Posted on 08/15/2017 7:49:25 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
After white nationalists protested the City of Charlottesville’s plan to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza claimed Sunday that Lee opposed slavery.
Verdict: False
While Lee disagreed with slavery in an abstract sense, he held views similar to his pro-slavery contemporaries and criticized abolitionists of his day.
Fact Check:
D’Souza claimed in a tweet that Lee, a Confederate general during the Civil War, was a poor example of the evils of slavery.
The claim is counterintuitive – Lee owned slaves, and he fought for the Confederacy in a rebellion that was, in part, predicated on slavery.
The notion that Lee opposed slavery has roots in Southern folklore. “This is a little bit of white washing of his image that took place after the Civil War when he was resurrected as a hero of the Lost Cause – as somebody who was very honorable, a great military general and also somebody who morally opposed slavery,” Manisha Sinha, American History professor at the University of Connecticut, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
TheDCNF reached out to D’Souza’s press manager who cited a letter written by Lee in which he called slavery a “moral and political evil.”
The letter in its entirety, however, reveals that Lee held a worldview similar to pro-slavery apologists of the day.
Although Lee called slavery evil, he believed God had ordained it for a divine purpose that would eventually end. Lee made it clear in his letter that he opposed human intervention into what he considered heavenly matters.
“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,” Lee wrote.
Like many slaveholders, Lee believed that God ordained slavery to “civilize” the black race and that black people heavily benefited from the institution.
“The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially,” Lee wrote. “The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things.”
The argument was based upon the white supremacist idea that black people were morally, intellectually and even physically inferior to the white race.
“This notion that people of African descent were made good slaves – that they needed to be schooled into civilization was an odd argument because it was a school from which they could never graduate,” Sinha told TheDCNF. “So even after people had been here for centuries and generations, were Christianized, were civilized by Southern standards, even then they were not deemed civilized enough to be liberated.”
The positive good argument of slavery – the idea that paternalistic whites were actually helping inferior blacks by enslaving them – helped solidify a moral argument in the minds of many Southerners that slavery was permissible.
“There was a strain of pro-slavery thinking in Virginia that saw slavery as kind of an evil necessity, but a necessity nonetheless,” Sinha said. “And you can trace this back to the Revolutionary Era where there were people who expressed qualms about slavery in the abstract, but continued to enslave African-Americans, using sometimes sort of racist arguments to justify their enslavement.”
This way of thinking contributed to the notion that white slave masters were burdened by the duty to “civilize” black people, and Lee argues that whites, not blacks, suffered the greatest evils of slavery.
“I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race,” Lee wrote in his letter. “While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former.”
Although Lee ruminates on the welfare of black slaves, it was ultimately the interests of white slaveholders that took precedence in his view of abolition. Lee criticized abolitionists for their interference in Southern affairs, and argued that “to benefit the slave he must not excite angry feelings in the master.”
To argue that he was against slavery because he abstractly called it a “moral and political evil” ignores the fact that he not only believed the institution should continue but practiced it himself. In reality, the views espoused by Lee were much the same as those perpetuated by pro-slavery apologists of his time.
“He very much thought right down the line – the pro-slavery line,” Historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who studied Lee’s personal collection of letters, explained in a talk on the matter.
That is true, the States remained part of the Union. He declared them in a state of insurrection . As such, the President and the Congress exercised their Constitutional authority to used the Army and the Navy to suppress insurrection. Lincoln never claimed in 1861 that ending slavery was the objective in prosecuting a war against the Confederacy.
Even accepting this line of reasoning, it doesn't give Lincoln the authority to deprive all the citizens of only one class of "property."
If you are going to make the argument that it was for "Militarily advantageous" reasons, then the capture of all their property which could conceivably affect a military advantage should have been seized as well.
Their horses, their guns, their cattle (for food) and so forth should have been seized. Otherwise the idea that the seizure of their slaves for military reasons was a blatant lie.
At this time in history, the Constitution did not make a distinction between one type of "property" and another, and since it was illegal to seize people's property without due process, it was also illegal to seize their slaves without that same due process.
Of course, by this point in the war, nobody really gave a crap about legal matters, they were just doing whatever they wanted, and then plastering on an ad hoc legal "justification" for what they did. It was all a big game.
Just because Ike wrote that doesn’t mean it’s automatically correct. I was taught to think for myself and not to blindly accept without question statements made by others regardless of their position. Lee is long dead and arguing about the status of statues of him distracts from the efforts needed to be made in tax reform, immigration, jobs, health care, national defense and such.
Ok Taliban guy. What’s your DU handle?
The Federal armies routinely seized several classes of property belonging to Confederate civilians. They seized horses, hogs, mules, slaves, houses, real estate. Ask the people that lived in the Shenandoah valley what property General Sheridan seized. As the people of central Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina what property General Sherman seized.
Whether legal or not is again your opinion. What cases before the courts decided that seizing the property of those in insurrection was Unconstitutional
.....is an idea that's widespread among LEFTIST elitists today, exemplified by their "tyranny of low expectations" attitude.
