Posted on 05/19/2003 7:29:55 PM PDT by stainlessbanner
The campaign against one of the greatest Americans ever continues. The Richmond-area Boy Scouts have stripped Robert E. Lee's name from their uniforms, title, and logo.
How sad, given that Lee's life, and the maxims by which he lived, are exactly what the growing generation of boys in this country needs.
Everyone knows why the Scouts dropped the name, but the reason is unimportant. The important thing is the example of manhood of which the Scouts are deprived.
Lee's Life
Many have used superlatives to describe Lee. Lee was "the most perfect man I have ever met ... made of different and finer metal than other men," one admirer said. "He is an epistle," said another, "written of God."
Lee lived by the code of honor and chivalry. He embodied dignity, manly bearing, and valor. A pious Christian, his principal object was doing God's will.
Lee's code can be found in a small volume called The Maxims of Robert E. Lee for Young Gentlemen, published by Virginia Gentlemen Books and the source of the quote used here.
A humble man, Lee once said, "I know of nothing good I could tell you of myself." Indeed, he would likely say the Scouts should have taken a different man's name.
As president of Washington College, he shaped the lives of many young men. "You cannot be a true man," he told his students, "unless you learn to obey."
"Study hard," he told them, "be always a gentleman, live cleanly and remember God." And he once told Stonewall Jackson's minister, "I dread the thought of any student going away from the college without becoming a sincere Christian."
"Do your duty," he wrote to son Custis. "That is all the pleasure, all the comfort, all the glory we can enjoy in this world."
"We must all try to be good Christians," he said to a 5-year-old boy, "that is the most important thing."
The stories that demonstrate Lee's character are legion and cannot be repeated here.
Whom Would They Revere?
Boy Scouts should be clamoring to adopt Lee's name.
But no. They erased it.
And to be replaced by whom? Arthur Ashe, a tennis player? There's a statue of him in Richmond. How about Abe Lincoln, the American man-god, whom we are supposed to worship with sacrilegious veneration, and whose effigy recently arose amid the streets of Richmond?
Perhaps the Scouts can learn to emulate him.
Perhaps they will learn to regale their friends with jokes so filthy the women and children must leave the room, or to laugh at the misfortune of others, as Lincoln laughed when Gen. Sherman told him about burning Georgia. Perhaps they will learn to lie and exhibit false piety.
What A Boy Scout Should Be
Modern Scouts likely never learned much about Lee, but removing his name certainly won't help matters. Lee's example is sorely, desperately needed in a society that produces video games in which men maim women, and music videos in which singers gleefully advocate rape and murder.
What kind of boy was Lee?
"He was a most exemplary student," a teacher said. "He was never behind-time in his studies; never failed a single recitation; was perfectly observant of the rules and regulations of the institution; was gentle, manly, unobtrusive, and respectful in all his deportment to this teachers and his fellow students."
Sounds like what a Boy Scout should be.
Lee could have said that he didn't fight for slavery. So could many who fought with him. Some might have said that they were fighting for it. Many others would fall back on "Southern culture" or "our Southern way of life" and ignore the prominence of slavery in generating conflict.
But when we look back for a reason that goes beyond why this or that particular soldier fought and does the most to explain why war broke out, slavery looks like the that reason. I'm not interested in condemning Lee, but I can well understand why some aren't interested in letting him off the hook.
The country had never been as "united" as you make it sound. As early as the Whiskey Rebellion and the Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 18th Century, schisms were appearing in the union, arising mostly from the issue of states' rights. And the very Constitution was formed around the Great Compromise, which wrangled with the same question.
I have no intention of re-fighting the Civil War, but if you think it was about slavery, you're like a blind man describing an elephant: you're right as far as your small piece goes, but there's much that you're not seeing.
The record is pretty clear. No problems over slavery, no war. That was the only serious irritant.
Walt
To the degree that the Constitution acknowledges the sanctity of states' rights, and the Union violated that sanctity, it can be argued that the UNION soldiers betrayed their oaths, not the Confederates.
