Posted on 08/15/2017 7:49:25 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
After white nationalists protested the City of Charlottesville’s plan to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza claimed Sunday that Lee opposed slavery.
Verdict: False
While Lee disagreed with slavery in an abstract sense, he held views similar to his pro-slavery contemporaries and criticized abolitionists of his day.
Fact Check:
D’Souza claimed in a tweet that Lee, a Confederate general during the Civil War, was a poor example of the evils of slavery.
The claim is counterintuitive – Lee owned slaves, and he fought for the Confederacy in a rebellion that was, in part, predicated on slavery.
The notion that Lee opposed slavery has roots in Southern folklore. “This is a little bit of white washing of his image that took place after the Civil War when he was resurrected as a hero of the Lost Cause – as somebody who was very honorable, a great military general and also somebody who morally opposed slavery,” Manisha Sinha, American History professor at the University of Connecticut, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
TheDCNF reached out to D’Souza’s press manager who cited a letter written by Lee in which he called slavery a “moral and political evil.”
The letter in its entirety, however, reveals that Lee held a worldview similar to pro-slavery apologists of the day.
Although Lee called slavery evil, he believed God had ordained it for a divine purpose that would eventually end. Lee made it clear in his letter that he opposed human intervention into what he considered heavenly matters.
“While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is still onward, and give it the aid of our prayers, let us leave the progress as well as the results in the hands of Him who, chooses to work by slow influences, and with whom a thousand years are but as a single day,” Lee wrote.
Like many slaveholders, Lee believed that God ordained slavery to “civilize” the black race and that black people heavily benefited from the institution.
“The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially,” Lee wrote. “The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things.”
The argument was based upon the white supremacist idea that black people were morally, intellectually and even physically inferior to the white race.
“This notion that people of African descent were made good slaves – that they needed to be schooled into civilization was an odd argument because it was a school from which they could never graduate,” Sinha told TheDCNF. “So even after people had been here for centuries and generations, were Christianized, were civilized by Southern standards, even then they were not deemed civilized enough to be liberated.”
The positive good argument of slavery – the idea that paternalistic whites were actually helping inferior blacks by enslaving them – helped solidify a moral argument in the minds of many Southerners that slavery was permissible.
“There was a strain of pro-slavery thinking in Virginia that saw slavery as kind of an evil necessity, but a necessity nonetheless,” Sinha said. “And you can trace this back to the Revolutionary Era where there were people who expressed qualms about slavery in the abstract, but continued to enslave African-Americans, using sometimes sort of racist arguments to justify their enslavement.”
This way of thinking contributed to the notion that white slave masters were burdened by the duty to “civilize” black people, and Lee argues that whites, not blacks, suffered the greatest evils of slavery.
“I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race,” Lee wrote in his letter. “While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former.”
Although Lee ruminates on the welfare of black slaves, it was ultimately the interests of white slaveholders that took precedence in his view of abolition. Lee criticized abolitionists for their interference in Southern affairs, and argued that “to benefit the slave he must not excite angry feelings in the master.”
To argue that he was against slavery because he abstractly called it a “moral and political evil” ignores the fact that he not only believed the institution should continue but practiced it himself. In reality, the views espoused by Lee were much the same as those perpetuated by pro-slavery apologists of his time.
“He very much thought right down the line – the pro-slavery line,” Historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who studied Lee’s personal collection of letters, explained in a talk on the matter.
The Founding Fathers rebelled. The Confederates simply wanted to leave the Union.
RE: O.K. - so did Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson also did not hold out for the banishment of slavery in the Constitution and Jefferson was a slave owner and an alleged adulterer with a slave of his.
So, Trump is right, should we be calling for tearing down the Jefferson memorial.
________________________
I’m not arguing with you, but the opposition insists that comparing Lee with Jefferson is not an apt comparison.
One of the argument was presented by NeverTrumper: Allahpundit of Hotair.com. Here’s what he wrote:
See here: http://hotair.com/archives/2017/08/15/trumps-amazing-qa-charlottesville-alt-left/
“I don’t know why Trump would play their game by making monuments an all-or-nothing proposition. He could have drawn a distinction by noting that Lee was a traitor who fought against the country founded by Washington and Jefferson. It’s not hard to draw a line there. If you want to.”
It began on April 3, 1861 when Lincoln launched warships (Powhatan, Pocahontas, Pawnee, Harriet Lane, the Yankee, the Nashville, Uncle Ben, the Baltic and others) to attack the confederates at Charleston, and to whom copies of the orders to attack them had been passed.
Had Lincoln not sent those ships, they would have felt no need to neutralize the fort, and Major Anderson himself would have evacuated it had he just a few days more time before the conflict began.
But that is history they don't teach, and you have to go to a great deal of trouble to find it.
Far more comforting to some is the belief that the good guys beat the bad guys and that the bad guys were bad.
The civil war was not fought over slavery. That was later defined as a benefit of the war.
And it is statements like this that have always convinced me that "Allahpundit" is a political idiot.
You won't gain a single liberal voter by condemning Robert E. Lee, and you will alienate Millions of people who will hold it against you. It costs you nothing to refrain from putting the "traitor" label on Robert E Lee, and it would cost you a lot if you did so.
