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.
Actually I think it was Gen. Winfield Scott who extended the offer of Union command to Lee.
If it came to it, absolutely.
Not me. Granted, things have changed since 1861...
Your post certainly does imply that the civil war was his doing.
Yep, that must be why they put that pesky 10th Amendment in there.....
Maybe you've just provided a response to your own post. If this was "the greatest nation on earth," then what reason would the South have for leaving it? Maybe they didn't really think it was the greatest nation on earth, after all.
It's important to remember that the aim of the Confederacy wasn't to overthrow the U.S. government. They just wanted to secede and go their own way. Just as the Thirteen Colonies never tried to overthrow the British government -- they just wanted to secede and go their own way.
I find it hard to believe that you have not faulted Hawaiians for joining the Japanese.
How could I fault them? They weren't even Americans at the time, and therefore had no obligations to support the U.S.
IIRC, not one person in the Confederate military leadership or goverment was ever convicted of treason.
I wonder why?
"War is all hell..."
Again, which side a general chooses ... I think it does make a difference. There is a limit to the idea that you can be justly considered to have fought "honorably" if your cause is dead wrong.
And I've never believed that all Northern generals were honorable.
Simple...to avoid continued strife and attempt to bring re-union as quickly as possible. In regard to his post-war attempts at healing, Lee did the right thing. Lincoln would have, too, had he lived.
This is my favorite story about General Lee, with the appropriate reference:
In his recent work Robert E. Lee: A Biography (1995), Emory Thomas records a little known incident in Lee's life. Shortly after the end of the War, Lee attended communion at St. Paul's Church. Its "list of communicants read like a Who's Who of the Confederacy." When the invitation to come forward and receive communion was given, "a tall-well dressed, black man stood and strode to the rail. There followed a pregnant pause. According to one witness, "Its effects upon the communicants was startling, and for several moments they retained their seats in solemn silence and did not move, being deeply chagrined at this attempt to inaugurate the 'new regime' to offend and humiliate them...". Then another person rose from the pew and walked down the aisle to the chancel rail. He knelt near the black man and so redeemed the circumstance. This grace- bringer, of course was Lee. Soon after he knelt, the rest of the congregation followed his example and shuffled in turn to the rail...Lee's actions were far more eloquent than anything he spoke or wrote." (Thomas, p. 372.)
Another note to add is that people either don't know or forget that there really wasn't a concept of "nationalism" in 1861 like we have today. At that point in time the only exposure to the Federal Goverment a person had on a daily basis was he/she recieved mail. State loyalty was the custom/culture of the day.
There was no Federal funding of schools, crop subsidies, mandated speed limits, income tax, welfare, grants, etc. Heck the army was so small it was hard to even have a career there.
The 10th Amendment does not provide near-absolute sovereignty for the states. I'd like to hear your argument that it does.
I hate to say anything that's going to offend anyone, but....I think Grant's performance in the west was extremely impressive. It compares very favorably with Lee in the East, particularly when you consider that Lee was facing some extremely crummy union generals in the first couple years of the war.
Grant was not as impressive tactically after he came East, and (this is where I hope not to offend anyone) I think that may have been due to different troops quality. There were some good units in the Army of the Potomac, but the average quality was not as high as in the Army of Northern Virginia or in Grant's western armies. With a slightly lower troop quality, its a bit unfair to compare his tactical skill to Lee's when they opposed one another.
But I thought you assigned traitorism to Lee?
Absolutely. In that time, ones duty was to STATE first..South Carolina seceded because they firmly believed it was up to them to determine the future of their state, not the Federal Government. Lest anyone forget, Georgia, near the end of the "Late Unpleasantness", threatened to secede from the Confederacy for the exact same reason. The governor at the time considered the Federal interference from Richmond to be too imposing on states rights.
Indeed an extremely important, and too frequently overlooked, distinction.
Why must you pepper your responses with references to your view of my education? A little substance, and a little less insult, might be more becoming.
The leaders in the South were educated men who absolutely knew the ins and outs of the Federal Constitution. They were simply wrong in their theory of the right to secession, however. We can discuss this with reasoned discourse, if you would like.
good discussion ping
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