Richmond Replaces Robert E. Lee Equestrian With ‘Emancipation Monument’ Just Two Weeks Later

Gateway Pundit ^ | 9/23/2021 | Cassandra Fairbanks

[Bon of Babble]

A new monument has been unveiled in the spot where the iconic Robert E. Lee equestrian stood in Richmond — just two weeks after it was removed. The statue of Lee was a national historic landmark and installed in 1890.

[Regulator]

Noted that he a) turned down the offer and b) duly resigned as he was no longer really a part of the nation that Lincoln headed.

Seems consistent to me.

[jmacusa]

It's called treason. He and Davis could have been hung. Political expediency on Lincolns part and the fact that the nation was politically,financially and spiritually exhausted from the war and he felt to prosecute these two would have caused further division and resentment. Davis, that bastard wanted to keep the war going for as long as possible.

[Regulator]

OK, Judge Underwood! We got your take on it.

But U.S. Grant, Salmon P. Chase and eventually even Andrew Johnson disagreed. Lincoln had nothing to do with it, he was dead.

Grant made a deal with Lee at Appomattox, and Lee would not have surrendered without it. In that deal he and his men were protected as long as they did not violate their parole. Grant made the deal because he was on the verge of losing: Lee was retreating into his stronghold and Grant was running on empty.

If Lee had had better intelligence, he probably would never have made the deal. The war WOULD go on, and Grant would probably have ended up with a stalemate. But maybe Lee decided that was a future he didn’t like, and sought a deal from his fellow slave holding, West Point graduate colleague Gen. Grant. Bet you never knew that: the Union was on the ropes.

Anyway, here is a list of the reasons that a Treason prosecution against Lee wasn’t going to work:

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“And yet, whether General Lee and Judge Underwood realized it, there were serious constitutional, legal and practical obstacles in the path of a conviction—or even a trial—for treason of the Confederacy’s most famous soldier.

The Constitution’s definition of treason is a very narrow one, and is based on English treason laws dating back to the 1350s which limited treason to seven grounds, including attacks on the king’s person or household, levying war against the king, or giving the king’s enemies aid and comfort. Restoration-era judges, eager to put nooses around the necks of as many of the Puritan revolutionaries of the 1640s as possible, gradually opened-up the definition of treason to include notions of “constructive treason,” in which something as simple as the mere airing of an opinion at variance with the king could be deemed treason.

But the Constitution sharply reined-in applications of “constructive treason.” It defined treason in just two specific ways—levying war, which suggested involvement in internal insurrections, and giving aid and comfort, which more nearly described assistance lent to an external war being waged by a sovereign belligerent. If anything, the Constitutional provision (and its statutory companion, the Crimes Act of 1790) made it nearly impossible to obtain convictions for treason, something that was dramatically exposed in the celebrated trial of Aaron Burr. By the time of the Civil War, only five convictions for treason had ever emerged from the federal courts, and all of those had occurred in the administrations of Washington and John Adams – both of whom then pardoned the convicted.

The Civil War triggered renewed invocations of the law of treason. A Conspiracies Act, on July 31, 1861, and the Crimes Act of August 6, 1861 defined any conspiracy “to levy war against the United States” as a “high crime” and labeled Confederate recruitment “a high misdemeanor,” while the Second Confiscation Act applied the penalties of treason specifically to “any person” who should “set on foot, assist, or engage in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States.”

But Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky was quick to argue that treason, strictly speaking, was a crime involving “adherence to a foreign enemy with which the United States are at war…and that adherence to a domestic enemy was not an adherence to an enemy within the meaning of the Constitution.” It only confused matters more that the Confederacy had been accorded belligerent rights “in exchanges of prisoners and other acts,” and that concession could imply that Confederate officers had been the servants, not of treason, but of a separate, sovereign nation.

Lee would have to be tried in the jurisdiction where the treason occurred. The Constitution prefaces the section on treason with a requirement that “the Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed,” and the Sixth Amendment adds that such a trial would have to take place in the “district wherein the crime shall have been committed.” That meant, at the least, that a trial of Lee would probably take place in Virginia. And while it had not been difficult to create a co-operative grand jury in Norfolk, the wording of the Sixth Amendment seemed to require that such a trial take place in Richmond. It would be a much more monumental task to find a civilian petit jury in Virginia which would vote to convict Robert E. Lee.