The Constitution does not acknowledge the sanctity of the states. It puts limits on them and transfers the ultimate sovereignty and many of the attributes of sovereignty to the government of the country and to the people of the United States. The people are the sovereigns, not the states.
Walt
Walt
Nope, you're the only serious irritant around these parts Wlat.
His words. My emphasis.
WhiskeyPapa -is- a liberal troll.
Thanks to GOPcapitalist, who originally compiled this.
Unfortunately, Dante, George Washington has already been caught up in this game.
The author's last point, "greatness, and certainly great people, must be judged within the context of their own time" is a point that I have always stressed on these threads.
As a Cuban-born American, none of my ancestors fought in the American Civil War. However, I have seen this game at work in the land of my birth as the Communist Cuba Government elevated some men (including some of my own ancestor who were Cuban Founding Fathers and War of Independence Generals) to the status of Sainthood while the Communists demonized other men (including all Americans who risked or gave their lives for Cuban Independence during the Spanish-American War) as racist and evil men whose blood desecrated Cuban soil when it was spilled. Memorial plaques to the American soldiers who died at San Juan Hill and other battle sites around Santiago as well as the Maine Memorial Monument were stripped of all mention of the American soldiers and sailors who died in Cuba.
Any serious student of History knows that any any flesh and blood man who lived before our own times (even Jesus Christ himself who praised the Roman Centurian instead of condenming him for being a slave owner) would miserably fail the current tests for Political Correctness imposed by those who now gleefully trash America's past heroes.
That goes for Abraham Lincoln to:
Abraham Lincoln a Racist?: Black American historian presents evidence
I understand perfectly why those on the Left who hate America and want to discredit America's past as somehow more evil than the past of any other nation on Earth now love to play this game.
However, I am frankly baffled as to why supposed Conservatives also gleefully play this game.
I'm all ears for this one.....
But the roots of this particular conflict go much farther than slavery. Even today, with the issue of involuntary servitude resolved once and for all, we still experience the tensions of unresolved questions over states' rights. Unfunded mandates, affirmative action, federal land grabs, abortion, gun control, education ... All have in them a ghost of the Civil War, and that ghost ain't clankin' no slave chains.
It is interesting to note that if a Civil War erupted today, it would occur along roughly the same lines as the original, with the Midwest likely added to the Southern ranks. Ideologically, this is still a highly divided country, but the issues that divide us aren't related to slavery at all. At their root, they never were.
‘The causes of the war will be found at the foundation of our political fabric, in our complex organism, in the fundamental law, in the Constitution itself, in the conflicting constructions which it invited, and in the institution of slavery which it recognized and was intended to protect. If asked what was the real issue involved in our unparalleled conflict, the average American citizen will reply, ‘the negro’; and it is fair to say that had there been no slavery there would have been no war.
But there would have been no slavery if the South’s protests could have availed when it was first introduced; and now that it is gone, although its sudden and violent abolition entailed upon the South directly and incidentally a series of woes which no pen can describe, yet it is true that in no section would its re-establishment be more strongly and universally resisted.
The South steadfastly maintains that responsibility for the presence of this political Pandora’s box in this Western world cannot be laid at her door. When the Constitution was adopted, and the union formed, slavery existed in practically all the states; and it is claimed by the Southern people that its disappearance from the Northern and its development in the Southern states is due to climatic conditions and industrial exigencies rather than to the existence or absence of great moral ideas.
Slavery was undoubtedly the immediate fomenting cause of the woeful American conflict. It was the great political factor around which the passions of the sections had long been gathered – the tallest pine in the political forest around whose top the fiercest lightnings were to blaze and whose trunk was destined to be shivered in the earthquake shocks of war. But slavery was far from being the sole cause of the prolonged conflict. Neither its destruction on the one hand, nor its defense on the other, was the energizing force that held the contending armies to four years of bloody work.
I apprehend that if all living Union soldiers were summoned to the witness stand, every one of them would testify that it was the preservation of the American Union and not the destruction of Southern slavery that induced him to volunteer at the call of his country. As for the South, it is enough to say that perhaps eighty percent of her armies were neither slave holders, nor had the remotest interest in the institution. No other proof, however, is needed than the undeniable fact that at any period of the war from its beginning to near its close the South could have saved slavery by simply laying down its arms and returning to the Union.'
