Posted on 07/10/2015 10:11:35 AM PDT by ghost of stonewall jackson
The harder call concerns Robert E. Lee. Should schools and other facilities be named after the great Confederate general, or should his name be removed and replaced?
The case against Lee begins with the fact that he betrayed his oath to serve the United States. He didn’t need to do it. The late historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor demonstrated that 40 percent of Virginia officers decided to remain with the Union forces, including members of Lee’s family.
As the historian Allen Guelzo emailed me, “He withdrew from the Army and took up arms in a rebellion against the United States.” He could have at least sat out the war. But, Guelzo continues, “he raised his hand against the flag and government he had sworn to defend. This more than fulfills the constitutional definition of treason.”
More germane, while Lee may have opposed slavery in theory he did nothing to eliminate or reduce it in practice. On the contrary, if he’d been successful in the central task of his life, he would have preserved and prolonged it.
Like Lincoln he did not believe African-Americans were yet capable of equality. Unlike Lincoln he accepted the bondage of other human beings with bland complaisance. His wife inherited 196 slaves from her father. Her father’s will (somewhat impractically) said they were to be freed, but Lee didn’t free them.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
When my son was in the Boy Scouts he was in the Robert E. Lee Council. They changed it to the Heart Of Virgina Council shortly after he dropped out. That was the first I remember of this nonsense.
"The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United Status will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.
Slavery was an institution that required unusual guarantees for its security wherever it existed; and in a country like ours where the larger portion of it was free territory inhabited by an intelligent and well-to-do population, the people would naturally have but little sympathy with demands upon them for its pro- tection. Hence the people of the South were dependent upon keeping control of the general government to secure the perpetuation of their favorite institution. They were enabled to maintain this control long after the States where slavery existed had ceased to have the controlling power, through the assistance they received from odd men here and there throughout the Northern States. They saw their power waning, and this led them to encroach upon the prerogatives and independence of the Northern States by enacting such laws as the Fugitive Slave Law. By this law every Northern man was obliged, when properly summoned, to turn out and help apprehend the runaway slave of a Southern man. Northern marshals became slave-catchers, and Northern courts had to contribute to the support and protection of the institution.
This was a degradation which the North would not permit any longer than until they could get the power to expunge such laws from the statute books. Prior to the time of these encroachments the great majority of the people of the North had no particular quarrel with slavery, so long as they were not forced to have it themselves. But they were not willing to play the role of police for the South in the protection of this particular institution."
--U.S. Grant
There is a collective psychosis going on and it is Stalinist.
This is not an issue or question of any import or impact.
Yet it is the issue of the day, obsessed over, universally supported.
The rapidity and universality of the Pavlovian response of the media/political class is frightening.
There is no reason to expect reason, logic or rationality anymore.
That’s my response- so what? People are so emotionally invested &/ or fearful of accusation, they don’t seem to be able to think straight. I don’t think slavery or “racism” are even the point (’useful idiots’ not withstanding). It’s just browbeating & beating a dead horse.
We agree. Or closely enough.
The United States were hardly the only place where Slavery was accepted at the time, without the moral qualms that the writer suggests. Not only in Brazil, until the 1880s, but in what was to become French West Africa, the labor system was completely accepted. (For example, in 1880 Senegal, the jewel of French West Africa, the population consisted of two classes, slaves and slave owners. When both Clinton & Bush II went over to Senegal and denounced "slavery," they were almost certainly addressing the great grandchildren of the slave owning class, who hoping for American dollars, politely listened, probably without informing their guest speakers of the reality.
As for General Lee's oath: It was to the Constitution, not to someone else's interpretation of where that loyalty actually lay, under the circumstances of Virginia's secession. The writer, here, arrogantly is assuming an interpretation of duty, that is not as obvious as he imagines.
General Douglas MacArthur--certainly an authority of Military Duty--treated both the Blue & Grey with equal respect in his classic Duty, Honor, Country.
Virginia's ratification of the Constitution was never understood as a permanent pledge to support all future office holders of the Federal Government. Such a theory would fly in the very face of Jefferson's definition of legitimate Government in the Declaration.
The writer is seeking to rationalize a result that he apparently desires. The piece does him no credit, whatsoever.
Grant continued:
"The framers were wise in their generation and wanted to do the very best possible to secure their own liberty and independence, and that also of their descendants to the latest days. It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies...We could not and ought not to be rigidly bound by the rules laid down under circumstances so different for emergencies so utterly unanticipated. The fathers themselves would have been the first to declare that their prerogatives were not irrevocable. They would surely have resisted secession could they have lived to see the shape it assumed."
