classes about the "War of Northern Agression" I agree with a lot of this post. The problem with a lot of how people view the Civil War and the Confederacy (both positively and negative) is that we should not separate it from Reconstruction. It needs to be clearly understood that the Civil War was fought for slavery as states rights wouldn't be an issue without slavery. We also need to consider how poorly Reconstruction was carried out and often vindictively by the Union. In my opinion the persistence of the Confederate nostalgia has more to do with lingering resentment of Reconstruction than it actually did with the Antebellum South. The truth of the South prior to Civil War is that while there were wealthy plantation owners the vast majority of white people were very poor with little hope themselves of ever being a wealthy plantation owner. Life was hard for most white Southerners prior to the Civil War but after when they felt like they were under occupation and economically exploited by what they viewed as a foreign power it became easy to resent the Yankee Carpet Bagger and the blacks they had freed. That as much as racial hatred spawned the Klan and the odd politics of the South. My own view is that in any ways neither the South or the North has been really honest about the history of the Civil War both sides have romanticized it in their own ways. Since you also live in Minnesota you might appreciate this. In the Minnesota State Capital in the Governor's Reception Room where he greets official visitors there are several paintings of Minnesotans fighting in the Civil War. Minnesota also continues to hold onto a Confederate battle flag taken at Gettysburg from a Virginian battalion and has refused to return it to Virginia. While I agree with the arguments against glorifying the Confederary it's pretty clear that many in the North haven't let go of the Civil War either.
A great post either and as a history buff myself I really enjoy this discussion. You are absolutely correct in that we need to consider both the context of historical figures' time and also remember that these were not one dimensional people but very complex people. Lincoln wasn't a saint or a devil and neither was Lee. As you correctly note both had many similar attitudes which were also widely held at the time. My own view of what makes a historical figure great was how he transcended his time. To me me this is the critical distinction between Lee and people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. All of them were men who shared in the same prejudices and biases of their time but in the case of Washington and Jefferson were also able to see beyond those. In Lee's case there is a lot that is very admirable about him but ultimately he couldn't overcome his own regionalism and biases that bound him to the World of Virginia in the mid 19th Century. To me Lee is almost a tragic figure who could've been one of the greatest Americans if he had fully understood that the culture and society of the South was in both a moral and economic dead end and taken up the command of the Union Army. His military brilliance might've ended the war faster, sparing millions of American lives, and then guided Reconstruction in a way that might've led to a better reintegration of the South. Instead he chose to fight a war that even he knew was likely a lost cause.
I'm sure 100℅ of large plantation slave owners corporal punished and I'm sure Lee corporal punished his soilderrs As a matter of fact what Lee myth are you referring to? Lee's appeal to younger generations is he was great general. Not a nice general. Edit; the slavery arguments attributed to Lee in the OP were standard slavery/race opinions of his time. ESPECIALLY the Christian ones They don't have anything to do with him being a nice slave owner or not
The high end estimate for the total number of people killed is about one million. That is both sides combined and includes soldiers, civilians, and slaves.
I stand corrected on my numbers. That said if the war had ended earlier many many lives might've been spared.
Not a Civil War historian or anything, but the stories detailing a sympathetic view of Lee that I remember always start with Lee opposing succession prior to it happening. I don't remember growing up on stories of him being a good-guy slave owner (not to say they don't exist) only that he wanted to stay in the USA, until Virginia actually checked out, at which point he felt compelled to join the CSA. That is the kind of thing that would generate goodwill among northern white American historians when comparing with the rabid successionists and their rhetoric after the defeat of the CSA. In the late 19th to early 20th century most of those white Northern historians were probably just as indifferent to how he treated slaves as the people of the South were. The difference between Jefferson and Lee is that Lee comitted treason against the country in which we all live, while Jefferson helped create the country in which we all live. I would expect that any statues of Thomas Jefferson erected in the United Kingdom would be taken down ASAP.
Saw a "Move On" petition I thought was pretty interesting: move the Confederate statues to the memorial battlegrounds, many of which already have statues and exhibits. Started by some woman in Virginia. I think it would be perfect. What do y'all think?
This is what I've never understood, Republicans always claim to be the party of Lincoln but you can bet every idiot with a confederate flag or bumper sticker is a staunch Republican. They're somehow both the party of Lincoln and the party of the Confederacy, it's pretty amazing. I'm honestly surprised we haven't had any of the "liberals were the slaveholders" stooges show up in this thread yet.
