Lee cheerleaders recognize that Lee did own slaves, but give him props for manumitting them. What they leave out of the record is that Custis’s will legally required Lee to emancipate the slaves that passed into his control within five years of Custis’s death. Custis died October 10, 1857 and his will was probated December 7, 1857 (about a year after Lee wrote his letter on slavery); Lee kept the slaves as long as he could, and finally filed the deed of manumission with Court of the City of Richmond on December 29, 1862—five years, two months, and nineteen days after Custis’s death.
Custis actually gave freedom to his slaves without qualification in his will; the matter of the five years was supposed to be time for Custis’s executors to do the legal paperwork for emancipation in such manner as may to [them] seem most expedient and proper. There’s good reason to read the clause as intending for the five years to serve as an upper bound on settling the legal details, not as five more years for driving the slaves for whatever last bits of forced labor could be gotten. Lee, however, did not see it that way, and set the slaves to for his own profit for as long as he could. We have already seen that some of the slaves disagreed with Lee on this point of legal interpretation, and how he treated those who acted on their legal theory by seceding from his plantation.
I await your apology.
Taking Mr. Norris' account of his inhuman flogging at General Lee's order as accurate (and, disallowing the possibility of exaggeration, I have no reason to believe it is inaccurate), it is established that Lee thus (on at least this occasion) behaved in a cold-blooded and barbarous manner towards those slaves of "his" who elected, as properly sovereign Human Beings, to Secede from his Plantation.
Which compels me only to two questions:
Lincoln stated in his own First Inaugural that his object was NOT to free the slaves, but rather to continue collecting Federal Tariffs upon the Southern Trade (through all those "fortifications", i.e., Tax Forts, by which the Federals collected monies from the free-trading South): "The power confided in me," he said, "will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion -- no using force against, or among the people anywhere".
I'll reserve in advance that I genuinely believe that the Southern "peculiar institution" of life-long and multi-generational Slavery was a supreme, Anti-Biblical Evil, utterly abhorrent to the norms of Biblical Law (despite the abusive attempts of some Southern preachers to justify the practice). I just happen to believe that an Invasion of Conquest, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and originally commenced for the purpose of Collecting Taxes (even if it was, and that only later, tepidly justified on Emancipationist grounds), is pretty Evil too.
I was born and bred an Iowa Yankee, so I don't have an Old Dixie, "Lost Cause" dog in this hunt. I'd just like to hear your thoughts on the matter.
Best, OP