Robert E. Lee, American Icon
And so it goes in today’s popular cancel culture, down goes another Confederate monument. The Statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was hoisted away in shame in Richmond on Sept. 8th. Arguably the most prominent historical figure of the Confederate South, and by default, slavery. Although it is well documented that Lee led the Northern Virginia Army more as a proud Virginian than a legendary commander defending the right to own slaves, it is more widely believed Lee was an ardent defender of slavery despite his own words to the contrary. From an excerpt out of the Encyclopedia Virginia, a Program of Virginia Humanities, “choosing to serve Virginia and the Confederacy “was a hard thing for him . . . thinking as he did that Secession was foolish.” He was even more alarmed at how “unprepared” the South was to wage a war, and that unpreparedness and the unpopularity of defending a regime built on chattel slavery, in Lee’s eyes, spelled doom from the start.” In Roy Blount Jr.’s autobiography, Robert E. Lee, “If Virginia stands by the old Union,” Lee told a friend, “so will I. But if she secedes (though I do not believe in secession as a constitutional right, nor that there is sufficient cause for revolution), then I will follow my native State with my sword, and, if need be, with my life.”
While there is no record of Robert E. Lee having direct ownership of slaves, there is plenty of “indirect” ownership. His family owned slaves when he was a boy growing up on his family plantation in Northern Virginia, and later when he married the great granddaughter of Martha Washington, Mary Custis. The Custis family owned three plantations and more than 190 slaves. Mary’s father George Washington Parke Custis was not comfortable owning slaves. Upon is death, George Washington Parke Custis designated Lee as the executor of his estate and ordered Robert E. Lee to emancipate all enslaved people within five years of his death. Robert and Mary Lee supported the American Colonization Society whose mission was to free slaves and provide assistance throughout their emigration to Liberia. The ACS was, however, condemned by many and most notably Frederick Douglass, as a racist scheme and once wrote, “There is no sentiment more universally entertained, nor more firmly held by the free colored people of the United States, than that this is their own, their native land, and that here (for good or for evil) their destiny is to be wrought out. Identified with the entire history of the American people, going back more than two hundred years, this sentiment is natural and praiseworthy. There is not now, there never has been, and we think there will never be, any general desire on the part of our people, to emigrate from this land to any other and least of all, to the wilds of Africa.”
But Lee’s strongest opposition to slavery came at the beginning, during, and after the Civil War. Then President Abraham Lincoln invited Lee to command the US Army which tormented Lee for weeks before declining the invitation. His decision to align himself with the Confederacy had nothing to do with defending slavery, telling Presidential Advisor Preston Blair, “if I owned all the negroes in the South, I would be willing to give them up . . . to save the Union.” Lee was a Virginian first, and sought to fight more the dangerous rise of abolitionist violence and Virginia’s ill-fated decision to secede from the Union. Finally, Robert E. Lee wrote to the chair of the Confederate House of Representatives William Porcher Miles, urging for a plan of confederate enlistment and eventual emancipation. From the Encyclopedia Virginia, “after the war, Lee remained adamant that the war had been fought by the Confederates not for slavery but “for the Constitution and the Union established by our forefathers.”
Robert E. Lee never thought of Blacks and Whites as equals, however. Despite his Patriotism and his defense of Virginia over slavery as a cause to fight the Civil War, Lee once told his son, “I wish them no evil in the world—on the contrary, will do them every good in my power.” But it remained “abhorrent to a reflecting mind to be supporting and cherishing those” whom Lee would always suspect of “plotting and working for your injury, and all of whose sympathies and associations are antagonistic to yours.”
Many have argued that the defeat of the Confederate Army and the freeing of millions of slaves as an outcome of the North’s victory in the Civil War, meant all those symbols of hate and the people that represented the defeated Southern Army and it’s short lived government should not be memorialized. While I agree symbols of hate should banished nor memorialized, however many of the men and women that commanded the government and armies in the South during the Civil War were not all symbols of hate in their own right or war criminals. If the South had won, would you think the same of Ulysses S. Grant or Abraham Lincoln? Historical men and women who thought a duty to defend their country is a noble and brave act, and, after all, these men and women were Americans before, during and after the Civil War and should always be memorialized as Americans above all else.
