Posted on 08/15/2017 7:49:25 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
After white nationalists protested the City of Charlottesville’s plan to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza claimed Sunday that Lee opposed slavery.
Verdict: False
While Lee disagreed with slavery in an abstract sense, he held views similar to his pro-slavery contemporaries and criticized abolitionists of his day.
Fact Check:
D’Souza claimed in a tweet that Lee, a Confederate general during the Civil War, was a poor example of the evils of slavery.
The claim is counterintuitive – Lee owned slaves, and he fought for the Confederacy in a rebellion that was, in part, predicated on slavery.
The notion that Lee opposed slavery has roots in Southern folklore. “This is a little bit of white washing of his image that took place after the Civil War when he was resurrected as a hero of the Lost Cause – as somebody who was very honorable, a great military general and also somebody who morally opposed slavery,” Manisha Sinha, American History professor at the University of Connecticut, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
TheDCNF reached out to D’Souza’s press manager who cited a letter written by Lee in which he called slavery a “moral and political evil.”
The letter in its entirety, however, reveals that Lee held a worldview similar to pro-slavery apologists of the day.
Although Lee called slavery evil, he believed God had ordained it for a divine purpose that would eventually end. Lee made it clear in his letter that he opposed human intervention into what he considered heavenly matters.
“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,” Lee wrote.
Like many slaveholders, Lee believed that God ordained slavery to “civilize” the black race and that black people heavily benefited from the institution.
“The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially,” Lee wrote. “The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things.”
The argument was based upon the white supremacist idea that black people were morally, intellectually and even physically inferior to the white race.
“This notion that people of African descent were made good slaves – that they needed to be schooled into civilization was an odd argument because it was a school from which they could never graduate,” Sinha told TheDCNF. “So even after people had been here for centuries and generations, were Christianized, were civilized by Southern standards, even then they were not deemed civilized enough to be liberated.”
The positive good argument of slavery – the idea that paternalistic whites were actually helping inferior blacks by enslaving them – helped solidify a moral argument in the minds of many Southerners that slavery was permissible.
“There was a strain of pro-slavery thinking in Virginia that saw slavery as kind of an evil necessity, but a necessity nonetheless,” Sinha said. “And you can trace this back to the Revolutionary Era where there were people who expressed qualms about slavery in the abstract, but continued to enslave African-Americans, using sometimes sort of racist arguments to justify their enslavement.”
This way of thinking contributed to the notion that white slave masters were burdened by the duty to “civilize” black people, and Lee argues that whites, not blacks, suffered the greatest evils of slavery.
“I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race,” Lee wrote in his letter. “While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former.”
Although Lee ruminates on the welfare of black slaves, it was ultimately the interests of white slaveholders that took precedence in his view of abolition. Lee criticized abolitionists for their interference in Southern affairs, and argued that “to benefit the slave he must not excite angry feelings in the master.”
To argue that he was against slavery because he abstractly called it a “moral and political evil” ignores the fact that he not only believed the institution should continue but practiced it himself. In reality, the views espoused by Lee were much the same as those perpetuated by pro-slavery apologists of his time.
“He very much thought right down the line – the pro-slavery line,” Historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who studied Lee’s personal collection of letters, explained in a talk on the matter.
My question:
Were these statues in place over the 8 years while obama was in office?
So they only became an issue since Trump has been in office? Hummmmmm.......
I do believe he had a problem with it.
Washington and Jefferson were slave owners too. Does that mean they didn’t oppose slavery?
General Lee spoke out against the “peculiar institution.”
I believe Lincoln, too, was critical of the abolitionists. At lest the more aggressive ones.
I do believe he had a problem with it.
—
Why didn’t they go after them then? I guess it wasn’t such an important issue to the media when obama was in office.
Don’t care, I’m not concerned with slavery.
Are people 200 years from now going to deconstruct the country over who supported abortion?
The whole goal of the crap is to unfound America.
It has to stop now, or we’re headed for war.
I don't see any attempt to denigrate him nor his statues.
Washington and Jefferson inherited slaves, it was illegal at the time to free slaves. There were laws in place that prevented people from freeing slaves. There are many facets to the story.
Today it is Gen. Lee, tomorrow President Lincoln.
The Doughboys, a segregated army! Oh, my.
WWII still segregated and they interned Millions of Asians! Can’t have that.
And on and on...
Without a history, you do not exist.
Also, slavery was a normal part of life all over the world, it existed in many forms. It is evil and bad, but it was part of normal life at the time. America didn’t create slavery.
>>While Lee disagreed with slavery in an abstract sense, he held views similar to his pro-slavery contemporaries and criticized abolitionists of his day.
File this away for the people who are “personally” opposed to abortion (in an abstract can’t really fathom it sense) but criticize those are against aborting kids. “I’m pro-choice, really, although I wouldn’t have one myself, y’see...”
America’s abortion on demand policies (up to the day of birth) are extreme by first world standards.
Generals Sherman & Grant (among other northerners) owned slaves. Grant held on to his until after the Civil War when the 13th Amendment became effective. The Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the South. Delaware only ratified the 13th Amendment after 1900. It is inappropriate to judge the past by today’s morality.
Robert E. Lee letter dated December 27, 1856:
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. ...
Is it not strange that the descendants of those Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom have always proved the most intolerant of the spiritual liberty of others?
Lee got rid of his wife’s slaves before the war started. Grant on the other hand had slaves and didn’t release them till after the war. When asked why he kept them so long he said “good help us hard to find.”
FDR’s Klansman on the Supreme Court was a factor in that decision on the constitutionality of FDR’s internment camps for those of Japanese descent in America.
My theory is the removal of all things Confederate was planned during Obama admin. The plan was to be executed during the reign of Shitlery. Well she lost but the Leftists are ramming the agenda through now anyway.
R.E. Lee did not own slaves in 1860-61. He was the executor of his father-in-law’s estate. His father-in-law left about a half-a-dozen slaves to Lee’s wife, with instructions in the will that they were to be manumitted 5 years after his death (but not before). Lee leased them out, to provide money for his wife, and manumitted them at the expiration of the 5 years, right in the middle of the War. By law, he could do nothing else.
“Although he later served as a general in the Union Army, Grant had control of slaves owned by his wife.[1] He is known to have personally owned only one slave, William Jones, from 1857 to 1859.[2] Grant freed Jones rather than sell him, despite financial need.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_who_owned_slaves
Probably not far from the truth.
Obama hates colonialism too so I am sure anything that represents whitey to them will be a target.
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