The causes of the Civil War were many – but anyone who asserts that slavery was the focal point is embracing a superficial view of history. Both North and South believed that they were fighting to preserve (the North to preserve the union; the south to preserve individual/states’ rights). But the southern soldier and citizen, in particular, was fighting for the right to self-governance – fighting what they saw as despotism. Coincidentally, the issue of the abolition of slavery was an issue in which that perceived despotism manifested itself.
Up until late 1862 -- a full year and a half into the conflict -- slavery was not an issue in the war. The federal government had declared, time and time again, that it was fighting for one reason only: to preserve the union. Power politics ruled.
In Bruce Catton’s The Civil War, he writes:
‘The government of Britain, France, or any other nation could play power politics as it chose, as long as the war meant nothing more than an attempt to put down a rebellion; but no government that had to pay the least attention to the sentiment of its own people could take sides against a government which was trying to destroy slavery.’
So, when the Emancipation Proclamation was ‘conveniently’ drafted in 1862, the chances of Britain or France supporting the Confederacy disappeared completely. As Catton asserts, ‘The Emancipation Proclamation locked the Confederates in an anachronism which could not survive in the modern world.’
So the slavery issue became something of a convenient smokescreen.
In a letter I have that was written by a young southern woman during the war, she writes (a view that was prevalent in the south during the latter part of the war):
’When we consider that cotton constitutes the very basis upon which her [Britain’s] enormous power is built, we shall see at once the importance of having it all under her control. This she hopes to accomplish by destroying the culture in this country, which can only be done by destroying the labor which produces it ....She cares nothing for the slaves in Brazil, where his condition is infinitely worse than it is here, or in Cuba where it is worse yet. All her sympathy is reserved for the slave in the Southern states of this Confederacy, who cultivate the products of which she wishes to preserve a monopoly.’
The complex reasons for the war rested mostly on power and economic issues. Slavery played an indispensable role in both of those considerations, but it was not a primary catalyst in bringing on the conflict.
As for Lee’s own view on slavery, in a letter dated December 27, 1856, he (then a Colonel) probably summed up his personal view of slavery better than he did in any other of his writings (and that view did not change once the war broke out, nor afterwards). He wrote:
’There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted on behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially .... Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influences of Christianity than from the storm and tempest of fiery controversy. This influence, though slow, is sure.
Even laying historical facts aside, one has to wonder why the legacy of Robert E. Lee has come under such relentless attack over the past few years. It seems that the attack has less to do with his character, and much more to do with a politically correct agenda aimed at history revisionism and destroying America’s heritage by destroying her genuine heroes.
... how much weight does a political opinion have, when you express it only in a letter to your wife? If we found a letter from Richard Nixon to Pat in which he declares that war is evil, would we call him antiwar? -- Roy Blount, Jr., Robert E. Lee
Political figures made alliances across sectional lines. Southern Federalists like Washington, Marshall, Pinckney and Lee's father Harry joined with Northern Federalists like Adams and Hamilton. Southern Republicans like Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe found allies in Northern Republicans like Clinton and Burr. The Whiskey Rebellion and Alien and Sedition Acts produced political conflict, and the controversy over those Acts helped put the Republicans into power, but sectional war did not happen, because of intersectional political alliances and a belief that the conflict could be resolved at the ballot box.
The same was true of the dissention over the Embargo and the War of 1812. All that was needed to bring the country together was peace. After that war, the Republicans were victorious, but they adopted much of the old Federalist platform to create the "Era of Good Feeling." These conflicts were akin to the later struggles over the Vietnam War, bitter and impassioned, but not likely to produce separation, rebellion or civil war.
Historians don't like to talk about single causes. It looks barbaric, deterministic, and oversimplified. Their livelihoods are concerned, too. Even though we know quite well what caused WWII, historians still argue about the beginnings of that war and will do so forever. And there are always contributory factors: slavery would not have been so divisive an issue if the US hadn't expanded, or if the cotton gin and textile mills hadn't been invented.