Judge Underwood certainly understood that this would be one of his most formidable obstacles. When he was quizzed six months later whether he found “it practicable to get a jury of loyal men in your court,” he glumly replied, “Not unless it is what might be called a packed jury.” Without such packing, Underwood was unsure whether a jury would vote to convict Lee of treason. “It would be perfectly idle to think of such a thing. …Ten or eleven out of the twelve on any jury, I think, would say that Lee was almost equal to Washington, and was the noblest man in the State.”

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Salmon P. Chase, would not co-operate. Abraham Lincoln had installed Salmon Chase as Chief Justice after the death of Roger Taney in October, 1864, partly to kick the ambitious Chase upstairs and remove him as a rival for the presidency, and partly to ensure that the administration’s emancipation policies during the war would get a friendly hearing from a devout anti-slavery man like Chase if challenges erupted after the war ended. Chase, however, had agendas of his own; if he could not usurp Lincoln as President, he could certainly magnify his office as Chief Justice. Ever since Roger Taney’s unavailing effort to bind Lincoln’s war policies in ex parte Merryman, the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary as a whole had played a muted role in the conduct of the war. But as soon as the shooting was stopped, Chase and the High Court once again moved to re-assert themselves over against the executive and legislative branches of the government.

In particular, Chase refused to participate in his auxiliary role as a Circuit judge so long as military tribunals were operating anywhere within a given District. “While military authority was supreme in the South,” Chase explained, “no Justice of the Supreme Court could properly hold a Court there.” As Chase explained to Horace Greeley, military tribunals regularly interfered with civil proceedings, and “instances are not wanting where their acts have been nullified by military orders.” Without Chase’s participation in a capital case, Judge Underwood would have to try Lee’s treason case by himself, and that would produce a verdict of something less than unchallenged authority. As it was, Chase did not have a particularly high opinion of Underwood’s competence as a judge. “The ‘Anxious’ man,” Chase remarked drily, “can have a trial before Judge Underwood” any time he wants. But “the Court will be a quasi-military court,” and Chase would have nothing to do with it.

Lee’s own self-defense:

Two weeks after Judge Underwood’s grand jury indicted him, Lee shrugged off his pessimism and began asserting a more defiant tone. To his cousin, Martha “Markie” Williams, Lee declared that he was “aware of having done nothing wrong.” That sense of “nothing wrong” grew out of a theory of citizenship which, in turn, was based in a fundamental ambiguity in the federal Constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution, as it was written in 1787, is the concept of citizenship actually defined. In the five places where the Constitution refers to citizenship, it speaks of citizens of the states, and citizens of the United States. But the Constitution made no effort to sort out the relationship between the two, leaving the strange sense that Americans possessed a kind of dual citizenship, in their “native State” (as Lee called it) and in the Union. This played directly into the larger pre-war argument that the Constitution had neatly divided sovereignty between the states and the federal Union. Beginning, then, with the premise that “all that the South has ever desired was that the Union, as established by our forefathers, should be preserved; and that the government, as originally organized, should be administered in purity and truth,” Lee had no trouble in arguing that Virginia and the other rebel states “were merely using the reserved right” of state sovereignty when they seceded.

In “my view,” Lee reasoned, that meant that “the action of the State, in withdrawing itself from the government of the United States,” required its citizens to act with it. “The act of Virginia, in withdrawing herself from the United States, carried me along as a citizen of Virginia” because “her laws and her acts were binding on me.” In the event, the Civil War had exploded that theory by sheer force. “The war,” he explained to his nephew, Edward Childe, “originated from a doubtful question of Construction of the Constitution, about which our forefathers differed at the time of framing it” and it had now been settled “by the arbitrament of arms.” But neither Lee nor any other individual Confederate could be called a traitor for having done so; “the State was responsible for the act, not the individual.”

