General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"A great General, whether you like it or not. A great General."
@Reuters
ICYMI: Trump defends Robert E. Lee as a 'great general' while justifying Charlottesville comments
Link to tweet
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)He is a disgusting POS.
Ohiogal
(32,057 posts)STFU, Donnie.
Me.
(35,454 posts)The legend of the Confederate leaders heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.
(Writing By Lee)
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. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy."
The argument here is that slavery is bad for white people, good for black people, and most importantly, it is better than abolitionism; emancipation must wait for divine intervention. That black people might not want to be slaves does not enter into the equation; their opinion on the subject of their own bondage is not even an afterthought to Lee.
Lees cruelty as a slavemaster was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryors portrait of Lee through his writings, Pryor writes that Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families, by hiring them off to other plantations, and that by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days. The separation of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lees slaves regarded him as the worst man I ever see.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/
"Lees heavy hand on the Arlington plantation, Pryor writes, nearly led to a slave revolt, in part because the enslaved had been expected to be freed upon their previous masters death, and Lee had engaged in a dubious legal interpretation of his will in order to keep them as his property, one that lasted until a Virginia court forced him to free them.
When two of his slaves escaped and were recaptured, Lee either beat them himself or ordered the overseer to "lay it on well." Wesley Norris, one of the slaves who was whipped, recalled that not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.
This is the history I was never taught in school very important. Thanks.
I grew up in Texas. The now-recognized myth of the kindly, slavery-hating Virginia patriot was all I knew until I began reading independently about the Civil War when i was a teenager.
CrispyQ
(36,509 posts)Pieces of shit, both of them. And their supporters, too.
Thanks for posting that.
RHMerriman
(1,376 posts)So was Võ Nguyên Giáp...
Does Donnie the Draft Dodger think the memory of Gen. Giap should be commemorated in the United States?
Fullduplexxx
(7,870 posts)msongs
(67,441 posts)Yeehah
(4,591 posts)His friend Jefferson Davis saved his career. Lee turned out to be a capable general for an army that fought against the United States. He was a traitor and should be reviled by anyone who loves the USA. It's unfortunate the traitorous South has remained the bane of this nation.
Arkansas Granny
(31,528 posts)Maybe he didn't get "captured", but he surrendered himself and his entire army.