Context matters too: some people might see the problem as anti-slavery rather than slavery. Others rightly point out that the inflammatory factor wasn't the existence of slavery but its expansion. The problem was that many regarded the survival and expansion of slavery as deeply intertwined. Some people may view the issue as agrarianism vs. industrialism, but what made the two so inimical between the two sections, when the conflicts were peacefully handeled within sections? Others will complain that anti-slavery forces weren't wholly committed to racial equality. There's no reason, in the context of the 1860s, to presume that they would be. Those opposed to slavery may not even have been truly abolitionist, but this doesn't mean that slavery and its expansion weren't at the root of the conflict.
The individual and the large scale reasons for any war differ. A modern war involves millions of people. They act as they do for individual and subjective motives. Soldiers usually fight for the same motives in war: defense of home and family, loyalty to country and friends. But that doesn't explain why any war broke out.
If we're talking about the big picture and looking for one factor that made war possible and likely, slavery is the best candidate. What other issue could have divided the country as bitterly and lastingly as slavery and destroyed all possibility for compromise?
States' rights.
(Well-written, cogent comments, by the way.)
The causes of the Civil War were many – but anyone who asserts that slavery was the focal point is embracing a superficial view of history.
Your source, John Gordon, writes:
Slavery was undoubtedly the immediate fomenting cause of the woeful American conflict. It was the great political factor around which the passions of the sections had long been gathered – the tallest pine in the political forest around whose top the fiercest lightnings were to blaze and whose trunk was destined to be shivered in the earthquake shocks of war. [emphasis added]
It looks like he's saying that slavery was indeed the focal point of the conflict.
That individual soldiers may not have enlisted to preserve or uproot slavery doesn't affect the fact that in the big picture slavery sparked the conflict. That there was a conflict inherent in the Constitution over state's rights and federalism doesn't explain why the war came when it did.
Aristotle speaks of formal and material causes which are the inherent properties of things, efficient causes which make events happen and final causes, the ultimate reasons why things happen. I'd say the conflict over state's rights was a formal or material cause and slavery was the efficient cause. Conflict could always break out between the federal and state governments or between sections. That was an inherent property of our union. But it doesn't explain why war between these two sections broke out when it did.
As to why the war broke out when it did, it must be considered that Lincoln was elected despite the fact that he did not receive a single Southern Electoral College vote.
In such a situation, some may have thought that the time had come when the South's control over it's own political destiny within the Union had totally slipped away.
Although Lincoln won because of the split in the Democratic Party, the impasse between the Northern and Southern Democrats over the issue of "popular sovereignty" and the future of slavery in the territories meant that the South would see a repeat of this total lack of influence in later Presidential elections.
This perception of completely losing control over it's own future political destinity is, in my opinion, the final cause of seccession at that particular point in time.
Whether seccession had to ultimately lead to war or whether cooler heads on both sides of the Potomac may have been able to bring the South back into the fold and save the Union without the loss of 600,000 deaths (which, in terms of today's U.S. population, would be equivalrnt to over 5 million deaths) is a totally different question that requires it's own root cause analysis.
You seem to place a great deal of importance on the timing of this war (‘why the war came when it did,’ ‘why the war between these two sections broke out when it did’). And, in doing so, you infer that the desire to abolish slavery logically would have been the primary catalyst at this particular juncture of our history. That argument is not cogent.
Slavery began on this continent in early colonial times. It was practiced, and entirely legal, in all thirteen colonies. Although it had pretty much faded out in the North by the late eighteenth century because of industrial demands and climatic conditions, it was still Constitutionally protected, and supported by Northerners (whose shipping industry still made a good deal of money as a result of the slave trade) as well as the South.
Then in the early nineteenth century, both the North and South voted in Congress to stop the importation of slaves. And by the mid nineteenth century, slavery was well on its way to dying a natural death. Most Northerners, even mid-century, though, philosophically condoned slavery because abolishing it would have affected Northern business as well (a decrease in cotton production, for one, would severely adversely affect Northern textile mills). But the expense of keeping slaves, and other economic considerations, was beginning to sound slavery's death knell.
