According to one of the affidavits of a CSA officer at Fort Pillow, Forrest shot in cold blood a mulatto servant of a federal officer. So much for him.
Lee ignored the words of his putative hero George Washington, who urged an immovable attachment to the national union. So much for him.
Jefferson Davis maintained that HIS government had the absolute right to coerce the states. So much for him.
Damn'd traitors, every one.
Walt
George Washington was a Virginian. He would have seceded, reluctantly, just like Lee, to try to preserve, in the CSA, the decentralizing principles behind the Union which were being perverted by the Union Party Radicals in Congress.
US Grant, when asked if he was going to free his slave, replied, no, "good help is hard to come by."
I'm sure I could find any number of cases where your saviors/heros killed people in cold blood. Surely you don't want me to remind you of the things WT Sherman did in Georgia to southern women and children.
Nothing Lee, Forrest, or Davis ever did was unjustified.
"I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races -- that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."
An address by Abraham Lincoln at Springfield, Illinois, on June 26, 1857 [Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol II, pp 408-9, Basler, ed.]
It's such a shame that Lincoln couldn't have guided the country during Reconstruction, and maintained the structure so that the STATES could have abolished slavery, as was their inclination and right to do so, at a time of their choosing. Damn John Wilkes Boothe. He enabled the traitorous radicals to take over.