Thanks.

. . . an opinion based on up-close and personal first-hand knowledge? --->



William Mack Lee - Body Servant of General Robert E. Lee. He stayed with General Lee throughout the war and until the day Lee died in 1870. Mack said of General Lee after his death "I was raised by one of the greatest men in the world. There was never one born of a woman greater than General Robert E. Lee, according to my judgment. All of his servants were set free ten years before the war, but all remained on the plantation until after the surrender."
General Lee left Mack $360 in his will, which Mack used to go to school and started 14 churches. He became an ordained Missionary Baptist minister in Washington, DC.

per the terms of the will of the original owner. They were not freed ten years before the war, which began in 1861. They were not freed during the war.
I'll bet WEB DuBois knew this and it wouldn't have affected his opinion of Robert E Lee. In reality, Lee was a slave owning traitor.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwif8uvovOjVAhWI1IMKHWuMCTMQFggmMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2017%2F08%2F18%2Fus%2Frobert-e-lee-slaves.html%3Fmcubz%3D3&usg=AFQjCNG4vY2rJ2Ikfk4azlTpEgnHOosuLw

. . . and specifically Confederate monuments . . . before Mr. DuBois was even born. Would you care to bet WEB would have mentioned that little tidbit if he knew about it . . . or this? --->

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/robert-e-lee-opposed-confederate-monuments/

like Lee would not want monuments memorializing his defeat.

Last edited Wed Aug 23, 2017, 05:09 AM - Edit history (2)

Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and (from 1865) the general-in-chief of Confederate forces, neither owned slaves nor inherited any, thus it is not correct to assert that he “freed his slaves” (in 1862 or at any other time).

As in the case of Ulysses S. Grant, the slaves that Lee supposedly owned actually belonged to his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, and lived and worked on the three estates owned by Custis (Arlington, White House, and Romancoke). Upon Custis’ death in 1857, Lee did not “inherit” those slaves; rather, he carried out the directions expressed in Custis’ will regarding those slaves (and other property) according to his position as executor of Custis’ estate.

Custis’ will stipulated that all of his slaves were to be freed within five years: “… upon the legacies to my four granddaughters being paid, then I give freedom to my slaves, the said slaves to be emancipated by my executor in such manner as he deems expedient and proper, the said emancipation to be accomplished in not exceeding five years from the time of my decease.” So while Lee did technically free those slaves at the end of 1862, it was not his choice to do so; he was required to emancipate them by the conditions of his father-in-law’s will.

http://www.snopes.com/2015/06/30/confederate-history-slave-ownership/


Edited to add:
Oh, my!
Is it possible Snopes is wrong? I mean: Take a gander at this --->

"Lee first came to slave ownership in 1829 when, newly out of West Point, he inherited several slaves from his mother's estate. Lee quickly discovered, Pryor writes, that for him slaveholding represented "an uncomfortable stewardship." He found supervision of the their work to be distracting from his own career, and disliked the daily details of managing and providing for them. He found slaves to be, in Pryor's words, "more trouble than they were worth." To relieve himself of the day-to-day responsibility for them, and to provide additional cash for his household, Lee soon took to hiring out his bondsmen and -women. This practice, common among slaveholders in Lee's circle, makes it difficult to track his ownership of slaves in detail over the next three decades. Freeman believed that Lee had divested himself of slaves by 1847, based on Freeman's failure to find any relevant tax records, and Lee's own son, Robert Jr., claimed that his father had manumitted all his slaves "a long time before the war." Pryor counters that Lee definitely owned slaves as late as 1852, considered buying more shortly before the war began, and throughout the war itself used slaves as personal servants. Whether Lee directly and personally owned slaves at a given point before or during the war, Pryor would argue, is almost immaterial, for presence of slaves and the benefit of their labor was an intimate and familiar part of Lee's daily life until the end of the Civil War."

