Posted on 10/17/2005 8:24:21 AM PDT by Incorrigible
|
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.
IMHO , this is a straw man. I don't know of any serious person who blurs this distincion. The real point is that secession itself was treason against the Union.
It should be noted, though, that in this context the U.S. was really just part of a global trend of "big-state nationalism" that marked that era in history. Other similar events included the unification of the Prussian states into a single Germany nation under Bismarck and the formal unification of Italy under Garibaldi (both in the early 1870s), as well as the British North America Act of 1867, which unified six British colonies into a single Confederation of Canada.
Which is exactly what Lee would have done had he had those bodies at his disposal as a Union Commander. Lee took big gambles because he had to ... sometimes they made him look brilliant (eg Chancellorsville), sometimes not (eg July 3, 1863).
And don't forget Grant's successes in Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga.
I'm ticked at the leadership of the Confederacy for tainting the relatively noble concept of the right to secede with the stain of slavery.
"Which is exactly what Lee would have done had he had those bodies at his disposal as a Union Commander"
I just love people who can channel the dead.
"I'm ticked at the leadership of the Confederacy for tainting the relatively noble concept of the right to secede with the stain of slavery."
I'm ticked at the founding fathers for not having the cajones to deal with slavery 80 years earlier. As a nation we are still reaping from that sin.
I don't think the Framers intended for either the states or the federal government to have "near absolute sovereignty." They wanted checks and balances. If they wanted sovereignty of anyone other than the people, they wouldn't have rebelled against England in the first place.
The Constitution exists, not to give power to the federal government, but to limit its power. Article I, section 8, in particular, enumerates the twenty powers of the Congress and then gives them the authorization to enact laws to fulfil their requirements under those powers. Section 9 further limits what Congress can do within their stated powers. Section 10 then imposes some very broad limits on the states.
The 10th Amendment then says that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Sounds to me like the Framers intended to limit the Federal government's power to the few items that only a centralized government could do well. Everything else (including, IMHO, the right to leave the Union) was to be left to the states and/or the people.
The Union did not occupy any kind of moral high ground in the dispute over the issue of slavery. Frederick Douglass made this point very eloquently in his famous "Rochester Speech."
The Union wasn't opposed to slavery on principle; it was opposed to slavery because it didn't need slaves . . . it had and endless supply of Irish immigrants to exploit in the coal mines of Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
Without hypotheticals, life would be very boring and unintelligent.
The Constitution does not state that states have a right to leave.
Hypothetically, had Joshua Chamberlain NOT issued his order at Gettysburg, the South would have flanked the Yankees and either forced 1) a retreat or 2) a surrender (either of these are conjecture since no one knows what would have happened or what the Union response would have been had the flanking maneuver been successful..)
Grant, of course, was furious at this and as cited in the article threatened to resign if it were acted upon. Rightfully so, in my view - his personal honor was on the line too.
This is just a guess, and I'll gladly accept correction from someone who knows the timeline better than I, but Johnson was embroiled in his impeachment problems right around that time, and things tend to get lost in government when that happens. That's why it seems supremely ironic to have the thing reconciled (if in fact it is reconciled) in 1975, so shortly after Vietnam fell due in part to Nixon's pending impeachment. What got lost in that shuffle was air support for the ARVN. It would be more than a little ironic if true.
Thoughts, anyone?
What in particular do you think I am ignorant of?
Yes, but I think such hypotheticals are very interesting even if we can never know. What if Warren, Chamberlain, et al had not saved the left wing? I suspect that even a complete Federal defeat (absent complete destruction of the Army of the Potomoc) at Gettysburg would have caused widespread panic in the North and would have had a rallying effect in defense of Washington. It would have been messy, but I think the results would have been the same.
You are exactly right! And that, my FRiend, is why the Tenth Amendment is *SO* vitally important.
The 10th Amendment says that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The right of individual states to secede (along with the right to have an abortion, the right to privacy, the right to have sex above the sheets, etc) isn't delegated to the Federal Government nor prohibited from the individual States in the Constitution. Therefore, the right to secede is reserved to the States respectively, or the people.
For right or wrong reasons, some states chose to secede. You may be interested to know that New England actually considered secession during the War of 1812, and again in the 1830s IIRC. It was considered by many to be a right reserved to the states under the 10th Amendment.
What is interesting is that the Union armies in the West tended to be the equal of the Confederate armies on a man for man basis. That again may have been due in part to the average westerner being made of "sterner stuff" than his average eastern counterpart.
If you read up on Grant's western campaigns, those western armies under his commander were some very competent forces. It would have been interesting to see how Grant might have handled the war in the east differently if he'd have had something like the Army of the Tennessee under his command.
I know it may seem strange that Lee led the army of a such a disgraceful cause and was let go scot-free, but thats the way it had to be. In fact, there were calls for mass executions of southern traitors at the time, but complete and total absolution was the way that won out because some people realized that it was the only way to start the healing process.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
