Robert E Lee ping
The greatest American general.
One of the greatest Americans to have ever lived and some people want to tear him down.
These same people want to tear down America.
Just wait til the PC Revisionists discover this thread. I bet several will try to get an argument going and carry it on for days and days. It’d be par for the course.
Sir Winston Churchill: “Lee was the noblest American who had ever lived and one of the greatest commanders known to the annals of war.”
The period in American history known as reconstruction when blacks were given the vote (then restricted) gets the revisionist treatment or ignored because it doesn’t fit into the socialists agenda which calls for division. The reason those monuments in question are placed, honoring men who fought for their cause when after defeat did not continue on. But rather chose to accept and support the result to unuify the country
Ping
One can respect Lee for doing what he thought was right while at the same time believing that what he did was wrong.
https://archive.org/details/shallcromwellhav00adam/page/n6
“Shall Cromwell Have A Statue?”
The reasons for erecting a statue to Robert E Lee in Washington
An oration by Charles Francis Adams, Jr
the Great Grandson/Grandson of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams.
Served in combat as a Colonel in the Union Army fighting against Robert E Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
*************************************************
“Was Robert E. Lee a traitor? Technically. I think
he was indisputably a traitor to the United States; for a
traitor, as I understand it technically, is one guilty of
the crime of treason; or, as the Century Dictionary puts
it, ‘violating his allegiance to the chief authority of the
State’; while treason against the United States is
specifically defined in the Constitution as “levying war” against it,
or “giving their enemies aid and comfort.”
That Robert E. Lee did levy war against the United States
can, I suppose, no more be denied than that he gave
“aid and comfort” to its enemies. This technically; but,
in history, there is treason and treason, as there are
traitors and traitors. And furthermore, if Robert E,
Lee was a traitor, so also, and indisputably were George
Washington, Oliver Cromwell, John Hampden, and
William of Orange. The list might be extended indefinitely,
but these will suffice.
There can be no question that every one of those named violated his allegiance, and gave aid and comfort to the enemies of his sovereign. Washington furnishes a precedent at every point.
A Virginian like Lee. He was also a British subject. He
had fought under the British flag, as Lee had fought under that of the United States; when, in 1776, Virginia seceded from the British Empire, he “went with his
State,” just as Lee went with it eighty-five years later;
subsequently Washington commanded armies in the field
designated by those opposed to them as “rebels,” and
whose descendants now glorify them as “the rebels of
‘76,” much as Lee later commanded, and at last surrendered, much larger armies, also designated “ rebels “ by those they confronted.
Except in their outcome, the cases were, therefore, precisely alike; and logic is logic. It consequently appears to follow, that, if Lee was a traitor, Washington was also. It is unnecessary to institute similar comparisons with Cromwell, Hampden and William of Orange. No defence can in their cases be made. Technically, one and all, they undeniably were traitors.
But there are, as I have said, traitors and traitors, —
Catallines, Arnolds and Gorgeis, as well as Cromwells,
Hampdens and Washingtons. To reach any satisfactory
conclusion concerning a candidate for “everlasting fame,”
— whether to praise him or to damn him, — enroll him
as saviour, as martyr, or as criminal, — it is, therefore,
necessary still further to discriminate. The cause, the
motive, the conduct must be passed in review.
Did turpitude anywhere attach to the original taking of sides,
or to subsequent act? Was the man a self-seeker?
Did low or sordid motives impel him ? Did he seek to
aggrandize himself at his country’s cost ? Did he strike
with a parricidal hand ?
These are grave questions. And, in the case of Lee,
their consideration brings us at the threshold face to face
with issues which have perplexed and divided the country
since the day the United States became a country. They
perplex and divide historians now. Legally, technically,
— the moral and humanitarian aspects of the issue wholly
apart, — which side had the best of the argument as to
the rights and the wrongs of the case in the great debate
which led up to the Civil War?
Before entering, however, on this well-worn, — I might say, this threadbare theme, as I find myself compelled in briefest way to do, there is one preliminary very essential to be gone through with. A species of moral purgation. Bearing in mind Dr. Johnson’s advice to Boswell, on a certain memorable occasion, we should at least try to clear our minds of cant.