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/arlington-bobby-lee-and-the-peculiar-institution/61428/

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/

This Atlantic article that uses historians and sourced material outlines that

1) Lee believed in and was physically brutal to his slaves
2) Sold most of his slaves before he released the others (possibly they were too old for the market) and went against convention by splitting up slave families to get a better price.
3) That he lost a court case that forced him to release the slaves
4) During the war his army took non slave black Union soldiers and enslaved them
5) In other battles massacred black union soldiers who tried to surrender
6) After the war Lee argued against black enfrachisement and counselled fellow southerners to only hire whites
7) As President of Washington College he did not punish white students who abused blacks

Grant said that Lee was "setting an example of forced acquiesence so grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized"

It is possible that the quotes you refer to were fabricated or enhanced as a part of a conscious campaign that existed to create a myth of the kindly Lee, or that Mack had a Stockholm complex.

In any case we know what Lee thought of Mack because he testified in Congress that

“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.”



So Lee would have rejected Mack's testimony in his own defense because of their inferiority.

. . . copyrighted by Rev. Wm. Mack Lee in 1918. Please let me know if you find something/anything therein to provide a basis for your speculating that there was possibly a "...conscious campaign that existed to create a myth of the kindly Lee, or that Mack had a Stockholm complex."

http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/leewilliam/lee.html

On my phone so can't re do the links but the article had a link on point and that article had half a dozen scholarly articles about the effort after the war to white wash confederate reputation.

If the words represent his true feelings then evidence of a Stockholm condition would be that Mack was still saying nice things about Lee after Lee had told Congress that people like Mack should not get civil rights.

Mack says he also cooked for Lingstreet. Unlike Lee Longstreet made efforts to amend his conduct after the war.

Sidetracked by some "friendly" prodding and poking, such as:
"You do know, don't you, that the Democrats are responsible for the Jim Crow laws?"
"Oh, surely you're aware it was the Democratic south against the Republican north?"
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera . . . . . . as if those questions would lead to meaningful answers relative to what's happening today and, somehow, provide a peaceful solution.




Note: It's 2:20 PM . . . the sky is beginning to darken . . . time to shut down this contraption . . .

run by racist traitors and their followers. That 'Lee freeing his slaves' story rates right up there with Trump's story about Gen. Pershing and pig's blood on bullets. It is bad fiction.

Last edited Wed Aug 23, 2017, 05:01 AM - Edit history (3)

"It is bad fiction."? That's your opinion. I, however, shall (God wiliing 'n' th' crick don't rise!) eventually finish reading the history of the author's own life as the "History..." of his own experience.

"It is bad fiction."?

http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/leewilliam/lee.html



Edited to add:

1)Please see my Reply #24 to your Reply #5.
2) In Reply title (above): "freed slave" changed to "body servant."
3) I'm taking Rev. Wm. Mack Lee's word that he was freed ten years before the war.

RE Lee took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. He resigned his commission and rescinded that oath in order to take up arms against that Constitution. He was offered command of the entire Federal army, but declined.

Lee is responsible for more American deaths than the Taliban/al Queda/ISIS combined.

I've shared the essay on my Facebook page for my many fellow southerners who still feel ambivalent on the "monuments" issue.

That was a class we were required to take our senior year in High School back in '72. It was mostly brainwashing, rah, rah 'Murica but it did describe the Soviet and Chinese Government's organization and the basic principles of Marx, Lenin, etc.

Anyway, it was stated in this class that DuBois was a "card carrying Communist" even though he only joined the party right before he died. He thought that the principles of Communism would provide the best shot at promoting racial justice from what I read later.

Speaking of principles, any chance to demonize a minority back then was seldom wasted by the authorities at my high school. The official fight song of the football team was "Dixie" and we had no black students until the later part of my senior year and then only by court order. Those kids had to get up at O dark thirty to be bused in and were not happy about that one bit.

Can't say as I blame them.

That inscription should be added to all the Confederate statues. Then leave them up forever.

Use them to tell the despicable truth.