Right, Lee's views were consistent with those of our Founders, North & South.
They all believed slavery a moral wrong which should be set right eventually -- gradual, compensated emancipation as first proposed by Thomas Jefferson, and as later proposed by young Congressman Abraham Lincoln for Washington, DC.
FLT-bird: "Jefferson Davis said multiple times that they were not fighting over slavery..."
Sure, but the Corwin Amendment which FLT-bird so loves to lay at Lincoln's feet was actually Senator Davis' baby, born of his efforts to prevent Mississippi from declaring secession.
Democrat Senator Davis believed the best way to prevent further secessions was to guarantee the status of slavery in the United States.
And most seceding states made certain slavery was featured prominently in their "Reasons for Secession" documents.
Sure, slavery did not cause Fort Sumter on April 12, or the Confederate Declaration of War on May 6, 1861, but slavery did become hugely important in the forms of:
- Contraband of War
- Laws to confiscate Confederate property.
- Hiring Confederate ex-slaves to support the Union army.
- Laws prohibiting return of Confederate fugitive slaves.
- Nearly 200,000 Union colored troops.
- Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.
- 13th, 14th & 15th Amendments.
As for what your average Confederate soldier believed, here is what some said:
- "...any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks, and that the whole course of the Yankee government has not only been directed to the abolition of slavery, but even to a stirring up of servile insurrections, is either a fool or a liar."
'The Vidette' -- a camp newspaper for Confederate Brig. Gen. John Hunt Morgan's cavalry brigade, November, 1862.
So slavery helped keep the fight going & going...