With Malice Toward None, With Amnesty for All: The Pardon of Robert E. Lee

Newhouse News ^ | 10/14/2005 | Delia M. Rios

[mikeus_maximus]

Any Confederate who had sworn before the war to uphold the Constitution was barred from holding federal or state office.

Why? They did uphold it: "The southern states would have never signed the thing if they didn't think they could get out of it!" --Shelby Foote. That was a legitmate interpretation by the southern states.

And I say this as a Yankee born, bred, and educated for most of my life in the North. As a kid I couldn't even stand driving through Tenn. & Ga. to get to Florida, and actually felt uncomfortable in a that foreign land until we crossed the Ohio River on the way back home. But even I can read and reason. It wasn't a "civil war" with 2 sides vying for power. It was a war for independence, which failed.

[GeorgiaDawg32]

Agreed..but what the heck, sounds like a good reason to sit around the BBQ, suck down a few cold ones and "hypotheticalize"..:)

[SouthernBoyupNorth]

I believe you are mistaken in a "dead wrong" cause. Allow me to point out that the War between the States was fought over States Rights. Not slavery as taught by today's liberal biased schools. It was a conflict over States rights Vs Federal Government Rights. I do not believe that it was dead wrong. But it is decided and the blood of good men was spilled over it. If you are referring to the slavery issue, it was the northern abolitionists who raised the cry over slavery in order to get people to enlist in the army of the north.
It was a rally cry of the north to dehumanize and impersonalize the people of the south. It was an attempt to put up a smoke screen for the masses. It succeeded. Do you honestly think anything like the IRS would have been likely to occur had the South won and states were more independent?

[Van Jenerette]

...deo vindice

[Alberta's Child]

Perhaps the entire issue of North vs. South from the Civil War onward can be summed up in this classic quote from Walker Percy, who commented on the subject in an essay about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (I paraphrase):

"During the 1860s, the people of the North fought a long, bloody war to free the slaves. One hundred years later, they are moving to the suburbs so they don't have to live next door to them."

[dinoparty]

I agree that the States Rights issue and the slavery issue are separate in theory. One can conceive of a claim of states rights that has nothing to do with slavery. But make no mistake: without the issue of slavery -- in particular the question of slavery in the territories and the perceived threat to slavery in the southern states -- the south would have never left the Union. That is simply a fact.

[Scoutmaster]

Rules of grammar that forbid ending sentences in a preposition?

Actually, please don't take that as an insult. It was not intended personally, but is a knee-jerk reaction of having spent my senior year in high school in Bessie Smith's advanced grammar class. Most of what I learned fell by the wayside, but I still find myself constructing sentences awkwardly, such as "Of what in particular do you think I am ignorant?, simply because Bessie came directly to your desk to inform you that you were wrong, and that hairy mole on her upper lip was a great deal more palatable from a distance. Ah, ending sentences in a preposition is something up with which I shall not put.

Bear with me, because my thoughts are disjointed.

As I understand it, and I believe it is an incontrovertible fact, Lee DID take his oath at West Point regarding the United States. As much as a gentleman as he apparently was, and as greatly as it may have bothered him to go against that oath when pressed to do so by his home state, he broke that oath.

On the other hand, the Constitution was barely 70 years old. People thought of themselves as Virginians, or New Hampshireites (?) first, and as Americans second. Shelby Foote may have truly placed his finger on the primary legacy of the War for Southern Independence (I think most of the elements of a Civil War were absent, but then again, the victor usually gets to name the war), when he said:

Before the war, you said "the United States of America ARE," and after the war, you said "the United States of America IS."

No matter what, Lee, always spoken of as a man of honor, broke his West Point oath.

Depending on your ethics, William Tecumseh Sherman was either brilliant in eliminating the will of the Southern peoples to fight a war, or was an SOB who would be considered to have committed actionable war crimes were he to do the same things to civilians today that he did on his March to the Sea. You'll find that most Southerners have more hatred for Sherman than Grant, Hooker, McClellan, and every other Union General combined. I hate him so much because he causes so roadblocks in Southerners researching their genealogical past. Too many courthouse records were burned at the SOB's orders.

The most annoying thing about Lee is the messianic homage paid to him by graduates of Washington & Lee, or members of the Southern Kappa Alpha fraternity.

I can stomach the University of Virginia's insistence that things be done a certain way today, or be called by a certain name, "because that's the way Mr. Jefferson wanted it," only because I have a son in school there. But even that gets on my nerves from time to time.

Slavery was a horrendous moral evil. If we can invade Iraq to remove Hussein (an act with which I agree), then I don't care if only 5% of the Southerns supported slavery, and only 5% of the Union politicians and soldiers fought the war to end slavery -- I'm on the Union side. Just as I would be on the side of a U.S. military operation to destroy slavery in the Sudan. Funny how Jesse Jackson can't seem to get worked up about slavery taking place TODAY.

