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Myth of Robert E. Lee: Legend of Robert E. Lee's heroism and decency is based on fiction
Posted on 6/5/17 at 1:02 am
Posted on 6/5/17 at 1:02 am
quote:
The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.
There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.
But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”
In Reading The Man, historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his writings, Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families,” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”
The trauma of rupturing families lasted lifetimes for the enslaved—it was, as my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates described it, “a kind of murder.” After the war, thousands of the emancipated searched desperately for kin lost to the market for human flesh, fruitlessly for most. In Reconstruction, historian Eric Foner quotes a Freedmen’s Bureau agent who notes of the emancipated, “in their eyes, the work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery were reunited.”
Publicly, Lee argued against the enfranchisement of blacks, and raged against Republican efforts to enforce racial equality on the South. Lee told Congress that blacks lacked the intellectual capacity of whites and “could not vote intelligently” and that granting them suffrage would “excite unfriendly feelings between the two races.” Lee explained that “the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.” To the extent that Lee believed in reconciliation, it was between white people, and only on the precondition that black people would be denied political power and therefore the ability to shape their own fate.
To describe this man as American hero requires ignoring the immense suffering for which he was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield. It requires ignoring his participation in the industry of human bondage, his betrayal of his country in defense of that institution, the battlefields scattered with the lifeless bodies of men who followed his orders and those they killed, his hostility towards the rights of the freedmen and his indifference to his own students waging a campaign of terror against the newly emancipated. It requires reducing the sum of human virtue to a sense of decorum and the ability to convey gravitas in a gray uniform.
There are former Confederates who sought redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’ integrated police force in battle against white supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans; there are no statues of Longstreet anywhere in the American South. Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6’2” Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace
LINK
This post was edited on 6/5/17 at 1:15 am
Posted on 6/5/17 at 1:07 am to Bench McElroy
Fake history lib bullshite
Posted on 6/5/17 at 1:08 am to Bench McElroy
Something tells me you think the Rosenbergs got a raw deal and that we had 9/11 coming.
Posted on 6/5/17 at 1:11 am to Bench McElroy
quote:
Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause
Had to stop reading here because it's clear some bat-shite crazy, "progressive" liberal wrote this nonsense.
Posted on 6/5/17 at 1:11 am to Bench McElroy
Lee was not a good man or a good general either. Most History Channel shows the unfounded myth. I saw one yesterday.
Posted on 6/5/17 at 1:15 am to WhiskeyPapa
Can't wait to read the article titled The Myth of Martin Luther King.
When will liberals publicize his affinity for white women? A man of the cloth, indeed.
When will liberals publicize his affinity for white women? A man of the cloth, indeed.
Posted on 6/5/17 at 1:15 am to WhiskeyPapa
quote:
Lee was not a good man or a good general either. Most History Channel shows the unfounded myth. I saw one yesterday.
I don't think Lee was ever the same after the death of Stonewall Jackson. He was the key behind Lee's success early in the war.
Posted on 6/5/17 at 1:19 am to Bench McElroy
I think Longstreet is fondly remembered by the author because he had the opportunity to live into the twentieth century while Lee passed away a mere five years after the war's conclusion.
I am not the biggest fan of Robert E. Lee, I think he's overrated, but to say he was fighting for white supremacy while Longstreet was not is disingenuous. What was Longstreet fighting for that Lee was not? Was Lee fighting strictly for white supremacy while Longstreet merely fought to defend his family?
And let's not forget, it was Lee who was the first to kneel beside a freedman while taking communion at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Richmond, mere days after the war's conclusion.
Yeah...the Lost Cause mythology has built Lee into some kind of superhuman commander who only lost due to the overwhelming numbers he faced. But let's not re-invent history further and try to make the man out as some evil, scum of the earth human. In his day, Lee was respected by men both North and South. The Northern press mourned his death in 1870 just as much as the Southern press did.
