A Massachusetts soldier quartered at the Lee family mansion in Arlington, VA, wrote this to his hometown newspaper, the Courier & Gazette in Greenfield, MA, published on 15 June 1863:
“At the cook house for the overseer’s family I noticed an octoroon, nearly white, with fine features. She told me that her mother, long since dead was a quadroon and Gen. Lee’s housekeeper at Arlington, and to the question, ‘Was your father a colored man?’ she answered without hesitation ‘No,–master’s my father.” And this father and master now leads an army, the sole purpose of which is to establish a government founded on an institution which enslaves his own children, making his own flesh and blood saleable property!”
The accuracy of the report is impossible to verify, but it’s eyewitness testimony. It’s also not out of keeping with the traditions of Southern slaveholding.
Read what Mary Chestnut wrote in her diary, “A CONFEDERATE LADY’S DIARY”:
“God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system & wrong & iniquity ... This is only what I see: like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives & their concubines, & the Mulattos one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children-& every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own.”
If it was learned that Lee actually made a slave of his own child, then his face should be chiseled off Stone Mountain. That kind of example would be one to show the nature of “honor” in the worst kind of tyrant.
And that has to do with what I wrote how?