Replies

DoodleDawg: "“You all do love your partial quotes and quotes out of context, don’t you?”

jeffersondem: "In defense of Brother Joe, I do not believe the quotes he provided were out of context.
Your attack on him is unwarranted."

Thanks, DoodleDawg, for posting those same quotes in fuller context -- they help buttress my point, which is that RE Lee's views on slavery were basically the same as our Southern Founders, Thomas Jefferson most notably.

None of them asserted that slavery was a moral or positive good, all considered it a necessary evil which should, long term, be abolished.
Some like Jefferson took significant steps to restrict slavery and abolish it in certain regions.
Others like Presidents Madison & Monroe supported what all then believed the necessary correlation to emancipation, namely recolonization to Liberia, Africa.

RE Lee's opinions here can be considered "moderate" amongst Southern slaveholders of, say, 1860.
But when one real test came -- enlisting black Confederate soldiers -- Lee went along with opposition until very near the war's end.

In my 1 to 10 abolitionist scale, Lee and our Southern Founders fall around a 3.

From my readings almost all the founding fathers realized slavery was wrong and counter to the Declaration of Independence. However, starting around the 1830s many southerns started to advocate that slavery was a positive good. By the 1850s they had reached a point where being against slavery was evil and slavery was good. They had chased away, sometimes violently, any southern abolitionists.

There is a story I read once where a man was chasing a horse thief threw a southern town. He kept yelling stop that horse thief, to try and get help. Nobody help him. He then yelled stop that abolitionists and a few men then jumped him. I'll see if I can find the source of that story again.