So why, at such a point (when slavery was largely diminishing) would a war to abolish it logically be considered necessary? Your theory that the timing of the war supports the abolition of slavery causation doesn’t add up.
Percy Greg, a respected nineteenth century English poet, novelist and historian wrote:
________________
'The cause [of the war] seems to me as bad as it well could be; the determination of a mere numerical majority to enforce a bond, which they themselves had flagrantly violated, to impose their own mere arbitrary will, their idea of national greatness, upon a distinct, independent, determined and almost unanimous people .... The North fought for empire which was not and never had been hers; the South for an independence she had won by the sword, and had enjoyed in law and fact ever since the recognition of the thirteen 'sovereign and independent States,' if not since the foundation of Virginia. Slavery was but the occasion of the rupture, in no sense the object of the war. Let me add a statement which will be confirmed by every veteran before me -- No man ever saw a Virginia soldier who was fighting for slavery.'
________________
From the Richmond Times, Oct. 22, 1889:
________________
'On the 22d of September, 1862, after the war had been in progress for a year and a half, Mr. Lincoln issued his proclamation, in which he declared that the slaves held in the States, or portions of States which should be still in rebellion on the 1st of January, 1863, following, would be, by a subsequent proclamation, emancipated. His justification was found in the fact that, as a war measure, it would deplete the strength of the Confederacy and augment the forces of the Union.
In all other portions of the Union where slavery was legalized, to-wit: Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and portions of Louisiana and Virginia, the institution would remain unaffected by the proclamation. More than that, by the very terms of the proclamation, the people of the States in which it was made to apply could escape its effects by laying down their arms. Surely if the preservation of the institution of slavery in the seceding States furnished the incentive for their conduct, these States had simply to ground their arms and the institution would have remained.
On the 1st of January, 1863, the final proclamation was made, in which it was recited, because of the failure of the people of the States and portions of States above mentioned to lay down their arms, the slaves within those designated localities were declared free, and the President pledged all the powers of the Union to make good this declaration.
Thus, and thus only, did the emancipation of the slaves become involved in the war. Mr. Lincoln only justified his proclamation as a war measure to help the cause of the Union, for he said: If he could save the Union by freeing the slaves, he would do it; if he could save it by freeing one-half and keeping the other half in slavery, he would take that plan; if keeping them all in slavery would effect the object, that would be his course.
________________
The slavery issue entered the war (and year and a half) belatedly, and primarily as a wartime strategy. It was not a question of morality, but a matter of strategic convenience.
As for your quote 'How much weight does a political opinion have, when you express it only in a letter to your wife? If we found a letter from Richard Nixon to Pat in which he declares that war is evil, would we call him antiwar?'
Lee’s political opinion regarding slavery is well documented – as was his genuine compassion, honor, and decency, even during wartime. If there were one man in the history of this country who epitomized goodness in the face of trial and tragedy, Robert E. Lee was that man. I don’t believe he ever harbored hatred for, or looked down upon, any man (even those who betrayed or countermanded him), or any group of men. And -- your Mr. Blount's skepticism aside -- if he wrote something to his wife regarding his views on any political issue, he no doubt would have written the same to anyone else.
I have a letter that Lee wrote to his son in 1852, during the Mexican War, in which he says:
You must study to be frank with the world. Frankness is the child of honesty and courage. Say what you mean to do on every occasion, and take it for granted you mean to do it right. If a friend asks a favor, you should grant it, if it is reasonable. If not, tell him plainly why you cannot. You will wrong him and wrong yourself by equivocation of any kind. Never do a wrong thing to make a friend or keep one. The man who requires you to do so is dearly purchased at a sacrifice .... Do not appear to others what you are not .... There is no more dangerous experiment than that of undertaking to be one thing before a man’s face and another behind his back. We should live, act, and say nothing to the injury of anyone. It is not only best as a matter of principle, but it is the path to peace and honor.
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