Johnson barely survived his impeachment, and in a gesture of contempt for the Radical Republicans who had nearly destroyed him, issued “a full pardon and amnesty for the offense of treason” to “all and to every person who directly or indirectly participated in the late insurrection or rebellion” on Christmas Day, 1868.

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All of this was fought out 150 years ago. The ambiguity in the poorly written Constitution on the topic of citizenship would have buttressed Lee’s position, not to mention Grant’s insistence on honoring his deal. You can call it what you want, but it’s settled in law a long time ago.

From my perspective as the descendant of a Southern Abolitionist who moved to the Free States before the War and sent his own sons to fight against his own brothers who were Confederate officers and enlisted men, I can’t see it any other way. After 60 years of considering the issue I have concluded that Davis and Lee were correct, there is every right to secede. Nowhere in the Constitution is such a right proscribed. Lincoln was a nut pushing an absurd position. If you can add states to the club, you sure as hell can subtract them. The only thing that was lacking was substantive divorce rules.

End of subject.

[jmacusa]

No. The ‘’end of the subject’’ is Lee took up arms against his country and could have been hung for it. You Rebs irritate the piss out of me calling yourselves conservatives and you come to a conservative web site venerating a bunch of treasonous Southern Democrats.

The South undertook a violent secession to preserve and economic system based on the use of slave labor and LOST!

[Chgogal]

It is a beautiful statue. Having said that, I demand that every left wing jacka$$ write a thank you note to all the Union Soldiers’ families thanking them for their sacrifice in freeing the slaves. Until that is done, all the left wing jacka$$e$ need to shut up and read up on American History written by well known historians from 50 years ago.

[Regulator]

Hilarious. You missed the entire point.

Lee understood the laws of the time. The United States were no longer “his country”. He was a citizen of Virginia, which had recently VOTED to become part of a new country. That made him part of THAT country.

Note that the secession was not violent as you state. It was done in their State legislatures quite peacefully. It was not until the intentional provocation at Ft. Sumter that it turned violent, and that was Lincoln’s intent. He started the war on purpose.

As for me being a “Reb”, well that’s hilarious. Guess you didn’t understand the last statement? You’re probably a descendant of post War Between the States immigrants, so it’s understandable that you wouldn’t understand. You’re ignorant of our history! You haven’t been an American all that long!

I noted that my g-g-grandfather was an Abolitionist. That means he was the opposite of a Southern Secessionist, i.e. “a Reb”. In fact, he left the South as I noted, 8 years prior the War on purpose: he was a Southern Unionist. You’re probably not even aware that even existed, except that’s precisely what Andrew Johnson was.

As for the South fighting a war to preserve an economic system based on slavery, that may have been the main theme but of course to the South, it was just the last straw. And the North didn’t fight the war to abolish slavery, they supposedly fought it to “preserve the union”.

And as for “conservatism” equalling mid 19th century Republican Radicalism, that’s even more funny. A de-centralized federal republic - the one that existed from 1787 to 1861 - would be the real “conservative” viewpoint.

And while we’re on the subject of the South “losing”, I would note that y’all Rust Belt folks seem to be pretty much on the ropes these days: factories gone, cities in ruins, everyone on welfare. The South by contrast is an economic dynamo, and will continue to be so due to their antebellum opposition to absurd taxation, corrupt unionism, dumbthug trade protection and sullen technological backwardness. Hell, even Boeing put a factory in South Carolina and I can safely tell you if they thought they could get away with it politically they’d move every damn job out of Seattle tomorrow.

When segregation was ended, the South opened up as there was no longer the stigma of discrimination, leading to massive investment in their largely unregulated states. This started with Bell Aircraft in 1942 in Cobb County, and Larry Bell move his plant there to screw the unions in Buffalo. The rest is history: that plant is now Lockheed Martin Marietta, and it started a move to the South by hundreds of corporations.

