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.
There's a new book out about Lee's plan at Gettysburg on the third day, which basically argues that Stuart was supposed to hit the Union rear with the massed CSA cavalry at the same time Pickett was hitting the front. Stuart was held up by Custer, though, and the plan fell apart.
yeah Stuart ran into Custer near Hanover and had to fight his way through (which he did, but the timing was completely blown up by the time he got there).
Also, Early and Ewell were supposed to attack the Union Right flank that morning, but they never got through the town of Gettysburg, and didn't even start an attack, much less help the big attack later in the day.
You haven't been around hear very long.....but after six years of you blue-zone liberals calling my ancestors "evil Nazi traitors" there's really nothing to debate.
It's a bit of a stretch to suggest that he acted on behalf on "the entire nation," especially when you consider that there was no nation to speak of -- for many years afterward. At the time of the American Revolution there was no consensus as to what form this "nation" should take, and no certainty as to how many of the Thirteen Colonies would even ratify a new government anyway.
There was enough of a consensus for the Continental Congress to adopt the Articles of Confederation in 1777.
I don't remember where I read it, but I once saw something that made the case that Lee was always a little vague, flowery and overly polite in his orders, giving his subordinates too much time and too much roo mfor misunderstanding. As a result, he was rarely able to get a battle going before afternoon, which meant that he was unable to follow up on successes before night fell, and found it difficult to really coordinate a complex plan like you describe at Gettysbury. Grant and Sherman, on the other hand, wrote very terse and unmistakably clear orders. Not sure how valid the argument is, but I found it interesting and it does seem to fit their respective styles--gentlemanly vs. efficient.
That is the main differences between the men.
Grant was a new type of officer. One similiar to what we have today. Lee was more of an old-school General going back to the Napoleonic types.
Jackson took the vagueness of the orders to mean to push as hard as possible, whereas Ewell and to a point Longstreet would be sometimees overly cautious with them....
A student may stick in a footnote to some obscure or tendentious source and consider his work done, but someone who professes to do serious work in a subject has to consider just how reliable his evidence is. In DiLorenzo's case the answer is that his evidence isn't especially convincing and he didn't do the necessary homework.
No one would call Jabez Curry's 16 page pamphlet "The Perils and Duty of the South" a serious work of economics. Nor would anyone consider that Curry had put anything of original effort into his book or that he did much to critically analyze his "evidence."
The estimates that Curry cites were just that -- "estimates" with little pretence of precision about them. And that Adams and DiLorenzo assume that the 1838 Treasury report that Curry cites represents the truth about trade and tariff twenty years later is either laughable or scandalous.
Thomas Prentice Kettell isn't so very different. He may have been a better economist than Curry -- that wouldn't have been hard, since Curry had no grounds to be considered such -- but he was still a popular journalist, not a serious scholar. The conclusions of 19th century economists can't simply be taken for granted by 20th century specialists. A lot has to be reexamined and reconsidered -- and that's even truer when journalists and pamphleteers are considered.
I've no doubt that Kettell had his following. There have long been plenty of popular writers on economics who make a living following markets for those who want investment counsel, but not all of them were first-rate economists and some have quite eccentric. Go to any bookstore and you'll find plenty of such tracts.
Moreover, journalism was far more partisan in those days. Bennett was a proslavery Democrat. Blair was a fierce Jacksonian at the time when he praised Kettell. It's not clear that they had any especial knowledge of economics to go on either.
Jeffrey Rogers Hummell, the libertarian historian who did a lot to get this whole "revisionist" school started has criticized Adams and DiLorenzo for their naivete in accepting unfounded and exaggerated 19th century claims at face value. Most responsible scholars would doubtless agree with Hummell, rather than with Adams or DiLorenzo.
I am a research assistant at a major New England learning center, and having done quite a bit of research on the slave breeding in the South, maybe I can help you. ...
I have online access to electronic versions of the following peer-reviewed economic journals: ...
Well, after all, I am a historian with several degrees. I am from the South originally, and therefore am considered an expert on Southern culture. I attended several Southern universities, studying under notable historians. Later, migrating North, I achieved graduate degrees, and completed several papers on the history of slavery. One undergraduate paper I did was on slave breeding, and interestingly enough, I used the Internet to source new material. ...
Yes, today what we might call luxuries were lavished upon the breeding class in the middle states. However, studies show that the more luxuries they obtained, at one point procreation related activities began to decline, producing, if you will, a breeding bell curve. And thank you for your suggestion that recreation leather ball point acquisition, and procreation scoring might be affected by an external independant variable, instead of direct causation.
This may require further data review. I will take this concept of yours to my moderated research and discussion group to view their research, and obtain a final answer.
Best wishes from Boston
Cosmo ...
Greetings from Boston.
I believe that I have told you, or perhaps someone else here, that I wrote my thesis on New England Politics of the 18th Century. ...
Greetings from Boston.
Here is the perspective on Lincoln from my dissertation -->Even though the large majority of Americans, North and South, believed in a right of secession as of 1861, upon taking office Lincoln implemented a series of unconstitutional acts of such monumental proportions that no man who had the least bit of respect for constitutional liberty could have done such things. ...
Hello and Greetings from Boston
As you may remember, I am a noted historian and former resident of the South. I beleive you said "No distortion is too low for him or his gullible fans." ...
Noted historian, research assistant, or just bulltosser? No "expert" or "noted historian" would boast so openly as you do. They'd let their erudition speak for itself, as your errors in spelling, syntax, and logic do.
Far be it from me to draw any conclusions based on your posts, but others might find them a pretty clear self-portrait of a braggart, liar, and buffoon. That may be par for the course on the Internet, but you're in no position to accuse others of making things up.
It's not a stretch at all. He said as much during the Revolution, and in all eight years of war, Washington was only involved in one battle in his home state -- Yorktown, the final large engagement. All of his other actions over those long years were in New England, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He assigned his top field commander, Nathanial Green, a New Englander, to command the Continental Army in the South to counter Cornwalis while Washington himself stayed in New York to keep the British bottled up there.
Washington saw himself as an American and saw the 13 states as one nation. There is no doubt about that.
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