Posted on 10/17/2005 8:24:21 AM PDT by Incorrigible
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AMERICAN IDENTITY With Malice Toward None, With Amnesty for All: The Pardon of Robert E. LeeBY DELIA M. RIOS |
WASHINGTON -- On Christmas Day 1868, President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation granting "universal amnesty and pardon" to "every person who directly or indirectly participated in the late insurrection or rebellion."
Certainly this included Robert E. Lee, former commanding general of the Confederacy's famed Army of Northern Virginia.
So then why, in the summer of 1975, did President Gerald R. Ford cross the Potomac River to sit among Lee's descendants on the portico of the general's hilltop home? He was there, Ford explained, to right an old wrong. He chose that place, Arlington House, to sign a congressional resolution restoring "full rights of citizenship" to Virginia's native son. Then he handed a souvenir pen to 12-year-old Robert E. Lee V.
Ford spoke of Lee's labors to bind the nation's wounds after the Civil War -- even as contemporary America reeled from the April withdrawal of the last U.S. forces from Vietnam, ending another long, bitter conflict.
Was it really Lee who needed Ford's healing hand? Or was Lee, in fact, pardoned twice -- for reasons that had more to do with 1975 than 1865? "It is a good question," says Michael Hussey of the National Archives.
The search for an answer begins in the strange odyssey of Lee's amnesty oath.
Weeks after the war ended, Andrew Johnson invited high-ranking Confederates to apply for amnesty. Lee actively promoted reconciliation. He wanted to take Johnson up on his offer, but learned he had been indicted for treason. He believed he was protected by the "parole" granted as a condition of his April 9, 1865, surrender to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. His old adversary threatened to resign if Johnson did not honor the parole. Johnson agreed, freeing Lee to seek amnesty.
In doing so, Lee signaled that "opposition to the government was at an end," Douglas Southall Freeman wrote in his landmark history. "No single act of his career aroused so much antagonism."
But Lee did not realize an oath was required of him. It wasn't until Oct. 2 that he went before a notary public and signed his name to this pledge:
"I, Robert E. Lee, of Lexington, Virginia, do solemnly swear, in the presence of Almighty God, that I will henceforth faithfully support, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and the Union of the States thereunder, and that I will, in like manner, abide by and faithfully support all laws and proclamations which have been made during the existing rebellion with reference to the emancipation of slaves, so help me God."
The oath apparently was forwarded to Secretary of State William H. Seward. Then it disappeared from history. Did Johnson see it? Was it misplaced? Suppressed? No one knows. One thing is certain: Lee's request for an individual pardon was never acted upon.
Lee did not press the matter. He was resigned to "procrastination in measures of relief," as he wrote his son, Fitzhugh. But relief did come -- on Dec. 25, 1868, with Johnson's universal amnesty, making Lee's appeal moot.
Only one restriction remained, from the 14th Amendment ratified in July 1868. Any Confederate who had sworn before the war to uphold the Constitution was barred from holding federal or state office. That included Lee, a former officer in the U.S. Army.
Lee died Oct. 12, 1870, at age 63.
Almost 100 years later, an old grievance surfaced -- along with Lee's long-lost oath.
Inspired by the Civil War centennial, an archivist named Elmer O. Parker, began looking for Lee's oath. This great-grandson of Confederate soldiers located the document in a cardboard box among State Department files in the National Archives -- under "Virginia" and "L" for Lee. "Exactly where it was supposed to be," Hussey says. "But no one had thought to look for it."
His find might have been a footnote to Lee's story -- after all, historians already knew that Lee had applied for amnesty. Instead, it stoked a stubborn misconception.
"General Lee died a man without a country," the Richmond News Leader protested early in 1975. The sentiment was repeated in news coverage of Ford's visit to Arlington House, and persists today.
If Lee believed this, it would be news to his biographer Emory M. Thomas and to scholars at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. All Ford actually corrected -- posthumously -- was Lee's right to hold political office, something Congress had restored to former Confederates in 1898.
This was about symbolism. But for whose war?
In July 1975 -- when Congress took up the Lee resolution -- the United States was confronting its failures in Vietnam, with the bicentennial of the American Revolution -- heralded as a unifying event -- just months away.
Listen to Michigan Democrat John Conyers, addressing his colleagues from the floor of the House: "I would suggest to the members that until amnesty is granted to, and full rights of citizenship are restored to, those young Americans who, according to their consciences, resisted the ignoble war in Indochina, this resolution will be neither healing nor charitable."
Another Democrat, Joshua Eilberg of Pennsylvania, countered that the Bicentennial Congress should demonstrate "how we as Americans once divided can learn from our historic past and once again reunite when it is in our nation's interest."
The vote was overwhelmingly in favor. And so the nation's leaders looked to Robert E. Lee and the distant past for reconciliation and peace not yet realized in their own time.
X X X
A sampling of the billions of artifacts and documents in the National Archives is on view in the Public Vaults exhibit. On the Web, go to www.archives.gov and click on "National Archives Experience," then "Public Vaults."
Oct. 14, 2005
(Delia M. Rios can be contacted at delia.rios@newhouse.com.)
Not for commercial use. For educational and discussion purposes only.
Ouch Heyworth, that's got to hurt;)
No, I realized it. It was dangerously close to the sort of "humor" one sees in old KKK literature.
The southern states voluntarily withdrew their congressional representatives when they launched their rebellion. Once their uprising was defeated their representatives were let back in on very moderate terms. However, the southern states abused the spirit of the 13th Amendment with their black codes and with race riots and Reconstruction was the result.
