Sihr I do appreciate your point and as always you are well thought out and written. But to say Lee was some man of virtue is just plain revisionist history. Don’t get me wrong I am sure without out slavery or war he was a fine Honorable man. But we must remember he chose to be on the wrong side of history.
He did think the slaves we destined to be free. But only the hand of God would free them. His thinking, not mine.
Interesting thing this phrase "revisionist history" has become. If we read what was said by Lee, before 1865, and the fact that Lee was willing to put his money where his mouth was to free slaves we may find ourselves at odds with this quagmire of revisionism. Whether searching the archives of the fantastically leftist Harper's Magazine or the annals of our Library of Congress we find mountains of evidence that Lee was against slavery, and acted on that belief. What is startling about revisionist politics is that it necessarily must reject the historical record in favor of the incantations of deconstructionists.
Revisionism no longer has anything to do with a modification of something that came before the now, but it is a catch phrase of a political movement.
Revisionist history is a phrase used to neatly bookend a political doctrine too thoughtless to require more than two words to frame itself up. It seeks, with blind rage, to strip anything it doesn't like down to a single thread that is digestible to the viewers of CNN and Common Core classrooms. It paints everything in the universe in one of two colors, good or bad, because the palette presented by the smallest Crayola box (8 colors, I think) is too overwhelming to think about.
And for the gratuitous quotes, because I fear someone won't bother to consult the Library of Congress, and perhaps instead defer to the political machine that is The Atlantic or the mouth breathing scribblings of NYT babblers...
Unfortunately qualified though this letter to his wife is...
... In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. - Robert E. Lee, to Mary Anna Lee, December 27, 1856
He financially supported his wife's efforts to free slaves and personally finance their move to Liberia (
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african/afam004.html)
Before the Civil War, Robert E. Lee freed most of his slaves and offered to pay expenses for those who wanted to go to Liberia. In November 1853, Lee's former slaves William and Rosabella Burke and their four children sailed on the Banshee, which left Baltimore with 261 emigrants. A person of superior intelligence and drive, Burke studied Latin and Greek at a newly established seminary in Monrovia and became a Presbyterian minister in 1857. He helped educate his own children and other members of his community and took several native children into his home. The Burkes's letters describing their lives in Liberia show that they relied on the Lees to convey messages to and from relatives still in Virginia, and the letters also reflect affection for their former masters. As for it being up to God to free the slaves or not, well Lincoln left that up to His providence. These are Lincoln's words, not the revisionists. "The Almighty has His own purposes," Lincoln said. Then, kicking things off with a riff from Matthew 18:7:
"Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope - fervently do we pray - that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether." - Abraham Lincoln, 2nd Inaugural Address