Many years ago, but only shortly before his death, Richard Cobden said in one of his truth-telling deliverances to his Rochdale constituents, — “I really believe I might be Prime Minster. If I would get up and say you are the greatest, the wisest, the best, the happiest people in the world, and keep on repeating that, I don’t doubt but what I might be Prime Minister. I have seen Prime Ministers made in my experience precisely by that process.” The same great apostle of homely sense, on another occasion bluntly remarked in a similar spirit to the House of Commons, — “ We generally sympathise with everybody’s rebels but our own.”
In both these respects I submit we Americans are true
descendants from the Anglo-Saxon stock; and nowhere
is this more unpleasantly apparent than in any discussion
which may arise of the motives which actuated those of
our countrymen who did not at the time see the issues
involved in our Civil War as we saw them. Like those
whom Cobden addressed, we like to glorify our ancestors
and ourselves and we do not particularly care to give
ear to what we are pleased to term unpatriotic, and, at
times, even treasonable, talk. In other words, and in
plain, unpalatable, English, our minds are saturated with
cant. Only in the case of others do we see things as
they really are. Then, ceasing to be antagonistic, we are
nothing unless critical. So, when it comes to rebellions,
we, like Cobden’s Englishmen, are wont almost invariably to sympathize with everybody’s rebels but our own...
Karl Marx and the American Civil War
By Donny Schraffenberger
https://isreview.org/issue/80/karl-marx-and-american-civil-war
“THE CIVIL War is the defining event in the history of the United States, yet also the most misunderstood. More books are written on this war than on any period of US history, yet for all the words poured across the pages, the real cause of the war—slavery—is usually missed or obscured. Rather, there are tales of chivalrous Confederate generals heroically leading charges, drunken Union generals butchering their men in horrible frontal assaults, brothers fighting brothers in a pointless war that ravaged the land and wounded a people. Was the Civil War just a tragic mistake? A war like any other imperialist war the United States ruling class has its soldiers fighting in today? While some answer these questions with a yes, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels would have been taken aback. They would have resoundingly answered “no.” The Civil War, they believed, was not just another horrible atrocity, but rather a revolution that ended slavery and destroyed the slave-owners’ power as a class.
Marx and Engels saw the events leading to the Civil War as momentous. In a January 1861 letter to Engels, written after the election of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln, but before his inauguration, Marx wrote, “In my opinion, the biggest things that are happening in the world today are on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown, and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia.”1.....
****
“Marx and Engels backed the Republican Party and its candidate Lincoln. Although it’s hard to fathom today, in 1860 the Republican Party had socialists, abolitionists, and other radicals in its membership. It was a new party that had emerged from the conflict in the Kansas territory prior to the Civil War. The Republican Party was perceived as a threat to the slave-owners and their allies. Abolitionists and other radicals debated joining the Republican Party. Could its leadership be trusted? Were the more prominent members of the party really serious in ending slavery? Many came to the conclusion that the party was at least moving, or could be moved, towards that end. European revolutionaries, political refugees from the failed 1848 revolutions, joined the Republican Party. These revolutionaries also took up arms and fought for the Union.
Revolutionaries such as former Prussian officer August Willich, Engels commander in 1849, exemplified this. Willich was also a leader of the Communist League with Karl Marx, until a falling out with Marx over Willich’s idea of sending an armed force back into the German lands to restart the revolution. Marx argued that this wild plan would fail. Willich later gave up his scheme and moved to the United States. He eventually resided in the large German émigré community of Cincinnati, where he edited a radical newspaper. He would train the all-German Ninth Ohio Infantry regiment, whose volunteer soldiers had belonged to the radical Turnverein in Germany. Before the war, many members of the Ninth Ohio fought against the anti-immigrant chauvinism of the Know Nothing movement of the 1850s. They came to the conclusion that fighting for the Union was participating in a revolutionary war. Gustav Kammerling, a colonel in the Ninth, had been elected in 1848 as leader of a revolutionary militia. He also later fought alongside Engels and Willich in the Palatinate. The Ninth Ohio’s regimental history, Die Neuner, contains many interesting anecdotes illustrating how the soldiers viewed the Civil War as a continuation of the 1848 Revolution. The Ninth and other German regiments would sing revolutionary songs into battle, demanded that they be allowed to speak in their native German, and also successfully fought against General Sherman’s ban on alcohol. They got to keep their kegs of beer.
