re: Myth of Robert E. Lee: Legend of Robert E. Lee's heroism and decency is based on fiction

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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.



Lee wasn't entirely wrong.

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I'd need to see a source for that. It sounds very much like Abraham Lincoln's known sentiments about blacks.

You blaspheme, heretic.

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Lee told Congress that blacks lacked the intellectual capacity of whites

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So he held the same views as Lincoln and most people of his age?

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There is no proof of that story.

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It comes from at least two different sources. One close to the event and another reflecting on the event in 1905.

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Lee told Congress that blacks lacked the intellectual capacity of whites

So he held the same views as Lincoln and most people of his age?

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Lincoln supported the vote for black soldiers.



Bue bye Marse Bobbie.

"Privately, according to the correspondence collected by his own family, Lee counseled others to hire white labor instead of the freedmen, observing “that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving. In another letter, Lee wrote “You will never prosper with blacks, and it is abhorrent to a reflecting mind to be supporting and cherishing those who are plotting and working for your injury, and all of whose sympathies and associations are antagonistic to yours. I wish them no evil in the world—on the contrary, will do them every good in my power, and know that they are misled by those to whom they have given their confidence; but our material, social, and political interests are naturally with the whites.”

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.”


LINK

"Lee is a pivotal figure in American history worthy of study. Neither the man who really existed, nor the fictionalized tragic hero of the Lost Cause, are heroes worthy of a statue in a place of honor. As one Union veteran angrily put it in 1903 when Pennsylvania was considering placing a statute to Lee at Gettysburg, “If you want historical accuracy as your excuse, then place upon this field a statue of Lee holding in his hand the banner under which he fought, bearing the legend: ‘We wage this war against a government conceived in liberty and dedicated to humanity.’”

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."

LINK

That article blows up the myth of Lee, and rightly so.

You guys fall for this liberal troll's shtick every time.

Note that he posts some liberal talking point or article without comment and never posts again.


Don't fall for it.

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granting them suffrage would “excite unfriendly feelings between the two races.”

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I think the article is BS, but if you look at today's world, there is no way you cannot accept this little nugget as factual, regardless of who said it and why.

Thomas Jefferson didnt frick his slave. she denied it, her kids denied it, it wasnt until later when the family wanted fame that they made the claim.