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.
In many ways, the elite of the American South followed the British aristocratic model of that same era. The eldest son inherited the estate (plantation) the second son entered the clergy, and the youngest son became a military officer. Going into private business was considered a step down the social ladder for members of the elite class.
What percentage of Southerners served in the Union Army?
My understanding was that non slave holding areas like West Va. and East Tn. were more inclined to the union economy than the Southern plantation economy, so there were union troops from those areas.
Any Union regiments from Mississippi, Al, or deep south were of token numbers, it they existed at all, IMO.
Please show me if I am wrong.
That's a good point. I would make the case, though, that Washington's attitudes about "national above state loyalty" were very much influenced by the fact that he had once served in the British army, and not in a colonial militia.
...and one of those 'States Rights' was the defense of the institution of Slavery. How does the 'Fugitive Slave Act' figure into your argument?
Nonsense. Reading Dlierenzo on Lincoln is like reading Al Frankin on Bush.
In "None Died in Vain" Robert Leckie relates that Grant deleted a normal article in the surrender. He knew that, if he made the Confederate troops surrender their horses, Lee would have to surrender Traveler.
Mort Kunstler has a painting "We Still Love You, General Lee". Returning to his camp after meeting with U.S. Grant at Appomattox, Lee rides his beloved Traveller through the Southern lines.
Also, if you doubt Lee as a soldier, read John Eisenhower's "So Far from God" and Jeff Shaara's "Gone For Soldiers" about the Mexican War.
Please show me if I am wrong.
The 1st Alabama Cavalry, Sherman's personal escorts on his march to the sea. "During the war over two thousand loyal Southerners served in the 1st Alabama: farmers, mechanics, traders and others, from 35 counties of Alabama and eight other Confederate states. "
http://www.swannco.net/1st_Ala_Cav/first_cavalry.htmlhttp://www.swannco.net/1st_Ala_Cav/first_cavalry.html
And a more general discussion...
http://www.rootsweb.com/~arcivwar/loyal.htm
So we have 2000 from Alabama. If we apply that number to the 11 confederate. states, gives us and estimated 22,000 union fighters from the south.
What is that, about 1% of the total combatants in the war?
Like I said nationalism in 1861 was a far cry from what it is today.
Your knowledge of history is disconcerting...
I know said rule of grammer. But sometimes it is clearer and less rigid sounding(in a short snippett on a forum) to put it at the end.
Your lack of an argument is disconcerting.
My advice...quit with the sophomoric insults and stick to the facts.
he he he
So, yes, it is me the ignorant one against the many omniscient ones on this thread! Please...
Nor does it state they don't. Which leaves that power where? Thank you.
If the above issue, session, cannot be resolved politically, then that power resides with the most powerful. The Confederacy thought it was the most powerful, in the end, it was not.
The Constitution was designed to remove powers from the states that they could not, or should not use, such as foreign affairs and to connect the states, in their mutual self interests, with a federal system. The Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican American War upset this balance because of massive lands introduced in these new territories and their implication on the issue of additional slave states for the North or reduced representation in Congress for the South.
As a far West, Westerner (CA), with kin in both the North and South and having listened since childhood to all the arguments, I have concluded that the "Conflict of the 1860's" was all about Eastern power - North or South - over the new Western territories and whether any additional states would be slave or free. The rest is mere prologue.
If you read the second link, you see that the number is more like 100,000 for the entire south. Given that the size of the CSA army was most likely about 800,000, that means that something like one white military-age southerner in eight fought under the Union flag.
Ah yes, the 'ole "you are not a serious student of history if you don't agree with me" trick.
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