[\/\/ayne]

General Robert E. Lee's Parole and Citizenship

On May 29, 1865, President Andrew Johnson issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon to persons who had participated in the rebellion against the United States. There were fourteen excepted classes, though, and members of those classes had to make special application to the President.

Lee sent an application to Grant and wrote to President Johnson on June 13, 1865:

"Being excluded from the provisions of amnesty & pardon contained in the proclamation of the 29th Ulto; I hereby apply for the benefits, & full restoration of all rights & privileges extended to those included in its terms. I graduated at the Mil. Academy at West Point in June 1829. Resigned from the U.S. Army April '61. Was a General in the Confederate Army, & included in the surrender of the Army of N. Va. 9 April '65."

On October 2, 1865, the same day that Lee was inaugurated as president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, he signed his Amnesty Oath, thereby complying fully with the provision of Johnson's proclamation. But Lee was not pardoned, nor was his citizenship restored. And the fact that he had submitted an amnesty oath at all was soon lost to history.

More than a hundred years later, in 1970, an archivist at the National Archives discovered Lee's Amnesty Oath among State Department records (reported in Prologue, Winter 1970). Apparently Secretary of State William H. Seward had given Lee's application to a friend as a souvenir, and the State Department had pigeonholed the oath.

In 1975, Lee's full rights of citizenship were posthumously restored by a joint congressional resolution effective June 13, 1865.

[SES1066]

Apparently Secretary of State William H. Seward had given Lee's application to a friend as a souvenir, and the State Department had pigeonholed the oath.

FYI in referencing William Seward, there is irony with the Cancel Culture Outragers!

First, in the same conspiracy that had the President, Abraham Lincoln, assassinated, Lewis Powell went to Seward's home, that same night, where Seward was confined for illness, made entry into his bedroom and stabbed him 5 times. In the attack, Powell also injured 2 of Seward's sons, a soldier and a messenger before escaping. That all of them survived the night and that Seward stayed Secretary of State through Andrew Johnson's term is what has his statue now standing in the Alaska State Capital of Juneau.

Now as Number Two, the rampant Cancel Culture of Dis-history, the same ones in favor of removing the multiple statues of General Lee, also has a band wanting to do the same for Secretary Seward's new 2016 statue in Juneau. The 'reason'(?), he was a colonialist in leading the effort for buying Alaska from Russia and failing to consult the native inhabitants while doing so. Left unsaid and unconsidered by these a-historical ignoramuses is what the native treatment would have been like under Imperial Russia, a land of nobles and serfs!

While their 'change.org' petition does not appear to be getting much momentum, it does go to PROVE that there is a given percentage of people who love to virtue signal! The important thing to remember is that these activist are given an immediate respectibility by their fellow travelers in the [unbiased] MSM! RESIST THEM!