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.
Not much of one.
Half true. Sherman never owned a slave. Grant freed his sole slave before the war.
Grant held on to his until after the Civil War when the 13th Amendment became effective.
Incorrect. Even had Grant owned a slave during the war, by January 1865 he didn't live anywhere where owning a slave was legal since Missouri ended slavery at that time. The fact is that the slaves used by Mrs. Grant were owned by her father and had been emancipated early in 1863.
The Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the South.
Correct. And?
Delaware only ratified the 13th Amendment after 1900.
That didn't stop slavery from being illegal as of December 1865.
It is inappropriate to judge the past by today’s morality.
And yet people try.
None of that is true.
That particular part is sourced, and it's also supported by all available evidence.
When G.W.P. Custis (Mary’s father) died in 1958, he owed about 75 slaves. The majority of those slaves worked in and around the estate at Arlington, but some of his slaves worked on other Custis properties as far South as West Point, VA. His will required all the slaves to be freed when the “legacies and debts of the estate were paid in full”, or within five years of his death. Lee was the administrator of the Custis estate. The last of the Custis slaves were freed by Lee in Dec 1862.
No it wasn't, though after the early 1800's freed slaves had 12 months to leave the Commonwealth or they would be sold back into slavery.
The goals were the same. The motivation behind the respective rebellions was not.
Again, Maryland was not in rebellion against the United States so the contraband of war act could not be applied to them. Slavery could only be ended in states not in rebellion by a constitutional amendment.
August 9, 1960
Dear Dr. Scott:
Respecting your August 1 inquiry calling attention to my often expressed admiration for General Robert E. Lee, I would say, first, that we need to understand that at the time of the War between the States the issue of secession had remained unresolved for more than 70 years. Men of probity, character, public standing and unquestioned loyalty, both North and South, had disagreed over this issue as a matter of principle from the day our Constitution was adopted.
General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which until 1865 was still an arguable question in America; he was a poised and inspiring leader, true to the high trust reposed in him by millions of his fellow citizens; he was thoughtful yet demanding of his officers and men, forbearing with captured enemies but ingenious, unrelenting and personally courageous in battle, and never disheartened by a reverse or obstacle. Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.
From deep conviction, I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee’s calibre would be unconquerable in spirit and soul. Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities, including his devotion to this land as revealed in his painstaking efforts to help heal the Nation’s wounds once the bitter struggle was over, we, in our own time of danger in a divided world, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained.
Such are the reasons that I proudly display the picture of this great American on my office wall.
Sincerely,
Dwight D. Eisenhower
President Eisenhower wrote that letter in response to another a$$hole that, like you, had a problem with the great Robt. E Lee.
Should have picked our own damn cotton.
Orcs in masks with weapons deciding in collusion with authorities who can be on the streets of our cities and I am to give a crap about some retarded discussion? No.
Then what would you have had to rebel over?
Exactly. Would have saved us a LOT of grief.
Eisenhower did respect and admire Lee and considered him possibly the second best general of the Civil War. And there is no reason why he shouldn't; there is much to admire about Lee. But Lee's reputation is safe and his many good points stand on their own, so spreading fables about him being anti-slavery or things like that don't do him any credit.
The reasons why the Confederacy invoked the right to independence asserted by the Declaration of Independence is irrelevant. Only the reason why the Union decided to attack them matters, and the Union did not attack them because they had slavery. The Union attacked them because they were trying to become independent of the financial control of Washington and it's Crony Capitalists in New York.
"Slavery" is an ad hoc excuse to cover up the fact that the North attacked them because they didn't want to lose control of the South's economics.
They were justified in warring against the Confederacy because the Confederacy was an insurrection,
It was a democratically approved process of seeking independence from Washington DC. They took a vote. The people of those states voted to leave. It was all orderly and in accordance with long established principles of Democracy.
The powers that be in Washington didn't like the fact that they were trying to separate themselves from Washington's control, and they called it an "Insurrection."
One only need listen to the Battle Hymn to understand the Union’s motivations.
If the motivation of the Union was to destroy slavery which had been legal in the Union for "four score and seven years", then why didn't they attack Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, or Missouri? Those were Union slave states, some of which kept slavery for six months longer than did the states of the Confederacy.
How can a Union which claims to be fighting against slavery (which they had no trouble keeping legal when they were in charge) be tolerant of slavery in their own states?
It's a lie. It's propaganda meant to fool gullible people.
The first thing that should be torn down is the DNC headquarters and then the abolishment of the democrat party.
They are the embodiment and legacy of slavery and racism.
So I see.
Where do you get this "contraband of war" idea? Is there a clause in the US Constitution that mentions "Contraband of War"? Or is this some made up excuse to justify what they did?
I know that there is an actual constitutional clause (Article IV, Section 2.) that says laborers must be returned to the person to whom their labor is due in accordance with the laws of their state, so how you get your "Contraband of War" thing to override an actual clause in the US Constitution, I would like to know.
Why didn't this "Contraband of War" idea apply to their land, their livestock, their bank accounts, and all other assets that they possessed? How does this "Contraband of War" idea get so specific that it only applies to slaves but nothing else?
It is made up crap by a dictator set on imposing his own personal preferences on a group of people conquered by his soldiers, and it has nothing at all to do with actual law or a constitutionally delegated power.
Lincoln himself repeatedly said he had no legitimate power to abolish slavery, and yet when he had the military force necessary to do as he wished, he suddenly discovered that he did have this power.
Give me a break. It's lies.
If you have some constitutionally based argument to demonstrate otherwise, please put it out there so the rest of us can contemplate it.
It has been done on numerous occasions by people far more knowledgeable than I. And yet you persist in your odd-ball theories
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