I just wish the Emancipation Proclamation had freed slaves EVERYWHERE, and not just in the States in rebellion against the Union. That would give the pro-Union "slavery was the only real cause of the war" proponents a significantly better leg to stand on. That, and deleting some of Lincoln's comments of the relevance of slavery to the Recent Unpleasantness. These thoughts from someone with infinitely less actual Civil War knowledge that 90% of the buffs who have already posted.

[FFIGHTER]

True, Grants effectiveness is measured in his results. He brought the fight to the "enemy" and was pragmatic in his approach. I believe this was in part to his experiences in the War with Mexico, which also helped to shape Lee. They both learned that pragmatism and adaptability of ones resources to the problem at hand. Grant also learned respect of logistics to any Army, in part to his role as Quartermaster during the Campaign. Though the Mexican Army was superior in numbers, the overall competence of Santa Anna's troops does come into question, as well as the use of "standard" European military tactics in his approach to the U.S. Army/Marines.

[Billthedrill]

Yep - you should never use a preposition to end a sentence with. ;-)

[LexBaird]

Rules of grammar that forbid ending sentences in a preposition?

"That is something up with which I shall not put." - Winston Churchill

[Ditto]

But that "honorable" general sacked, burnt, raided, and looted his way south, sowing fields with rock salt and making good farm land unusable for decades to come....

Salted the fields? That's the firt time I ever heard that one. Do you have a source for that?

[FFIGHTER]

The other thing that comes to mind, with regards to General Grant, is his honor, a soldier's soldier. I admire the respect that he granted Lee, and his steadfastness to bring healing after the Great War. He thwarted Andrew Johnson's attempt to imprison General Lee, by threatening to resign his commission, if terms agreed to at Appomattox were violated, and then again when members of Congress proposed that a painting of Lee surrendered to Grant be placed in the Capital Rotunda, Grant would have nothing of it. "it won't do. No power on earth will make me agree to your proposal. I will not humiliate General Lee or our Southern friends in depicting their humiliation and then celebrating the event in the nation's capitol."

[altura]

You said, "But I agree that the worship of Lee is no worse than the worship of the traitorous anti-Vietnam War leaders"

There are a lot of really stupid comments made in Free Republic, and you probably are not in the top ten or even twenty, but then, maybe you are.

Obviously, you know very little about Robert E. Lee or the War Between the States, or, as we call it, the War of Northern Agression.

That being said, I wonder that you would post.

If you expect me to give you a biography of Lee or a history of the Civil War, I don't have time, and you wouldn't read it, but if you want to be informed, it's relatively easy to find out a few things.

There!

Happy now?

[T.Smith]

I'm not answering this because others have already. I don't want you to be inundated with answers, but I don't want to seem that I'm ignoring your response either.

[LexBaird]

I just wish the Emancipation Proclamation had freed slaves EVERYWHERE, and not just in the States in rebellion against the Union.

He couldn't. He didn't have the same authority to do so in non-rebellious areas, as his CinC powers gave him in areas under armed insurrection and subject to martial law. To universally outlaw slavery took the 13th A.

[billbears]

The Constitution does not state that states have a right to leave

Nor does it state they don't. Which leaves that power where? Thank you.

[XJarhead]

One thing I've learned on FR is that it is impossible to have a reasonable discussion on the South and slavery. So whatever view you have on slavery and the South, you're welcome to it.

[detsaoT]

In any event, the book "The Real Lincoln" gives a VERY solid exposition on the dictatorial stylings of Abraham Lincoln.

Did you know that he had the entire legislature of the State of Maryland arrested, instituted military rule over the state, and confiscated all civilian weapons? That's not exactly a magnanimous move, if I may say so.

I highly recommend picking up a copy, IF AND ONLY if you are a serious student of history. If you're only interested in parroting back the crap they teach in our "education" system today, then don't bother.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0761526463/qid=1129570874/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-6442340-2000813?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

[Ditto]

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.

That would be incorrect. All one need do is look at the number of men from southern states who joined the Union Army because they felt their first loyalty was to the Constitution, not to their home states. The concept of "Nationalism," while not universal, was very much a driving force for many and had been since George Washington set the example for national above state loyalty among the military several generations earlier.

Lee was almost an exception, being willing to serve on whatever side his state happened to fall on, and other than skillful political maneuvering in Richmond by the confederate side, Lee would have willingly been at the head of the Union Army. His reasons had more to do with his family history and the legacy he put on himself throughout his life as a member of one of Virginia's founding families. The contentious issues of the day that drove others to chose sides were not what drove Lee. He seemed almost removed from the issues. It was legacy that drove him.

[Warren_Piece]

One thing I've learned on FR is that it is impossible to have a reasonable discussion on the South and slavery.

So true. BTW, here in TN, when discussing the war, the Confederate army is, to this day, refered to as "we", and the Union army as "them".