This comment is from a reader who wishes to remain anonymous:
Mr. McClarey:
Fair enough. Please do not feel like you have to post this comment. I mean no disrespect. If a police officer joined a group of criminals in a crime spree because they were family and friends, would you honor him or call him a great man? If his actions caused the loss of far greater life than if he had not joined them, would you consider him honorable? Would it make any difference if the officer was personally not in favor of what the criminals were planning to do and accomplish? I have read so many articles praising the character and integrity of General Lee I am finally compelled to respond. He was anything but a great Christian man. He swore to serve and protect the Union and then took up arms against it. His leadership prolonged the war and caused far greater death and destruction ( I realize that this is an assertion on my part, but I believe it is justified). What part of that makes a man great? I would have understood a decision on his part to refuse to take part in the war on either side, but to actively lead an army against the country he swore to serve is treason plain and simple. The wrong thing to do is the wrong thing to do regardless of the reason. His leading the Confederate army was evil and wrong. He was not a great man but an evil one. I am not asserting that it was evil for everyone on the Confederate side, only those who took an oath to serve the Union prior to the war. I believe it was wrong for them, as they were defending the indefensible practice of slavery, but the average Confederate soldier was just fighting for his state. Lee was a different case altogether. If you want a man of integrity and character, look at Lafayette. He came to America because he believed in the cause. When he went back to France, he worked to improve things there for the people. Several times he was able to stop a tragedy from happening. In the end, the tragedy did happen, but he had done what he could to prevent it and did not take part in it when it did happen. Compare that to Lee who joined in the tragedy and made it much worse.
I will give a response in due course. Today is fairly hectic for me.
Side note not meant to directly answer the above comments: Before the Civil War, there was a question of whether the right to secede was inherent in the founding of the country. There were threats to leave the Union before but nothing came of them. When actual secession took place, a decision had to be made by the Federal government as to its validity. The President and the remainder of Congress took the position that there was no provision in law or history of the Constitution that allowed for secession. Hence, the Southern States were in rebellion and that rebellion needed to be put down. After conclusion of the war, there was no treaty or state surrender, only surrender of opposing military forces. It was determined that civil rights would be extended to those in rebellion if they would sign an Oath of Allegiance. That having been done to the satisfaction of the Federal government, troops were removed from the Southern states at the end of reconstruction in 1877. That also marked the end of the debate over the validity of states to secede.
“He was not a great man but an evil one.” Anonymous, it is easy to pass judgment on persons living and acting during the most difficult time in our history. Evil? Really? I rather see the man as conflicted in a time of great conflict. In a letter to his invalid wife, Lee wrote: “You must endeavor to enjoy the pleasure of doing good. That is all that makes life valuable.” But he adds: “When I measure my own by that standard I am filled with confusion and despair.” See Making Sense of Robert E. Lee | History| Smithsonian Magazine. I would think the best metric to judge the man was how he was viewed by his contemporaries, especially his enemies. After Lee’s death in 1870, Frederick Douglass, the former fugitive slave who had become the nation’s most prominent African-American, wrote, “We can scarcely take up a newspaper . . . that is not filled with nauseating flatteries of Lee.” This was no compliment, to be sure. But these newspapers included those in the North..
After the war, Lee assumed the position of president for Washington college, believing “it is the duty of every citizen, in the present condition of the Country, to do all in his power to aid in the restoration of peace and harmony.” In response to the bitterness of a Confederate widow, Lee wrote, “Dismiss from your mind all sectional feeling, and bring [your children] up to be Americans.” These are not the aspirations of an evil man, but stand in contrast to the bitter sectional rivalries then and now. Yes, now. If he could, Lee would rise from the grave and condemn our political culture with at least the vehemence with which you condemn him.
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I, personally, don’t think of Lee as “evil” so much as someone who made an incredibly risky and painful decision that turned out to be wrong. He was offered the chance to command the Union army and turned it down only because he didn’t want to fight against the people of his home state. He also could have chosen to continue the fighting after Appomattox on a guerrilla basis — as was already happening in some border states — or he could have fled to Mexico as some other Confederates did. He instead chose to stay and encourage reconciliation between South and North. Whatever “evil” he did during the war, he atoned for later.
“If a police officer joined a group of criminals in a crime spree because they were family and friends, would you honor him or call him a great man?”
That statement presumes the Confederacy was engaged in a “crime spree”, which based on the state and federal laws in effect at that time, wasn’t entirely clear.
I cannot agree that Lee was evil, nor even mal-intended. Certainly we have a narrative about which condemns him for fighting for the Confederacy; many have a vested interest in casting this view. Yet I think this overly simplistic.
Abortion today provides a very good analogy. We in the pro-life camp have long sought to eliminate this practice. How far would we go to see it done? If someone would declare he’d end abortion for us, all we need to would be…surrender our citizenship and make him king, would we agree to that? I should hope not. We would have the best intentions, yet would place ourselves in peril of other vice that newly minted king might do.
I think the Confederacy saw the issue of slavery in much the same way. I think many in the South knew slavery needed to end sooner or later, yet had ample and legitimate concern about how and when. Many in the North were… not exactly forgiving, never mind charitable.
We all know how much devastation the South suffered from the War. I don’t think we realize how ending slavery nearly overnight would likely have done much the same thing.
I think many Southerners voted their pocketbook as much as anything, much like people frequently do now.
“many in the South knew slavery needed to end sooner or later, yet had ample and legitimate concern about how and when. Many in the North were… not exactly forgiving, never mind charitable.”
Throughout the 1850s and during the 1860 campaign for president, Abraham Lincoln went out of his way to emphasize that he was not an abolitionist who would demand immediate and unconditional emancipation of all slaves regardless of the cost. His emphasis was always on preventing expansion of slavery to new territories while allowing slavery to remain in the existing slave states if that was what it took to avoid civil war. His hope was that if no new slave states were created (and none were after Texas in 1845), slavery would inevitably die out.
If the Civil War had not happened and the slave states had remained in the Union, I’m guessing that they probably would have all abolished slavery within 20-30 years anyway. The last nation in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery was Brazil in 1888, and that country took in 10 times as many African slaves as the U.S. did from the 16th to the 19th centuries.
I’m not the one to say whether he was good or evil … but I can honestly say that I think he was terribly wrong.