I look forward to it.
What words would you have?
David ‘amazing crease’ Brooks is so intellectually vacuous it is impossible to describe.
While I am a comparative newcomer to these Civil War threads I have noticed that there are far more attempts to disparage the Union soldiers than I've ever seen directed towards Southern ones. To hear some people all Union soldiers were Irish immigrants forced into the ranks right off the boat, rapists, conscripts, or just plain cowards. Grant was nothing but a drunk. Sherman was a pyromaniac. And it was just blind luck that the North won any battle at all much less the war.
The ones you left out at the end of his sentence.
Daddy used to say that Lincoln didn’t have to have that war. There were modern inventions coming down the pike that would have rendered slavery a moot point. (Our family did not deify Lincoln.)
OK, let's take the next sentences as well:
"While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is still onward, and give it the aid of our prayers, let us leave the progress as well as the results in the hands of Him who, chooses to work by slow influences, and with whom a thousand years are but as a single day. Although the abolitionist must know this, must know that he has neither the right not the power of operating, except by moral means; that to benefit the slave he must not excite angry feelings in the master; that, although he may not approve the mode by which Providence accomplishes its purpose, the results will be the same; and that the reason he gives for interference in matters he has no concern with, holds good for every kind of interference with our neighbor, -still, I fear he will persevere in his evil course..."
Lee was willing to leave slavery in the hands of God. He viewed any attempts to end it my abolitionists as an "evil course." He did, as I mentioned earlier, consider it "necessary" for blacks if they were to advance as a race, and a much better condition for them than as free men in Africa. And you still say he was opposed to slavery?
“This whole thing is about manipulating grief over a horrific tragedy to assault states’ rights. The goal is to erase historical and cultural memory of the complex nature and traditions of the United States.”
Yes, it is about manipulating grief and manipulation in general.
It has little to do with Robert E. Lee, State’s Rights, Confederate flag etc...
It is about establishing group think and establishing Stalinist working structure among the media/political class.
Your obsession with judging others does not make a valid or serious argument. Lee, of course, thought for himself on contemporary issues; that did not make him take a holier than thou attitude towards his neighbors or associates; but neither did it make him blindly accept anyone else's views on matters of conscience.
While I am philosophically more akin to the Virginia leadership, I would step in to defend New England, as well, if the shoe were ever really on the other foot. (No, no Puritan; but I honor the honorable coming together of the different American cultures in the 1780s, and unlike the lynch mob mentality of the South haters, will never respond in kind. I have been fighting the misuse of the Federal Government to try to impose one section's set of moral values on the others, since High School.
Then how could Lee, a most pious man, ever be opposed to slavery as was claimed?
Your obsession with judging others does not make a valid or serious argument.
And just where am I judging Lee? I am stating a fact to contradict the misstatement that Lee was opposed to slavery. I don't judge him on that. As a matter of fact in an earlier post I criticized anyone who would judge Lee, or any other man of that period, by today's standards. I said Lee was a man of his times, no worse and in many ways better than his peers. Check it out for yourself. I think you are entirely too touchy where Lee is concerned.
I have difficulty honoring Robert E Lee, mainly for continuing a lost war once Lincoln was reelected. This not only sacrificed more lives, it continued the physical devastation of the South’s homeland. But the issue of treason has long been settled. Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and even Stanton did not pursue the issue of treason against Southern combatants and leaders because to do so would result in continuation of the war by means that had been limited to Kansas and Missouri. The Union could never have controlled let alone pacified a South enflamed by prosecutions for treason. There would have been no reunion, and while this conquered state scenario would have pleased the likes of Thaddeus Stevens it would not have pleased the continued conscripts that would have been necessary to rule the South. Much better to welcome as brothers those who wore the Grey. So to those who claim Treason, in your own words, the issue has been settled. Move on!
Your arguments are pretty much the same as the Supreme Court deciding on issues out of their jurisdiction (e.g. the definition of marriage). Lee is correct, there are things that must be left in the hands of God doing his work on men’s souls. The abolitionist wants to play god.
I myself will defer to the vast majority of the Union Army’s leadership in this matter. They respected the man to the utmost, as a comrade in Mexico and as an adversary in Virginia. They knew Lee personally, who are we to dispute their judgement.
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