So if your saying that they were states but did NOT have recognized representation for 7-8 years, and would NOT be recognized until they met certain criteria, they weren't really states now, were they?
They certainly were, but Congress sets its own rules and they were well within their rights to refuse to admit southern representatives who had participated in the rebellion or were leaders of the rebellion.
I liked it!
Doubtful. Only 10 legislators were arrested on September 13, 1861. I doubt that such a small number affected the quorum.
What do you respond to the Federal government's actions regarding the transport of troops through Baltimore against the will of the citizens of Maryland?
You are suggesting that they should have allowed mob rule? Federal troops were on their way to Washington. They did not incite the mob, only defended themselves.
Washington commanded the colonial army, not the Virginia army. What he did he did on behalf of the entire nation and not just one part. And he would be the first to admit that.
Article I, Section 5, Clause 1: "Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members..." That gives each House the right to choose to seat or not seat a member, regardless of whether they have been elected. Each house can expel a member. The Constitution is silent on what criteria each house must use. If they refuse to seat an elected representative because the had been leaders of the rebellion then they have the right to do so. If they refuse to seat members until their states ratify an amendment then they can.
Some folks just love living under dictatorial rule.
Some people need to read the Constitution some time.
agreed..
nice tagline BTW LOL
I love it. You continually demean me and insult me, but you haven't engaged my points at all. That tells me that you are all bluster and no substance. Have fun the rest of your bitter-filled days.
Maybe not. Lee lost to lesser generals - McClellan and Meade. He was eminently beatable, and his own nature could be used against him as at Gettysburg. Grant could be as daring as Lee, as he showed by cutting his supply lines and crossing the river below Vicksburg and maneuvering Pemberton into the city. He could use the sledge hammer when necessary, as he did at Chattanooga. He could win on the defense, as at Shiloh, or on offense. He was the one general Lee admitted he could never figure out.
yeah but Lee was developing Heart Disease and pressed to hard at Gettysburg and knew it...
The only reason Antietam was even close was because of the order that was found by the Union forces. Other than that, Lee never lost in the first couple years.
Not taking anything away from Grant. What he did out west was brilliant in it's own right. But when he did once he got east was obviously what needed to be done to finish the war.
Thomas Prentice Kettel's "Southern Wealth and Northern Profits" is a longer work, but still a pamphlet. Its 170 pages include much padding, ranging over everything from Henry VIII to the ratification of the Constitution, to the condition of free Blacks in French Guiana, to anti-Repubican polemics. And Kettel certainly does pad his findings. Here's a little found at random:
The black race is more vicious at the North, as a necessity of its position; it will not work; it cannot compete with the white man, and crime is its ready support! If they had sufficient energy to migrate at all, they would tend southward, where nature will aid them in the indulgence of sensual idleness. It is probable that the Almighty has in store singular and severe manifestations of His wrath against those selfrighteous persons, who, in their own blinded folly, seek to thwart His manifest intentions to exalt both and all races through the medium of black servitude to white intelligence. By so doing, they strive to carry both back to the barbarism of the Middle Ages. It is, no doubt, the case that the condition of servitude admits of many modifications for the better. The most important improvement needed is to exact-more industry from the blacks. Those employed in cities and as house-servants are notoriously indolent. Persons who visit the South are at once impressed with this fact. It is probably owing, in some degree, to the enervating effects of climate which takes from the energy required to direct black labor.
Kettell was a journalist with aspirations to be considered an economist, but still a journalist. His name is only remembered because of "Southern Wealth and Northern Profts" not because of any theoretical or scholarly work of any lasting value. In his book Kettell was trying to win an argument, rather than to follow the evidence and find the truth wherever it lay. Whatever Kettell's standing in his own day was, a modern economist or history shouldn't simply take his 19th century conclusions at his word, without an attempt to understand the situation using the tools we have at hand today.
When someone starts out with charges of "disinformation" and "misrepresentation" it can be an indication that there's not much to support his actual argument. That seems to be how things are in your case. You don't defend the actual conclusions of Kettell and Curry. You don't rebut my criticisms of their argument. You just try to defend their authority. Unfortunately, Curry had no special expertise in economic matters, and whatever competence Kettell had in his day, it's no substitute for present-day analysis with the tools we have at hand today.
DiLorenzo is no historian, and shows no particular competence in that field, but it's scandalous that DiLorenzo, who claims to be an economist, doesn't make use of such knowledge as he purports to have to subject conclusions from a century and a half ago to a critical analysis.
That's the best you can come up with, huh? You may have change your screen name but you haven't changed your argument.
Even so, the acts plainly are unconstitutional (violation of Amendment IV, V, VI, VII and VIII)...
Because you say so? Well why have a court at all? We can just ask you.
....and the court did rule post bellum 9-0 that the Constitution cannot be suspended.
When?
But bootlicker's could care less about rights and constitutional protections - all they worry about is that they get a pat on the head, and maybe a chance to kiss the arse of their master, and that those evil Southern women and children were slaughtered, their homes destroyed.
Now there is the delusional 4ConservativeJustices we all came to know and love? We missed you!
Oh please, I've heard all the 'he had heart disease' or 'he had dysentery' excuses before. Not 10 weeks before Lee had kick the ass of the Army of the Potomac at Chancellorsville and nobody is saying his heart was giving out then. What Lee didn't have was Jackson, and what he didn't do is think to modify his leadership techniques to allow for his changes in organization and commanders. He overreached and underestimated his opponents and he paid the price.
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