What are you trying to say? At first blush, it sounds like you could care less about racial harmony. I don't think that's what you're trying to say, but the wording's a little confusing. In an earlier comment, you're defending Lee's often brutal treatment of his slaves, which is documented, by basically saying, "Everyone did it." Can you show proof of that? Slavery by definition was brutal - human beings as chattel, and the convenient forgetting, if they ever took a history class, that during humanity's history, slaves consisted of all races. Some in America seem to have the unique view that only Blacks were slaves, and not just here, and that they were somehow not a White person's equal as a human being. Lee thought that himself. That only by long and careful grooming by Whites could they be "raised up" to even approach the level of Whites as human beings. Not every owner treated their slaves as Lee did. Slaves were very, very expensive to buy, and expensive to keep. Not treating them well could be described as a poor business decision. Some plantation owners viewed them as a valuable asset that should be treated as well as they could afford. It's a cold blooded view from where we sit, but good business from the point of view of many slave owners. That's a part of Lee's history that the general public needs to be aware of. Only by knowing the totality of a famous man like Lee can he truly be known. He was a great general, a true wartime leader of men, and a brilliant engineer whose complex defensive fortifications were copied as late as World War I. I've defended that aspect of Lee myself, but he was not without flaws, and his views on slavery were a very large flaw, in my opinion.
Did Lee actually say anything about ending slavery though? He is often quoted as saying it is a moral evil, but if you read the OP, that's only one part of the quote. He though it was a moral evil because of how bad it was for white people. He didn't think it was doing anything wrong to black people at all, in fact he specifically called it "an act of Christian love" to enslave black people. I don't see anywhere that he wanted to end it. He thought it was a burden for white people to be forced to enslave blacks for their own good. That seems a far cry from Lincoln or the abolitionist movement.
Regardless, the statues of Lee and other confederate generals aren't about their contributions to our history because of their engineering prowess or anything else. They were built by southerners who were sticking up a middle finger at the north and believed in the cause of the south. They wanted to honor those men who fought for that cause. The statues honor the cause they fought for plain and simple.
I don't know that he ever did say he wanted to end it. I haven't seen that he ever did advocate that. He fought for the side not to end it and that's the main reason why he isn't on the same level of as Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, etc. I agree with what @rocketsjudoka said. The real honor should go to those that transcended history. Lee did say other things against slavery, but it certainly wasn't that he felt black people were equal etc. Lee was a good loser, who once lost told all of his people they weren't Confederates now, they were all Americans, he behaved with honor when he and his family were in debt after the civil war and an insurance company offered him something like $25,000 at the time which was a huge amount, to use his name for their company. Despite being desperate for money he turned it down because he wasn't doing anything to earn it. There are things I can respect about him. Those things don't change the fact that he was a general for the losing side in the battle to preserve slavery. I don't like the idea of creating myths about him being some super civil rights activist who decided to fight for the south anyway. But at the same time, we should be careful in the effort to dispel those notions that we don't paint him as the worst villain the world has ever known. That's not true either.
What about Lee's treatment of slaves is anymore brutal than any other large plantation. The reason I point out soldiers were also beaten is because that's just what was discipline was in that time. That's not an excuse but just saying in regards to Lee he wasn't any more brutal than most I really don't have a point on why some statues are removed and others aren't other then its a slippery slope.
That's correct, pgabriel. Kids are still named after Lee, or get their middle name from him. You really didn't respond to my earlier post, though, about slave ownership in the South and the reason a lot of slave owners were looking at their slaves as expensive investments. As for the statues? My understanding of them is that more than half were built during the era of Jim Crow, and they were a statement aimed at both Whites and Blacks. They were a statement. The statement was that Blacks needed to know their place. That years, decades after the war, that fight was still celebrated, and if "uppity" Blacks got out of line there would be consequences. And there were. Severe consequences. Lynchings. Murders. Severe beatings. The rape of Black women by Whites simply because some trash thought it was their right. I like you, pgabriel, but you are so wrong about this particular issue. That's putting aside trump.
I don't what you are talking about. I'm talking about Lee and the premise of this thread. Yes slaves were valuable. So they were severely beaten when trying to escape which is what happened in the anecdote in the OP There is nothing unique about it
