You said "Lee agreed that the system of chattel slavery in the south was a positive good, both rational and Christian, and thus an institution fit to be made permanent to serve as the cornerstone of the Confederate "nation"."
As "evidence" of this statement, you offered a letter in which Lee called for the emancipation and compensation of slaves and their families in exchange for serving in the army.
In the words of another defender of slavery, you were trying to make a chestnut horse out of a horse chestnut.
You put up that 1856 letter about how bad Lee supposedly thought slavery was.
I already quoted from it. The text is as follows:
"I was much pleased the with President's message. His views of the systematic and progressive efforts of certain people at the North to interfere with and change the domestic institutions of the South are truthfully and faithfully expressed. The consequences of their plans and purposes are also clearly set forth. These people must be aware that their object is both unlawful and foreign to them and to their duty, and that this institution, for which they are irresponsible and non-accountable, can only be changed by them through the agency of a civil and servile war. There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influences of Christianity than from the storm and tempest of fiery controversy. This influence, though slow, is sure. The doctrines and miracles of our Saviour have required nearly two thousand years to convert but a small portion of the human race, and even among Christian nations what gross errors still exist! 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. Although the abolitionist must know this, must know that he has neither the right not the power of operating, except by moral means; that to benefit the slave he must not excite angry feelings in the master; that, although he may not approve the mode by which Providence accomplishes its purpose, the results will be the same; and that the reason he gives for interference in matters he has no concern with, holds good for every kind of interference with our neighbor, -still, I fear he will persevere in his evil course."
You said "Lee agreed that the system of chattel slavery in the south was a positive good, both rational and Christian, and thus an institution fit to be made permanent to serve as the cornerstone of the Confederate "nation"."
Is that what you said I said? I forget.
That was a quote from a book. I even cited the book.
I haven't seen anything from Lee to change that.
Why did Lee refuse Grant's idea to exchange black Union POW's for white?
Because he didn't want to sing "Cumbayah" with them?
Lee was a product of his time. That time was stratified and gentrified. He thought blacks inferior, and probably poor whites too. Look at his nickname. "Marse Robert." What's funny is how the "mean whites" ate it up.
Walt
He wasn't doing that in 1861. In 1861 he was saying that it was idle to talk of secession.
He changed his tune about freeing blacks only when his army was meltng away.
Lessee, that letter was January 11, 1865.
The next month he wrote that "hundreds of our men are deserting nightly."
And:
"A new England private said that each evening the men in the company would speculate about the number of deserters who would come in that night: "The boys talk about the Johnnies as at home we talk about suckers and eels. The boys will look around in the evening and guess that there will be a good run of Johnnies." Heavy firing on the picket line was always taken to mean that the enemy was trying to keep deserters from getting away."
"A Stillness at Apotmattox" pp 330-31, by Bruce Catton
I'd say Lee was a bit late in coming to Jesus.
Walt