Ahem, yourself. Williams says that current hostility to Lee is based on "presentism" or revisionism or modern relativism or whatever.
Pointing out that thousands of soldiers who fought against him and millions of civilians thought of him as a traitor disposes of his argument.
Whether they were right or wrong, that view isn't "presentist" or "revisionist."
Revisionism set in when people started to make some kind of national hero out of Lee after the war.
It's admirable that we're secure enough as a nation even to embrace people who want to split us up and weaken us, but that kind of magnanimity doesn't always provide us with the clearest or the most exact or the right judgments.
Actually, given that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (among others), in their public writings, suggested or implied that State secession was in no way prohibited by the Constitution, it becomes apparent that folks like you are the 'revisionists.'
It's admirable that we're secure enough as a nation even to embrace people who want to split us up and weaken us, but that kind of magnanimity doesn't always provide us with the clearest or the most exact or the right judgments.
You sound like a Tory, arguing against the American Revolution. Unfortunately for you, a Tory would have had a better legal foundation for such an argument than you have...
It’s the North that weakens the South, not the other way around.
Come on. That's classic appeal ad populum, the same thing I objected to in the beginning. If I object to an emotional appeal as such, and you simply repeat it, what is that? My point is, popularity is not an arbiter of facts in argument. Neptunism was the regnant school of geology in 1750, and if we accepted your argument, we'd all be Neptunists still.
Revisionism set in when people started to make some kind of national hero out of Lee after the war.
Fair enough, and Southern writers have written in opposition to the mythmaking, to point out Lee's flaws as a commander.
But treason wasn't among them.