Posted on 10/28/2017 10:58:22 AM PDT by Baynative
“Lee’s Father in law had freed his slaves, Lee was talking about doing the same.”
Other than a personal servant the only slaves that Lee “had” were the ones that his wife had inherited upon her father’s death in 1857- her father being Martha Washington’s grandson, the slaves being descended from her slaves, which unlike those of George Washington weren’t freed upon George Washington’s death.
The will of George Washington Parke Custis requested that all of his slaves be freed within five years of his passing. Lee was executor of the estate, and Arlington was heavily in debt. If the debt wasn’t paid off then the creditors could claim the slaves as payment. So Lee worked the slaves or rented them out in order to pay off the debt, which was done by 1862. The Custis-Lee slaves were then set free, about a year before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.
When I was a boy growing up Arlington VA we had a school janitor who told me that when his mother was very young she had been a personal servant of Mrs Lee, a connection with history of which he was proud. I bet his family have to keep that to themselves today.
Yep
Any freeper who’d defend that pack of white trash deserves to be horse whipped.
According to Douglas Southall Freeman's biography, Lee owned slaves in his own right much of his adult life. In 1853 - long before the death of his father-in-law - Lee freed two of them and paid passage to Liberia where one studied for the ministry and became a Presbyterian minister. Link
The will of George Washington Parke Custis requested that all of his slaves be freed within five years of his passing. Lee was executor of the estate, and Arlington was heavily in debt. If the debt wasn’t paid off then the creditors could claim the slaves as payment. So Lee worked the slaves or rented them out in order to pay off the debt, which was done by 1862. The Custis-Lee slaves were then set free, about a year before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.
Lee signed the documents of emancipation on December 29, 1862 - several months after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.
National Archives:
" President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. "
https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation
LOL!
Sheesh.
5.56mm
The preliminary didn’t free any slaves. And moreover the Emancipation Proclamation itself didn’t free slaves in the Union, in the States that weren’t ‘in rebellion’.
It’s simple fact that Lee freed the Custis-Lee slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. It was nothing more complicated than Lee following his father-in-law’s will. Once the debt on the Arlington estate was paid off in 1862 the slaves were in a position to be set free. Before that they could have been seized by creditors in lieu of payment for the debt.
But it was issued. September 22, 1862.
It’s simple fact that Lee freed the Custis-Lee slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.
Never disputed that. Lee would have emancipated the slave, proclamation or no proclamation, because his father-in-law's will mandated it. Actually it mandated that they be freed by the fifth anniversary of his death which I believe was in July 1862. But Lee was otherwise occupied that month.
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