So much for your simplistic high school understanding of the issues of the past. The Federal Union was never meant to be an iron cage, because it leads to just what we are seeing now: a mad tyrant pounding the table every day insanely trying to control every aspect of our lives mainly for his own profit. I don’t know of any “conservative” on this platform who would disagree with that. A federal government that consumed 2% of GNP in 1861 and now represents something like 40% is precisely what the Founders were trying to avoid.

Either the Union is a nation of consensual partners or they get a divorce and go their separate ways. Anything else is tyranny.

[jmacusa]

No I haven't missed the point. Lee swore an oath as a commissioned officer in the US Army to ‘’preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of The United States against all enemies foreign and domestic’’. And no stupid, I'm not a recent arrival, I was born in America in 1956. In Kearny , NJ, named for it's most famous local son Union General Phil Kearny. My people immigrated here from Ireland in 1852.

My gg-grandfather was William. C. Grace, he was The Chief Medical Steward for The Surgeon Generals Office in Washington DC. during the CW. He wrote The Army's Surgeons Manual. You can buy it on line. And I'll tell you something else Reb. I'm done posting to you, accord me the same you dumb ass.

[Regulator]

So you say Lee was supposed to defend THIS part of the Constitution?!

Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3:

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

Nobody repealed it before they invaded, so it was still in force!

Lincoln's own troops violated the Constitution by not honoring the pro-slavery clauses of that same Constitution. Only Lee and his troops could be seen as defending that, but of course they already had their own new Constitution. Now who's the Constitutional traitor?!

So that's nice that y'all tater famine folks showed up here just before the war. Lincoln needed some warm bodies to draft. Believe that the 1863 riots in NYC were 'bout 100% Irish, entirely understandable. They didn't have a dog in the fight.

But y'know, bout the time those folks were arriving was the same time my Abolitionist GG-Grandpa headed West in a covered wagon from the South, where he was already the Fifth Generation of Protestant settlers who by the way STARTED the American Revolution (the um, Regulators...look 'em up, I'm sure you have no idea who they were). Hell, Mom's side goes back at least to 1681, which is when they LEFT Staten Island to move to Virginia! We were here hundreds of years before you, and you show up telling us the way it's all supposed to work? AND you think that shooting us was OK?

The point is, the new arrivals - Irish from the Potato Famine, Germans from the 1848 German revolution - had no idea what the sectional divisions were all about, and just wanted to show adherence to the new country. Slavery probably wasn't popular with them but you can't tell me the Irish felt anything for the Africans. They beat them senseless in New York during the Draft Riots, and even hung them, because they blamed them for the problem. Bit unfair, huh?

Noble Irish Immigrants Showing Warmth and Hospitality to Free Africans

BTW, Kearny is a place I ain't never been, except by accident. Try to avoid Jersey City/Newark/Oranges area...pretty nasty. Looks like y'all are outnumbered by the 'Ricans and Dominicans there! But, you guys all take orders from the Spanish Guy in Rome ("El Papa") so I guess you're all just fine with it, right?

Ta ta for now Paddy, if you want to be polite instead of using the phrase "Dumb Ass" I might go along with the request, but since you weren't....ya never know. Might blast yer butt a few more times.

[jmacusa]

My Irish Catholic ancestors faced plenty of discrimination here in America. They didn’t own slaves. And f**k off.

[jmacusa]

Oh and by the way Dumb Ass, you couldn’t ‘’blast my butt’’ if you tried. In the end your side lost the war. Mine won it.

[Regulator]

Well lots of Irish owned slaves!

Irish slave owning Confederate Officers

One of your relatives appears to be in the list! Guy by the name of William Grace from Tennessee. But it doesn't show any known slaves for him, so you may be off the hook!

As far as "discrimination", that's what an enemy population normally faces when they take up residence among the people they attack. Catholics attacked and murdered tens of thousands of Protestants starting way back in the 13th century with the massacre of the Albigensians, and continued it with the Inquisition and such despicable atrocities as Matanzas, the St. Bartholomews Day Massacre (those are my ancestors), Massacre of Beziers, and all sorts of similar events during the Thirty Years War.

You might realize that we remember such things, and it's the reason America was founded on religious tolerance...which the Catholics showed NONE of to the Protestants.

