Yeah, but Lee, when he had the choice, chose to fight on the side of slavery and secession. I get that he couldn't chose to fight against Virginia, but it's still treason, however principled the stand.
and as an officer I'd guess that he took an oath to protect the US & its constitution. So much for honor.
Revisionism, plagiarism, shitty source all of the above. This dude McDaniel is a white Supremacist & Neo Confederate and he is running for Senate. What a scumbag. Sick and tired of this canard about Lee as well...The dude was an slave owner and a traitor. Grant should have him "court- martialed" and hung.
It's also a bit misleading to say that he disapproved of slavery -- it tends to paint a picture of Lee in people's minds that's at odds with the facts.
Not really IMO anyway. One has to remember the whole thing was an experiment, a gadget government that was being made up as it went along. The issue was still live and fluid, and there were substantial differences of opinion as to where honor lay. The West Point oath cadets swore to bound them to the US for a eight years, no more. The oath at commission/appointment in the US Army pre 1862 could certainly be interpreted to bind one only until said commission/appointment was resigned. It us a bit ambiguous and certainly many interpreted it that way, and indeed most of the officers who "went south" were pretty scrupulous about resigning from the army first. The oath you had to swear to your state to get to the army oath was not, as I understand, it at all ambiguous -- it bound you to your. state. So it could reasonably be argued that officers from the southern states HAD to go with those states or violate those oaths. Certainly before the War of 1812 most Americans saw their states as their nations and the United States as an alliance. 1812 started the consciousness of the US as a nation, but in 1861 many if pressed would still place their state at the apex not the alliance, and obviously many did. Further, there was quite a tradition of officers resigning to take service in foreign nations-- David Porter, father of Davy Porter and adoptive father of Farragut, and one of the most influential officers in the Navy,for example, resigned his commission and took service as Admiral in the Mexican Navy for several years.. No one really argued with this behavior in the Antebellum years. A man got ahead whateve way he could. For most purposes, the Civil War was the actual test as to which way it was going tto be seen thereafter; and even at that there has remained a minority opinion that one set of states has no business deciding how another set shall do business; we are still finishing up the transition in many ways...
Lee did disapprove of slavery; he thought it had a bad effect on white people. He didn't really care about its effect on black people, even if he had seen blacks as people, which I'm not sure he did.
Dude, are you being facetious or sarcastic? I am genuinely asking. If not that some pretty sickening revisionism you are pushing here. I am realtly shocked that in 2018 after all that has been said and written about Lee that this canard is still being pushed. What's next.....Slaves were happy and satisfied? Slaves enlisted and fought with the Confederacy? GTFOH..
He's quoting Lee: In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy.
Let me leave that here..... The Myth of the Kindly General Lee The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed. White supremacy does not “violate” Lee’s “most fundamental convictions.” White supremacy was one of Lee’s most fundamental convictions. Lee was a slaveowner—his own views on slavery were explicated in an 1856 letter that it often misquoted to give the impression that Lee was some kind of an abolitionist. In the letter, he describes slavery as “a moral & political evil,”but goes on to explain that: I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy. The argument here is that slavery is bad for white people, good for black people, and most importantly, it is better than abolitionism; emancipation must wait for divine intervention. That black people might not want to be slaves does not enter into the equation; their opinion on the subject of their own bondage is not even an afterthought to Lee. Lee’s cruelty as a slavemaster was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his writings, Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families,” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.” https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/
I think you must not understand his post or something. His post was based on a quote from Lee that's substantially included in that Atlantic article to which you refer!
His post started by saying that Lee was not a traitor (in his opinion....). And it just went down from there...The next one was an attempt to say that Lee disapproved slavery....
I know Trump is trying to take us back in time, what with trying to get asbestos back in the game and coal and what have you. Slavery, beyond the economic sort that already exists, seems a bit far off so wtf does Lee have to do with anything?
Or more specifically, he indicated that Lee disapproved of its impact on white people, and suggested that Lee didn't think of black people as human. I don't think your positions are different.
Are you being sarcastic, this has already happened. Even fellow user Stilton FC said it was good for blacks to be taken from Africa. Some textbooks are trying to replace "slaves" with "workers". If Trumpites get their way, there might be Slavery Denial someday. Don't underestimate the white man, it took actual legislation in Europe to stop Holocaust denial. Who knows how far slavery revisionism can go, especially in this new Age of Trump.
Well, it WAS a choice, according to Kanye West! https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/01/entertainment/kanye-west-slavery-choice-trnd/index.html
In Lee's opinion, they should have been. While he may have found slavery to be “evil”, he still felt blacks were better as slaves than free in Africa.
There is no greater authority than Cliven Bundy on this topic! “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do. “And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-slaves/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.fb11c7e871b7 THIS is today's Republican Party and, in particular, the party of Trump.
He wrote about it, and was pretty clear. In understanding the choices people made back then it is kind of important to understand how they saw things, because we would hope to try to see through the illusions of our own times better than they did theirs. Understanding the reasons for their choices is not the same as endorsing them. Incidentally some slaves-- a very few, but some, did volunteer to serve at the front for the confederacy. There was never any issue of arming them, of course. but the varieties of human experience are almost infinite...
I am sorry, but I am absolutely calling "BS" on this one. It is not a question of seeing "through the illusions of our own times better than they did theirs." That is a crap cop out. Well over half of country saw that slavery was bad, evil, immoral, illegal and needed to stop. We fought a goddamn war with ourselves over. This is not some "enlightened" position known only to the very few, it was the majority position of Americans (yes, it should have been 100%, but that was why we went to war). He knew goddamned well that, in choosing to fight for the South, he was choosing treason, racism, and slavery. His own words, that you quoted, demonstrate his inherent racism and why he chose (and, yes, it was a choice, a stark choice) treason over honor and slavery over freedom. If he was opposed to slavery, there was only one choice to make. Robert E. Lee, the traitorous bastard, did not make that choice.
By modern standards Abraham Lincoln was also a racist. https://www.history.com/news/5-things-you-may-not-know-about-lincoln-slavery-and-emancipation