. . . and Lewis Dabney continued to preach and write in support of slavery for thirty years after the Civil War. Not just in support of the Confederacy, but in specific support of the institution of slavery. Lee's alleged comment to Stockdale, allegedly recounted to Dabney, was certainly . . . convenient . . . for the pro-slavery, lecturing Dabney.
Both the language and spirit of the alleged 1870 comment are inconsistent with Lee's writings and statements of 1870.
Lee believed that secession was revolution - and he knew secession was not the peaceful exercise of a right that the states or citizens of the United States had preserved. In an 1861 letter to his son, Custis Lee, Robert E. Lee wrote:
Secession is nothing but revolution. The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labour, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will. It is intended for 'perpetual Union,' so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government, not a compact, which can only be dissolved by revolution, or the consent of all the people in convention assembled. It is idle to talk of secession: anarchy would have been established, and not a government, by Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and all the other patriots of the Revolution.
Because Lee recognized that dissolution of the Union, other than by "consent of all the people in convention assembled", was a revolution, he knew he was taking up arms against his country.
Funny US Grant thought the opposite:
The fact is the constitution did not apply to any such contingency as the one existing from 1861 to 1865. Its framers never dreamed of such a contingency occurring. If they had foreseen it, the probabilities are they would have sanctioned the right of a State or States to withdraw rather than that there should be war between brothers.
US Grant Pres. USA
True.
I would also remind readers of two other Robert E. Lee quotes;
“I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than the dissolution of the Union. It would be an accumulation of all the evils we complain of, and I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation.”
Col. Robert E. Lee, U.S.A. in a letter to his son Custis, January 23, 1861
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“Abandon your animosities and make your sons Americans.”
Robert E. Lee, 1865;
“He Lost a War and Won Immortality” Louis Redmond