And a pleasant f**k off to you too, Paddy!

[Regulator]

Your side? Wait, y’all barely got here! Doncha remember I said I was from the UNIONIST side of the family?!

[Regulator]

And for the best explanation of Lee’s decision, read this:

https://www.historynet.com/a-question-of-loyalty-why-did-robert-e-lee-join-the-confederacy.htm

It is pointed out that he would have had to literally fight his own family had he opted to take command of the Federal Army. AND, he was a Unionist up through the winter of 1860-61. But a number of things changed his mind.

Instead of chanting the simple minded mantra about his commissioning oath, you could maybe put yourself in that place: a place where none of your ancestors had to be, as they had virtually no connection to the country or anyone in it.

This happened in my family. We were literally shooting at each other at Chickamauga, Chancellorsville, Antietam and nearly every other g-damn major battle. From my Father’s family, 190 fought for the Confederacy and 90 for the Union (mostly Indiana State Militia). On my Mother’s side, same noise.

Picking a side meant you were shooting at your cousins or uncles or even brothers.

Still think it was all so black and white?

There were people in the Western Carolinas who fought for BOTH sides: they were Bushwhackers. Fought for the Confederacy during summer months and went on Union raids in the Fall/Winter as guerrilla fighters. Can point to at least two of my relatives who did that.

The foreigners roped into this family fight were regarded with the utmost spite: they were interfering, and any cop can tell you that the worst thing to get involved with is a hot domestic dispute. Here’s the video testimony of two Missouri Confederates in 1929:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTf44Wwa2Fo

Note that these guys “fought the Dutch” - German immigrants they called “Dutch” when they really meant “Deutsch”. They talk about Cole Camp - not a battle, but a massacre where the Confederates killed hundreds of Germans in a surprise raid on their camp at 3 AM. No quarter given, they slaughtered them all in their blankets. The surviving Germans were forced to sign a promise to NEVER take up arms against the Confederacy. They didn’t do that to Union soldiers - those men were considered to be fighting an honest war. The Germans were considered to be amoral mercenaries. You can be sure they regarded the Catholic Irish immigrants to be the same.

A self righteous POS like Ralph Northam has no business judging a man like Robert Lee. In 1000 years Lee will still be a heroic, if flawed, figure. Ralph Northam won’t even be mentioned. He will be no more then an asterisk in 5 years, and completely gone in 10. Insignificant worms are like that.

[jmacusa]

You make a relativist argument and you seem to lean to the Rebs. Three posts to me. Wow. Thanks so much for the free parking in your head. means I’m getting to you.

Thanks.

[jmacusa]

Nope. The Graces settled in Harrison NJ. dumb ass.

[Regulator]

Wow, that’s good Paddy!

You used a big word. Progress!

Like I said, you get the blasts!

Who knows, some day you might get it.

[jmacusa]

Wow Dumb Ass you know how to use a computer keypad! Good boy.

Keep spiting in the wind at me stupid. I've gotten under your skin. Means I'm really becoming an obsession with you. How flattering.

[Regulator]

Well, “dumb ass”, looks like there were some relatives down the street in the South which you may be un-aware of.

And more then a few Irish slave holders, so it looks like they ate the poisoned fruit too!

Really, the big question is....why stay here after the Great Starvation is over? You could be a Republican in Eire. Would mean you ain’t a Unionist any more...and we all know how that would be Anathema to you.

Things are better now on the Emerald Isle now that divorce is legal, queers can hook up, and abortion on demand is the law of the land. Plus it’s multi-cultural! An Indian guy was the TaoSeach!

Should be paradise. Almost as much fun as North Jersey!

[Regulator]

Ha ha

That’s funny. You’re the bozo still replying!

[Radix]

This has for me been a very informational thread.

It is a shame that it deteriorated with personal rancor between 2 FReepers, perhaps more.

It has only been ONE HUNDRED FIFTY FIVE years since the Civil War ended. Of course reasonable persons will often disagree, but I happen to think that a civil discourse can be maintained.

Did all of those families who chose opposite sides during the 1860s never speak to each other again? That seems unlikely.