From restoration of the union to the abolition of slavery
The Lincoln administration did not set the destruction of slavery as a war aim at the outset of the Civil War. The majority of white Americans were not convinced of abolition in 1860. But the second American Revolution, the Civil War, would transform many indifferent or even pro-slavery whites into supporters of abolition. People’s involvement in debates, joining and fighting in the Union army, and witnessing slaves and former slaves fight back, convinced many to become slavery’s destroyers. But this process took the experience of the first years of the Civil War, when the policy of the Lincoln administration and some of its leading generals, like McClellan, was to restore the country as it was before secession, with slavery intact. Marx, writing about the 1860 election that brought Lincoln to the White House, stated that, “if Lincoln would have had Emancipation of the Slaves as his motto at that time, there can be no doubt that he would have been defeated.”12
Marx’s insight was different from that of many contemporary historians who seem awestruck by Lincoln’s “perfect” political timing. To them, it is as if Lincoln could foresee the future and always knew when to apply the correct amount of steam or brakes on the fast running locomotive of the Civil War history. Of course, in 1860, Lincoln would never have been nominated if he were a radical abolitionist. He was chosen because he was a moderate in the Republican Party, acceptable to both the right and the left. If Lincoln and his cabinet weren’t ready to destroy slavery in the first year of his administration, others were.
The resistance of slaves and former slaves mattered. Their running away, denying their labor to the Confederacy, helping the Union armies, and agitating to take up a rifled musket to bring down the slaveocracy convinced more and more Northerners of their cause for freedom. Abolitionists, both Black and white, organized meetings and demonstrations. Antislavery papers such as Frederick Douglass’s North Star or William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator helped to sway public opinion. Soldiers debating the nature of war and slavery around the campfire also had its impact. The timidity of the conservative generals, and their unwillingness to bring the full resources of the Union army down upon the Confederacy, fueled the national debate. The old strategy of compromising to win over slavery supporters was no longer working. Which way forward?
The war was a product of a revolutionary process, and Lincoln had options. He could have made peace with the South, keeping slavery intact. He could have kept the war a constitutional one, but how long could the revolution be checked? Alongside people fighting for slavery’s destruction were those in the North who sided with the South. Southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had their share of Copperheads—Northerners with Confederate sympathies. In Southern Illinois, a region called Little Egypt, some reactionaries wanted to secede from Illinois and join the Confederacy. The reactionary elements wanted to preserve the old status quo. Soon, pressure built up on both sides of the slavery question. The old system could not hold. As Lincoln later said, he wasn’t at the forefront of the revolutionary process—he was more a prisoner of events. Yet, he eventually moved in the revolutionary direction. He did not move as far as the most farsighted fighters for freedom, like the Black abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass rightfully wanted. But he moved far more than any president before or since.
As Marx noted in 1862,
At the present moment, when secession’s stocks are rising, the spokesmen of the border states are making even greater claims. However, Lincoln’s appeal to them, in which he threatens them with inundation by the Abolition party, shows that things are taking a revolutionary turn. Lincoln knows what Europe does not know, that it is by no means apathy or giving way under pressure of defeat that causes his demand for 300,000 recruits to meet with such a cold response. New England and the Northwest, which have provided the main body of the army, are determined to force on the government a revolutionary kind of warfare and to inscribe the battle-slogan of “Abolition of Slavery!” on the star-spangled banner. Lincoln yields only hesitantly and uneasily to this pressure from without, but he knows he cannot resist it for long. Hence his urgent appeal to the border states to renounce the institution of slavery voluntarily and under advantageous contractual conditions. He knows that only the continuance of slavery in the border states has so far left slavery untouched in the South and prohibited the North from applying its great radical remedy. He errs only if he imagines that the “loyal” slaveholders are to be moved by benevolent speeches and rational arguments. They will yield only to force.
So far, we have only witnessed the first act of the Civil War—the constitutional waging of war. The second act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand.”13
From a leadership perspective Lee is akin to Rommel. Both very good generals doing more with less.
Thanks for posting.
“He possessed every virtue of other great commanders without their vices. He was a foe without hate; a friend without treachery; a soldier without cruelty; a victor without oppression; and a victim without murmuring. He was a public officer without vices; a private citizen without wrong; a neighbor without reproach; a Christian without hypocrisy and a man without guile. He was a Caesar without his ambition; Frederick without his tyranny; Napoleon without his selfishness; and Washington without his reward. He was obedient to authority as a servant, and royal in authority as a true king. He was gentle as a woman in life; modest and pure as a virgin in thought; watchful as a Roman vestal in duty; submissive to law as Socrates; and grand in battle as Achilles.” - Benjamin H. Hill