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.
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.
Agreed..but what the heck, sounds like a good reason to sit around the BBQ, suck down a few cold ones and "hypotheticalize"..:)
...deo vindice
"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."
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.
Yep - you should never use a preposition to end a sentence with. ;-)
"That is something up with which I shall not put." - Winston Churchill
Salted the fields? That's the firt time I ever heard that one. Do you have a source for that?
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?
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.
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.
Nor does it state they don't. Which leaves that power where? Thank you.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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