to all those who mix in Lee with Jefferson and Washington.

[NNadir]

25. His mentor and commander was a Virginian as well and didn't become a traitor.

Last edited Sun Aug 20, 2017, 11:30 AM - Edit history (1)

Winfield Scott took the Commander In Chief role. He was a Virginian, like Lee and like the great Union General George Thomas.

Only the slave holders thought that being a traitor "was expected" of Thomas and Scott. Thomas and Scott, by contrast, saw that the preservation of the Union and the United States was expected and required by their oaths on assuming their commands.

Lee was unabashedly racist, as is post war testimony before Congress demonstrated, when he claimed "Negros lack the necessities" to be full citizens. He regarded his duty under the Washington/Custis will to free his slaves as extremely unpleasant.

Lee is over rated, both as a human being, and as a general.

Montgomery Meigs, born in Georgia, who served as the Quartermaster General with great distinction for the Union Army gave Lee his just deserts, and expressing his unremitting contempt for Lee, by converting Lee's estate into a cemetery for the people Lee killed.

Lee was a butcher who decimated his army with aggressive tactics which were blundering wastes of humanity. In fact, the only one of his subordinate commanders to survive the war was Longstreet, and even he had been badly wounded.

Alan Nolan's wonderful book "Lee Considered" takes down this marble edifice that has been white washed and excused by history.

About the only decent thing that Robert E. Lee did during the war was to surrender to his moral, ethical and military superior, Ulysses S. Grant. He fought for an extra year, killing tens of thousands of people fighting a cause which he knew would fail.

I note he did a lot, with his whiny self excusing letter to his troops after the surrender, to create the "Lost Cause" mythology on which right wing racists have been hanging the hats they take off their empty skulls right up to the present day.

Practically every civilized being on the planet understood by the 1860's that slavery was an awful and terrible wrong.

Lee didn't. He was a disgrace to his country and the honor attached to him by racist historians like Douglas Freeman and Shelby Foote is not justified in any way.