Robert E Lee & statue controversy

The President asked him to be supreme commander of the Northern Army but Robert E. Lee declined.  He was against slavery, his farm was right across the river from Washington, DC, but he sadly thought the Union was falling apart. “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,” he had written 3 years earlier.  But if the union was to fall, his first duty was to Virginia, his home state.  (We have to discern that loyalty to one’s state was strong among those born around 1800)  Lee had been the son of a Revolutionary War general and his wife was Mary Custis, step-great granddaughter of George Washington. Like Lincoln, Lee wanted negotiation between the two sides of hothead abolitionists and white-supremacist slave owners.  Virginians saw S. Carolinans to be much at fault for the revolt. They were deep into cotton and slavery.  Lincoln alleged the union was at stake and no family had been more involved in establishing the union than Lee’s. A lesser known fact about secession was that the aristocratic, plantation-owning portion of the south demanded revolt, yet only 704 legislators/delegates voted for secession--until events swept half the states into the Confederacy. Only 6% of southerners owned slaves.

            Lee reluctantly resigned his position in the US Army and went to Richmond as a military advisor to Jefferson Davis.  But when Gen. Johnston was killed in 1862, Lee was given command of the Army of Northern Virginia. In many ways he was the South’s answer to Lincoln, a leader whose personal probity and virtuous inspiration sanctified their cause.  He had served with distinction in the Mexican War and 32 years as an army engineer, was second in his class at Westpoint, then appointed to head that institution.  But he had something to live down.  His father, Revolutionary War general ‘light horse Harry’ Lee had not served Washington well, had been a crooked governor of Virginia and put the family into bankruptcy. So Lee set himself deliberately on a path to uphold family honor.

            He was a strong Episcopal Christian who hated slavery. “In all my perplexities and distresses, the Bible has never failed to give me light and strength.”  When his father-in-law died in 1857, Lee became estate executor and promised to free all the slaves.  Things didn’t go well when the slaves found out they were to go free in 5 years and several ran off at once.  If Lee could not get the estate out of debt, creditors would put liens on all the slaves.  Lee had renegades rounded up, punished (counter his feelings) and did indeed manage to manumit every one in 1862, while commanding an army.

            The South was outmanned 20 million to 5 million in white population and had few industries.  The Confederacy was doomed—unless Lee could trick the North into a decisive battle that would cripple their larger army.  That hope went down the drain at Gettysburg, July, 1863. “I tremble for my country when I hear of confidence expressed in me. I know too well my weakness, that our only hope is in God.” When the end came in April 1865, Lee found a new duty to heal the country. “I have fought against the people of the North because I believed they were seeking to wrest from the South its dearest rights. But I have never cherished toward them bitter or vindictive feelings, and I have never seen the day when I did not pray for them.” He was appointed President of Washington College in Lexington and started a campaign to reconcile the two sides with support of the 13^th Amendment. “While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is onward, & we give it the aid of our prayers & all justifiable means in our power, we must leave the progress as well as the result in his hands who sees the end; who chooses to work by slow influences; & with whom two thousand years are but as a single day,” Lee wrote.

            Perhaps the greatest irony of Lee’s legacy is that he greatly opposed Confederate public memorials and statues being put up to commemorate the cause.  In 2017 USA saw two neo-facist groups vie in tearing down Lee’s statue at Chancellorsville. Obviously both had little knowledge whatsoever of the man or the issues in the Civil War. And likely too, clueless of his faith in God or the role he played in reconstruction, conferring with Pres. Grant 5 times at the White House. Only fools refuse to learn what has come before them.