re: Robert E. Lee has been misrepresented by regressive "historians"

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But he also opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories. The South always operated under the assumption that if slavery wasn't allowed to expand it would eventually die

That's a total stretch and you know it. Southerners would have had zero hope of expanding slavery to northern controlled states after declaring war on the federal government. So clearly there were other reasons at play here.

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I don't know it for a stretch. When President Elect Lincoln made clear that he would not allow slavery into the western territories, South Carolina published secession documents within two weeks.

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That's a total stretch and you know it.

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No, it's not. This is exactly why they feared Lincoln's election and exactly why they ended up seceding from the Union.

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Southerners would have had zero hope of expanding slavery to northern controlled states after declaring war on the federal government.

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That was never their intent. They wanted to expand slavery into the western territories, specifically the ones won from the Mexican government in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War.

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Lincoln could win the Electoral College - despite not appearing on the ballot in 10 states - because people were not moving into the south. The EC of course is based on representation. It was tied to industry in that there were jobs in the north, and few in the south.

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Right. We know how he won, and we understand the system. So did the southerners. That system virtually eliminated any chance of the southerners getting representation in the WH. It was another reason they didn't want to remain. A growing executive, staunchly pro industrialist and Pro northern industry being perpetually held by northern interests... It's not hard to see what some of these other issues were.

""But he also opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories. The South always operated under the assumption that if slavery wasn't allowed to expand it would eventually die. More and more free states would come into the Union and the institution would eventually be legislated out, destroying the southern economy and the South's way of life.""

I was coming to make this point about the expansion of slavery being another reason the South seceded. They know as you said that no new states would ever be able to have slavery.
Thanks for bringing that up.

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well that's not true. unless you don't think people who cared about the monuments/statues counted as people.

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Only a fringe group of professional angry people and a few ignorant college students wanted the monuments gone. Feel better now?

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You are ignoring many many contemporaneous accounts and opinions

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Such as?

Truthfully, the Confederacy should have capitulated after the surrender of Nashville to Union forces and the landing of a sizeable Union Army at Shiloh ( Corinth, MS and Savannah, TN) Once the Union had control of the Confederate heartland as well as New Orleans the South was toast. Grant was able to move with relative impunity between Memphis and Vicksburg and Farragut and the Union occupation force had the Mississippi bottled up . By all rights the South should have capitulated in the fall of 1862.

When your enemy can land troops in the center of your country with relative ease you are in deep doo doo . The South could not stop the Union from floating down men and material up the the Tennessee, , Cumberland and Mississippi Rivers at will. It had it's major ports, New Orleans, Mobile and Charleston bottled up....all early on. After the Bloodbath at Shiloh, Jefferson Davis should have sued for peace and hope for favorable treatment from Lincoln, et al .

Lee being a very good strategic soldier (as well as tactical) should have known this.

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I don't know it for a stretch. When President Elect Lincoln made clear that he would not allow slavery into the western territories, South Carolina published secession documents within two weeks.

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Given the immediacy of dozens of other concerns, and an impending presidency of a guy elected without being an the ballot of 10 southern states, I think we can safely say this was one of many issues, one that SCAR basically decided they DGAF about when they started the war against the union states. Because that virtually guaranteed they wouldn't be achieving the goal of Western expansion.

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This is why the South couldn't care less what Lincoln had to offer. He opposed the institution's expansion and that was enough to say bye-bye to the United States.

Someone needs to read some of Lincoln's own quotes regarding slavery.

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They won't show what you are too lazy to look up.

Lincoln clearly felt it better to talk and negotiate and allow slavery to exist than it was to fight over.

When the southern states passed secession documents Frederick Douglass and others immediately implored him to end slavery by executive fiat. He refused. He felt that he had no power to do that any way. When General Fremont and others tried to end slavery by -their- fiat early in the war, Lincoln nixed those actions. For about 18 months he tried to end the fighting and restore the government as it was. Once that was done, it would be time to haggle over the future of slavery.
He finally gave up that idea and published the Emancipation Proclamation, based on his war powers as president.

We have this letter to A.G. Hodges of Kentucky:

""I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power.

I understood, too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. I had publicly declared this many times, and in many ways. And I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery. I did understand however, that my oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government -- that nation -- of which that constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground, and now avow it. I could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had even tried to preserve the constitution, if, to save slavery, or any minor matter, I should permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitution all together. When, early in the war, Gen. Fremont attempted military emancipation, I forbade it, because I did not then think it an indispensable necessity. When a little later, Gen. Cameron, then Secretary of War, suggested the arming of the blacks, I objected, because I did not yet think it an indispensable necessity. When, still later, Gen. Hunter attempted military emancipation, I again forbade it, because I did not yet think the indispensable necessity had come.

When, in March, and May, and July 1862 I made earnest, and successive appeals to the border states to favor compensated emancipation, I believed the indispensable necessity for military emancipation, and arming the blacks would come, unless averted by that measure. They declined the proposition; and I was, in my best judgment, driven to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it, the Constitution, or of laying strong hand upon the colored element. I chose the latter. In choosing it, I hoped for greater gain than loss; but of this, I was not entirely confident. More than a year of trial now shows no loss by it in our foreign relations, none in our home popular sentiment, none in our white military force, -- no loss by it any how or any where. On the contrary, it shows a gain of quite a hundred and thirty thousand soldiers, seamen, and laborers. These are palpable facts, about which, as facts, there can be no cavilling. We have the men; and we could not have had them without the measure."

-4/4/64

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The South had long-term plans of expanding the institution into Mexico, Cuba, and parts of South America.

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Cuba and Northern Mexico, definitely, South America....not so sure about that. Certainly the fact that there was a French Army in Mexico at the time and chaos in central Mexico would have made those plans easy...there are old maps showing the plan to move into Mexico and push as far west as Guayamas on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. Cuba had been a basket case since Mexico had gotten it's independence and Bolivar had wrested the Spanish Main from Spain.