I find Lee a terribly fascinating figure in American history. I think he had many admirable qualities. I think he was one of the best Napoleonic-style generals in history, but by the end of the war was horribly outdated and should have listened to Longstreet. (Though I'm glad he didn't, because that made the Confederacy lose.) And I find the near-universal desire to whitewash Lee on slavery troubling. He was a complicated man with good and bad qualities, and it does him a disservice to make him into something he wasn't. Not to mention the disservice it does the human beings he "owned".

Basically, imagine if Longstrret hadn't been wounded, but Lee had on Traveller.

Very different outcome.

Even by Gettysburg I think Lee was out of date; Longstreet was right there. Though even A. P. Hill agreed with him who (unlike Lee) had to actually look at those rocks.

reluctance of those who pretended Lee was capable of the strategy necessary. He was not.

He showed his incompetence at West Point. The South should have listened.

As for A.P. Hill.....well.....we killed another JEB Stuart that day, did not the Union?

Parallel, in doing his duty over and above his conscience in fighting for the North against slavery.

Opposite, in that he thought slavery just fine and opposed emancipation.

Lee, contra that particular letter, emancipated many of his slaves and also left orders that those he retained be freed after his death. In many ways, people who spout off over the need for "empathy" and "walking in another's shoes" really can't figure out how to do it when it clashes with their own values and virtues.

Then they condemn the (R) for not being able to do what they themselves can't do or can't bring themselves to do.

Grant for sure wasn't an ardent abolitionist, but neither did he think "slavery just fine" or was some anti-emancipation crusader that put duty to the US government above his personal views. Honestly, my impression of Grant was that he didn't really have any deeply-held views on these matters and was "evolving" as his life went on or as practicality demanded. Perhaps you could make the same argument about Lee, but it's clear that practicality demanded Lee embrace slavery fully until it no longer mattered (much like many of the other members of the enlightened Virginia quasi-aristocracy).

I suppose one interesting parallel is that Grant and Lee both married into wealthier, slave-owning families. But unlike Lee, Grant was from a Northern family with abolitionist sentiments. His decision to marry his wife, Julia Dent, caused a bit of a rift between him and his parents (though this relationship was always a tad strained if I recall, as he was something of the "problem-child&quot . Grant obviously put his personal desires above all other concerns in moving in with his in-laws at their plantation, but it's clear from his time at White Haven he was never at ease with the institution of slavery. For one, he insisted on doing a lot of the manual labor himself. There's some pretty amusing quote from one of the former White Haven slaves recalling Grant working on a log-cabin house for him and Julia, something to the effect of, "I ain't never seen a white man work so hard in his life." He only personally ever owned one slave, whom he manumitted after leaving White Haven. I think worth noting that this phase of Grant's life was plagued with financial uncertainty and the constant threat of poverty, so for him to have simply freed his personal slave as opposed to sell him indicates that perhaps their was some empathy and feeling beyond the mere necessity of the situation. Of course, Julia kept her personal slaves after they left, so it's pretty clear that the ranking of priorities was something like: "keeping the spouse happy" > "not engaging in practices one finds unpalatable" > "staying out of poverty". Perfect? No. Perfectly human? Yes.

many white European types who had anything much better than a patriarchal attitude toward Africans. The was a lot "science" out there "proving" that blacks just weren't our equals. (Orientals, native Americans and others didn't fare much better back then, either.)

After all, the entire slave trade took off after Pope Martin in the 1400s said it was a sin to enslave Christians, but everyone else was fair game. The Arabs jumped in controlling the African slave trade, Europeans sailed the world to get around the Arabs, and the race was on... By the time later Popes in the 18th and 19th centuries condemned all slavery, not that many people were listening to them any more.

But, I digress. Very few of us can imagine what it was like to live in the 1800's where pain, blood and cruelty were common, if not universal. If it was OK to beat your dog, why not beat your houseboy? We have learned a lot in the past hundred years or so, and that should be to our credit, but to look at those days with our eyes shouldn't be automatic condemnation of the individuals involved.

To get back to Lee, he was a general whose business was the art of warfare-- an art much more personal and brutal than it is today. Hand-to-hand and bayonet fighting were common, field medicine was close to torture, and there was often a gallery off to the side where the locals could set themselves up to get the best view of the action. And weapons technology was increasing far faster than soldier protection was. The normal blood, pain and cruelty was magnified to an incredible degree.

One reason we have gods is that it is so difficult for us humans to judge a man such as Lee.

enslavement of fellow humans.

He is despicable.

Just that exra little "screw you" to MLK.

the workday before MLK day...

n 2000, Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore proposed splitting Lee–Jackson–King Day into two separate holidays after debate arose over whether the nature of the holiday which simultaneously celebrated the lives of Confederate generals and a civil rights icon was incongruous. The measure was approved and the two holidays are now celebrated separately as Lee–Jackson Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee–Jackson–King_Day