Yeah, Lee was a white supremacist but so was just about every single man, woman, and child in nineteenth century America. The only group of people who went around saying blacks were equal to whites in those days were the Abolitionists - and they were a small, but vocal minority.
I am not the biggest fan of Robert E. Lee, I think he's overrated, but to say he was fighting for white supremacy while Longstreet was not is disingenuous. What was Longstreet fighting for that Lee was not? Was Lee fighting strictly for white supremacy while Longstreet merely fought to defend his family?
And let's not forget, it was Lee who was the first to kneel beside a freedman while taking communion at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Richmond, mere days after the war's conclusion.
Yeah...the Lost Cause mythology has built Lee into some kind of superhuman commander who only lost due to the overwhelming numbers he faced. But let's not re-invent history further and try to make the man out as some evil, scum of the earth human. In his day, Lee was respected by men both North and South. The Northern press mourned his death in 1870 just as much as the Southern press did.
Yeah, Lee was a white supremacist but so was just about every single man, woman, and child in nineteenth century America. The only group of people who went around saying blacks were equal to whites in those days were the Abolitionists - and they were a small, but vocal minority.
Posted on 6/5/17 at 1:20 am to Bench McElroy
Posted on 6/5/17 at 1:29 am to Bench McElroy
Garbage and lies. Although if those were true Lee quotes, they certainly were on point to a degree
Posted on 6/5/17 at 1:31 am to RollTide1987
quote:
The only group of people who went around saying blacks were equal to whites in those days were the Abolitionists - and they were a small, but vocal minority
The world has never been and never will be as simple as black and white. It was as complicated then as it was today. The president of the confederate states of America, one Jefferson Davis and his wife adopted and raised as their own a young black child. Upon the wars conclusion, the child was taken from them and was forever lost to history.
Posted on 6/5/17 at 1:45 am to Bench McElroy
quote:
Robert E. Lee, TravellerSir Winston Churchill once remarked, “Lee was the noblest American who had ever lived and one of the greatest commanders known to the annals of war.”
Lets me think, who to believe the bozo who wrote that article or one of the preiminent leaders in history?
Posted on 6/5/17 at 2:38 am to RollTide1987
quote:
And let's not forget, it was Lee who was the first to kneel beside a freedman while taking communion at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Richmond, mere days after the war's conclusion.
There is no proof of that story.
Posted on 6/5/17 at 2:41 am to RollTide1987
quote:
Yeah...the Lost Cause mythology has built Lee into some kind of superhuman commander who only lost due to the overwhelming numbers he faced.
Lee lost half his army to desertion in 10 days. Thirty thousand of his soldiers had business elsewhere. That is totally ignored. No general like that could be called successful.
Posted on 6/5/17 at 2:47 am to WhiskeyPapa
quote:
Lee was not a good man or a good general either. Most History Channel shows the unfounded myth. I saw one yesterday.
The show I watched yesterday said that Lee had to stay constantly on the offensive because the so-called CSA wasn't able to fight a long war. I don't think the record shows anything like that. Lee went on the attack at the Seven Days battle, in the attack into Maryland, at Chancellorsville, and at Gettysburg because that was his natural disposition. You can only win by attacking.
What this means is that the so-called CSA had NO chance of achieving victory by its own efforts. It could only win if the North decided to stop prosecuting the war. And that is not something you bet the farm on.
A war of attrition worked against the south which had 25% of the manpower of the north. But that is what Lee did.
He was the man most responsible for all the useless death.
Posted on 6/5/17 at 2:56 am to WhiskeyPapa
So you get all of your "facts" from history channel "fact or fiction"? Yikes.
Posted on 6/5/17 at 3:08 am to Bench McElroy
That's some highly ignorant of history shite right there.
Posted on 6/5/17 at 3:42 am to BBONDS25
That show was wrong. Can you read?
This post was edited on 6/5/17 at 6:32 am
Posted on 6/5/17 at 4:10 am to Bench McElroy
Drivel of the first order.
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