MacTheWolf (imported) wrote: Sat Nov 17, 2012 2:54 am
While researching Confederate officers during the War Between the States, I discovered that three of the most famous and efficient Confederate Generals were never slave holders.
The three were Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart. In fact, all three men were abolitionists before the war started.
I think your research is faulty. The slaves that Lee emancipated were those of his father-in-law, and that was in accord with the terms of Mr. Custis's will. There is no evidence that Lee emancipated slaves on his own. In his letters to his wife, Lee does acknowledge, like most privileged Southerners of the time, that slavery was an evil, but he also held that blacks were better off as slaves in America than as free men in Africa, and that slavery was God's way of giving blacks the necessary discipline and education they lacked in their natural state.
That's a pretty condescending attitude and morally repugnant, accepting the fruits of slavery but blaming it all on God. After the war, Lee was accused of flogging slaves, particularly Mary Norris. A former slave affirmed that Lee whipped slaves, but specifically noted that Mary Norris was not whipped. Lee stated that such claims were untrue. You will note that the claims are unspecified. Is Lee denying that he flogged slaves (the claim made by the deponent), that he flogged Mary Norris (the claim made by Mrs. Norris and also denied by the deponent), or denying that he didn't flog Mary Norris (the claim made by the deponent, but disputed by Mrs. Norris)?
If Lee actually disliked slavery but nevertheless took up arms against the nation that educated him and whose Constitution he had sworn before God to preserve, protect, and defend in order to preserve a state's right to maintain an institution he disliked (that was the only "states' right" that was in question; marriage to fourteen-year-old cousins in Kentucky and Texas was not in jeopardy) then Lee must have had the moral development of a hyena.
