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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.
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It has not been done at all. It has been declared to have been done, but there is no actual philosophical or legal underpinning to their claims.
They do what the media does. Allege something, and then keep repeating that they proved it.
I've asked a clearly provable question. How does an asserted "Contraband of War" claim overcome an actual constitutional clause?
Denial is a river in Egypt, not a valid defense.
Cliches are not a valid defense either.
The Confiscation Acts were laws passed by the United States Congress during the Civil War with the intention of freeing the slaves still held by the Confederate forces in the South.
The Confiscation Act of 1861 authorized the confiscation of any Confederate property by Union forces (”property” included slaves). This meant that all slaves that fought or worked for the Confederate military were confiscated whenever court proceedings “condemned” them as property used to support the rebellion. The bill passed in the United States House of Representatives 60-48 and in the Senate 24-11. The act was signed into law by President Lincoln on August 6, 1861.
I could be wrong, but I believe the constitution allows congress to pass laws.
Acts of Congress cannot override Constitutional Clauses. Try again.
I could be wrong, but I believe the constitution allows congress to pass laws.
Not that are blatantly in conflict with what the Constitution says.
Cite the Supreme Court decision that found this act unconstitutional. Your opinion of what is constitutional
or unconstitutional is just that, an opinion. It carries no weight in law in the United States.
The patriots were living under the British government. They wanted the British OUT of the colonies. That’s a rebellion.
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?
You will find the answer to your question in the Supreme Court Decision Scott V. Sanford.
When one threatens to lock up a Supreme Court justice to ensure one's continuing abuse of power, one does at that point not need to worry about Supreme Court decisions going against them.
Your opinion of what is constitutional or unconstitutional is just that, an opinion. It carries no weight in law in the United States.
Are we debating truth or are we debating power? Yes, I'm quite familiar with the rule that those with the guns can tell you what you are going to be forced to believe, (Gay Marriage) but in terms of speaking to the truth, what they force upon you to believe does not make it true.
You are trying to hide behind "The Supreme Court didn't say so", instead of answering the question honestly and within your own understanding.
How does this made up "contraband of war" acquire the authority to override an actual clause of the US Constitution? According to the rules, to override a constitutional requirement takes a vote of 3/4ths of the states to accomplish. "Congress" is not "3/4ths of the states.
People say the confederates were traitors for not abiding by the US Constitution. What then of people who are clearly violating it? Are they traitors as well?
Weren't you just demanding a Supreme Court decision to prove my point, and you are now offering a Supreme Court decision to prove the opposite of your point?
Are you now agreeing with Scott V Sanford? If not, this is why I don't suggest you put all that much faith into the pronouncements of a "Supreme Court".
Beyond that, this does not even slightly address the point. You cannot use a Supreme Court decision justifying slavery even in Free States, to explain why a Union Army which you claim was fighting to eliminate slavery, did not make the slightest effort to stop it in areas over which they had complete control.
Your response does not even make a bit of sense.
And again you resort to fairy tale instead of fact and show your ignorance to boot. Nobody threatened to lock Roger Taney up. And even if they had then it must not have taken, because in the case that determined the constitutionality of the Confiscation Acts Roger Taney voted with the minority.
Are we debating truth or are we debating power?
As near as I can tell we're debating why we should accept that your interpretation of the Constitution is true and the Supreme Court's interpretation is wrong. And based on your track record on other subjects relating to the rebellion - tariffs, motivations, etc. - then I have no problem at all dismissing your posts as the drivel they are.
It has been proven. Lincoln's very own bodyguard says it's true, and so does at least one other source. It is sufficient to establish the point without stronger evidence to demonstrate it isn't true.
Do you have any evidence that it isn't beyond "historians" claiming they can't find any proof (which they will believe) that it is?
We also know that Lincoln locked up people willy nilly, and so it's not even a stretch to believe that he threatened, and even went so far as to write out an arrest warrant for Chief Justice Tanney.
then I have no problem at all dismissing your posts as the drivel they are.
You will do that regardless of what I say or show you because you have no intention on considering any perspective that contradicts what you wish to believe.
You are a cheerleader and an apologist, not an objective philosopher who is looking for the truth.
And yet none of Chief Justice Taney's biographers saw fit to include that certainly important piece of information in any of their books on the man. James F. Simon, Charles W. Smith, Bernard Christian Steiner, none of them found any credible evidence to support the claim.
But I think I understand your standard here. If something has been said and/or written, and you agree with it, then it's proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. That would go a long way towards explaining a lot of your posts.
Do you have any evidence that it isn't beyond "historians" claiming they can't find any proof (which they will believe) that it is?
What you are asking is do I have any evidence supporting your belief that there is some sort of grand conspiracy among Taney biographers spanning forty years or more to suppress any mention of the Lincoln arrest warrant, thus elevating Lincoln's status and protecting his reputation? No, I don't I won't go into just how stupid I think that suggestion is.
We also know that Lincoln locked up people willy nilly, and so it's not even a stretch to believe that he threatened, and even went so far as to write out an arrest warrant for Chief Justice Tanney.
We know that because you say so?
You will do that regardless of what I say or show you because you have no intention on considering any perspective that contradicts what you wish to believe.
I do that because I've been reading your stuff for a while, and, as amusing as it also gets tired since you repeat it so often.
You are a cheerleader and an apologist, not an objective philosopher who is looking for the truth.
And it's safe to say that I will find neither in you.
“Are we debating truth or are we debating power?”
I was stating a fact. You may call it what ever you like.
But prove by something other than you opinion that the Confiscation Act of 1861 was unconstitutional.
I am hiding behind nothing. The Courts allow the President and Congress broad power in the prosecution of war. Not all of the actions allowed during war would be tolerated in peacetime. The Emancipation proclamation, the Confiscation Act were tolerated as necessary to prosecute a war. Just as the Courts allow the Government to draft a person into the Army or throw 120,000 American citizens in concentration camps because of their ethnic background.
Since the 11 states of the Confederacy did not consider themselves to be a part of the United States, it was not unreasonable for the Federal Government to determine that the protections of the Constitution did not apply toward the Confederate States of America or its citizens. In this the Supreme Court acquiesced. Sorta like the logic behind the prison for terrorists in Guantanamo Bay Cuba. Even though in the custody of the United States Government, full protection of the Constitution does not apply because Gitmo it is not part of the United States
Has nothing to do with “agreeing” with Scott V. Sanford.
One facet of that decision was that the Federal Government did not have Constitutional authority to interfere with slavery in any state where slavery was legal. That is why Lincoln did not use the Federal Army to end slavery in those state that remained in the Union where slavery was legal. He begged, pleaded, cajoled, even tried forms of bribery to get those states to outlaw slavery during the Civil War year. Only Missouri and Maryland outlawed slavery before the end of the Civil War.
You mean other than the clear wording of Article IV, Section 2? Gee, how do I "prove" that a constitutional clause overrides an act of Congress. Well since the Constitution says so, I would figure that would be good enough, but since we are ignoring what the Constitution says in deference to a Congressional Law, then that sort of creates a logical vicious circle, doesn't it?
I'm going to skip reading the rest of what you wrote. If you aren't going to be serious, then I don't see any reason for me to be either.
But Lincolns legal argument was that the states never left, and could not leave, that they had always remained a part of the Union.
How do you square that circle?
Slavery did not end until AFTER CWI. 1868 IIRC. Learned this last year.
I believe slavery officially ended in the Northern States with the ratification of the 13th amendment in December of 1865. (Six months after it ended in the South.)
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