George Herbert Walker Bush was exactly this same sort of political idiot who was always trying to befriend his enemies and backstab his friends.
I don't see how you would get "pro slavery" out of this.
My paraphrase would be, "I know that the slaves suffer, but I worry more for the slave owners."
“by noting that Lee was a traitor who fought against the country founded by Washington and Jefferson”
I am not arguing in favor of slavery or the Confederacy, but you and the never Trumper have to put Lee into the same kind of context they are willing to put Jefferson. Why? The “country founded by Washington and Jefferson” did not ban slavery. That’s a fact.
If you look at how far apart were NOT the views of Lincoln and Lee, as to the inequalities of “the Negro”, and put them both in the context of their day, you could see how Lee, no less than Lincoln thought HE WAS fighting for that country founded by Jefferson and Washington, that country that did not ban slavery.
I believe Lee was wrong, AND I believe Lincoln was wrong in his truly racist beliefs that “legal protections”, like banning slavery or not, “the negro” was not the “White Man’s” equal in many ways.
If everyone is going to tear down statues of Lee, I insist, with equal outrage, that the Lincoln memorial be torn down as well. There is enough racist comments from Lincoln that justify that if we are trying to apply a single standard to all parties of the day.
Actually, the goals of the American War of Independence and the goal of the Confederacy were the same. The Americans simply wanted to leave the British Empire and the Confederacy wanted to leave the U.S.A. The former won and the latter lost.
The existing slaves at the time would have seamlessly became citizens, and technology or higher wages would have enabled the South to maintain their cotton industry.
Of course, we probably wouldn't have icons like Michael Jordan or Muhammed Ali either...
Don’t forget, it was FDR, a democRAT individual regarded by democRATs to be on a plane politically, equal with Mother Theresa religiously; it was he, who rounded up, dispossessed and imprisoned all those Asians
Exactly correct but for one exception. The Foundation of the British Government (divine right of kings) did not recognize any principle that would allow a subject to throw off his allegiance to the King.
The Founders established the principle that it was the right of any people to gain independence when the Government ceased to have the consent of the governed.
Having changed the legal paradigm, it should have been easier to leave the US, than it was to leave the UK.
It would have prevented the passage of the US Constitution. Most of the states in 1787 were still slave states. Had the States separated then, the British would have probably reabsorbed the United States. They kicked our A$$es in the war of 1812, and would have been even more able to defeat a non unified collection of states.
They also honor military men who took up arms against a duly elected president.
Can a man be wrong but still be honorable?
I think the answer is Yes, no reason to dishonor the dead in which countless souls died in his leadership.
Those who lived through his command credit his leadership for their lives who eventually were reconciled with the North.
>> Anyone can edit a WIKI. <<
Yes, but they CAN’T edit the Wiki history, and there are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of other editors to correct people who write nonsense. Also, the Wiki cite was sourced. Go evaluate the primary source, if you mean to challenged the truthfulness of the assertion.
How did Jefferson commit adultery when his wife had died?
Looks like the “fact checkers” are missing something.
Wars arise for many reasons but sudden changes in resource availability that force one nation or tribe to intrude on the territory of another to survive are often the cause, if there isn’t enough to share and no hope of trade, or if one side is simply so strong they just decide to conquer the other and help themselves.
War leaves casualties, prisoners, widows and orphans... and farms are laid waste, food stocks depleted, livestock consumed. In some cases, the sides are so out of balance that the weak capitulate before even losing much in the way of population. The problem for the victors is their resources are limited but suddenly they have all these defeated people on their hands. They cannot keep lots of prisoners for fear of uprisings and the burden of feeding so many mouths. They cannot just let them go because the males might regroup, the boys grow up, and they’ll lick their wounds and seek revenge some day.
If there’s no market for slaves, the victors, unable to keep or hold prisoners who might have a reason to kill them in their sleep, have little choice but to put everyone that is a potential threat or burden to the sword. And that’s just what happened, before there was a demand for slaves.
Millennials today don’t understand that old cold reality because they have been so fortunate all their lives. They don’t understand that that’s what would have happened to the ancestors of American blacks. Millennials seem to think that if there hadn’t been American slavery all those ancestors would have lived happily ever in Africa, but that’s not necessarily true.
Slavery was horrible especially by today’s standards, but it was not permanent, and certainly not as bad as a whole people being exterminated.
The “fact checker” might want to get Thomas Sowells’ book Conquests and Cultures and read it, because it will help the reader see more realistically the situations people in various times and places lived through not from a modern perspective but from the perspective of the time period.
Make no mistake: the Confederacy revolted over the issue of slavery. The states of the Confederacy clearly stated so. The Union, however, was not legally on a crusade. They were justified in warring against the Confederacy because the Confederacy was an insurrection, and not only that, attacked a Union possession within its borders. But also have no doubt that beyond the legal justification which made the Union counter-attack necessary, the Union believed was willing to fight because of the moral horror at slavery. One only need listen to the Battle Hymn to understand the Union’s motivations.
The last of the G.W.P. Custis (Lee’s father in law) slaves were not freed by Lee until Dec 1862.
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