I like Ike. He doesn’t explain how a slaveholder backing out of his commitment to the Union to fight for slavery and Old Virginia against the United States makes him a great American? I think Lee’s efforts cost the country an extra year of war and maybe an extra couple of hundred thousand dead. The United States was a lot poorer because he walked on this earth. Keep the statue up…that we may learn from it.
Lee had a commitment to states rights and independence from a Federal Govt hell bent on usurpation. Lee was correct. Look where the US is today. We now live in an empire run by 535 swamp dissension backed by a an impenetrable bureaucracy
Lee was not a slaveholder. He abhorred slavery. He refused to bear arms against his home state of Virginia. In those days, slavery was a 10th amendment issue, much like marijuana and abortion are today. I’m from the south, many generations back, and lost distant uncle’s and cousins to Lincoln’s oppression. We served the Constitution AS WRITTEN. But Lincoln thought it better to just crush us with unending manpower and bottomless factory production. And still we whooped them 6:1.
Slavery was legal in the Union. This means the Union was a slave holding nation. Just because the Union remained a slave holding nation does not mean they fought to keep slavery legal.
Slavery was not relevant to why Union armies marched into the South. Slavery is not relevant to why Confederate armies fought against Union armies invading them.
The effort to introduce slavery as the cause and goal of the conflict is just propaganda. Since it was protected by the US Constitution, nothing could have been done about it anyway.