I agree. The left excoriated Christian missionaries for going to underprivileged areas to bring not just the gospel, but also practical benefits like medical care, sanitation, irrigation, et cetera. But they see no problem with the leftist government forcing today's economically deprived nations to legalize homosexuality and transgenderism (and punish those whose consciences cannot "celebrate" those practices) as the price for receiving aid programs.
Secondly, I strongly object to the "marxification" or "collectivization" of language, in which an isolated incident is pluralized to represent all such incidents and the entire group to which an individual within a single incident belongs.
The example at the top of this post should properly be rewritten as:
the idea that a paternalistic whites wereculture was actually helping an inferiorblacksAfrican culture
Given Lincoln’s stated views that blacks should not be considered socially equal to whites,
and given that the Confederacy’s founding openly stated that those in power considered blacks inferior,
and given that the North acted essentially as a occupying force in the South during Reconstruction with the aim of keeping the South from rebelling again (taking over industries and creating harsh conditions for most of the whites, including poor education for both races),
one can easily imagine that emancipating the black slaves who formed a quarter to a third of the population was a covertly punitive act against the white population—clothed in noble language about human dignity.
Most people familiar with the Bible recognize that adultery is sex outside of lawful marriage. Even if the rumor of Jefferson having chidren by his bondswoman could be proved true, the laws of the time would have prevented them from marrying. Therefore, a sexual relationship outside of marriage within the Christian culture of the time would have been considered adultery. It would still be considered so, today, to Bible-believing Christians.
Eisenhower was a West Point graduate and of course had studied the Civil War more closely than many of us on this board, since he was at West Point 1911-1915, a mere 46 years after the end of the Civil War, when many veterans of the CW were still living. It was closer to him than WWII to us.
Eisenhower's opinion may have been biased towards Lee, but not merely sentimental and certainly not uninformed. Wars are meant to be won; and students at the military academy would have studied Lee's failures as well as his successes.
In addition, Lee was appointed superintendent of West Point in 1852, meaning that Eisenhower would have received special attention on Lee in his West Point instruction.
Lee was a very respected General. I remember that Lee was torn about leading the South but felt it was his duty. I attended Chicago Public School. The public school system taught reading, writing, arithmetic and history during the 60s and 70s. Now they teach NADA.
― Mohsin Hamid
Yes, but you’re free to take another wife biblically if your spouse has passed aren’t you? It could be considered fornication, but then again based on not being allowed to marry a bondsman according to mans law, I would figure if he was faithful to her and considered her his spouse after his first wife’s death the Lord would be OK with that.
Regardless of how we dissect it, he was still a cornerstone of the birth of the nation at the time and people who try to denigrate him now suck (to say the least).
Lee didn't "speak out" against slavery.
A private letter to your wife doesn't count as "speaking out."
Lee was in a bind of course -- soldiers and officers weren't supposed to "speak out" on public affairs -- but Lee never showed any inclination to "speak out," and it would have been better for the country if he had.
Imagine whatever you like. But in the 19th century opposition to slavery didn't require commitment to an idea of racial equality. Lincoln said:
I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.
That's not a sentiment we can approve of today, but at the time it was an advance in our ideas of human dignity.
Moreover, the thing about war is that people are busy trying to kill people and win the war. Other goals, good and bad, come second. So it's always possible to dismiss people's other motives and actions as unimportant. Until you actually get into a war and finally understand the mindset.
General Lee could not have released his slaves if he wanted to (which it sounds as if he did.) Virginia law prohibited releasing dowry slaves. His slaves were technically his wife’s (thus dowry.) George Washington had the same situation. (Both were married to Custis women.)
Jefferson, OTOH, had another problem. Since slaves were considered property, he couldn’t release his because he was in debt. He neither bought nor sold any.
Lee wasn’t an abolitionist. They were somewhat disruptive in his view. He was a gradual emancipationist, who criticized the system and hoped that it would end eventually (gradually.) The abolitionists were radicals who wanted to change the system overnight. People like Lee were gradualists who thought it better if there was an adjustment and a phase out.
Also, most of his slaves were inherited. His father in law was in debt (thus couldn’t legally release the slaves for the same reason Jefferson couldn’t.)
In December 1862, he signed a document of manumission for his slaves, and released them.
So many people are angry at RINOs and moderates and the wishy-washy. You can be mad at somebody who says, in effect, "This is bad, but we shouldn't do anything about it until it's done it's work and God does away with it Himself in his own good time."
There's a contradiction when it comes to Lee. If you are one of the people who are really mad at those who won't take a stand and who just expect everything will be alright in the end, you should take another look at Lee and judge him by the same standard and see how he measures up. If on the other hand, you really want to honor Lee, maybe you should take another look at today's politics and politicians and wonder if people haven't been too hard on them.
I wasn’t talking about the war. I was talking about Reconstruction, over which Lincoln had no sway, having been assassinated. Many historians believe he would have been less harsh and more conciliatory towards the South.
To be equivalent, you would have to seize all of the property of everyone without trial, not just a select few in places that were beneficial to the military at the time.
Let us say that Lincoln made a proclamation to seize all the horses, hogs, mules, houses, and real estate throughout the entire south.
Would this have been legal or constitutional?
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