Robert E. Lee: Attitude Toward Slavery and Abolition

ROBERT E. LEE: ATTITUDE TOWARD SLAVERY AND ABOLITION

History has been exceedingly kind to the memory of Robert E. Lee and, more or less, accepted this concept of him as the model of Southern gentility and valor. In fact, the world view of Robert E. Lee is predominately concerned with his greatness as a military general and strategist; his mastery of his soldiers and the battlefields they died upon has never been in dispute. Historians (and Southerners and Southern Historians) have participated in propagating a myopic view of the character of this complex man, and framed him much more benignly than he deserves. There have also been attempts to slant history further in Lee's favor by investing him with abolitionist sympathies, but that is inaccurate as well. Make no mistake, Robert E. Lee's defense of and participation in the indefensible institution of slavery will forever mitigate the reverence with which he should be remembered.

The incarnation of 'Robert E. Lee the Soldier's Soldier' has allowed him entry into the pantheon of men accepted to have possessed the greatest military aptitude in World history, not just American history. It is accepted that heroic men are not necessarily what we, in modernity, define as 'good' men. Our memory of Napoleon, Julius Caesar, or Alexander the Great isn't diminished by evidence of the butchery they left in their wake--we know their flaws, accept them, and concentrate on accomplishment. Robert E. Lee is a different sort of hero and the attempts (even at the beginning of the Civil War) to gloss over, burnish, and revision his true and known positions on the Southern abomination of slavery defy logic. He was in every way a true son of the South and he revered the Virginia planter society of which he was a member and very invested. "Lee had spent much of his adult life away from his home . . . but he was absolutely attached to the idea of Virginia. It was, to his mind, a divinely-ordered society. In Virginia--as in all the South--well-born, well-bred white Christian gentry had the freedom to rule as they saw fit" (American Experience PBS)(italics mine).

Robert E. Lee's decision to resign his commission in the United States Army was certainly not an easy one, but for a commissioned officer to choose loyalty to his home state above loyalty to the Nation he had sworn an oath to serve and protect is difficult to understand. His decision to defend the Southern status quo is a clear marker of his acceptance of slavery as part and parcel of Southern planter life. That his name is not permanently associated with abdicators of note is a further historical misjudgment--Robert E. Lee was indeed a traitor and this was recognized by some: "I think [Robert E.] Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man, had a good character, and acted conscientiously. It's always the good men who do the most harm" (Adams).

Though many, especially Southerners, offer excuses and obfuscations that secession was not primarily an issue of maintaining slavery the facts lead us elsewhere. States' rights were never intended by the Forefathers to supersede the rights of the Republic, and to defend the Civil War with that argument was disingenuous of Lee. He was not only a 'slavery apologist' on behalf of the largest slaveholding state, his beloved Virginia, he was also a slave owner. Though he referred to slaves with such euphemisms as 'servants' or 'those people', the General could be a harsh master. Used to soldiers unquestionably following his orders, Lee found his Negro population difficult to manage and was punitive when defied. "Lee very much felt that the slaves who ran away had violated what he probably felt was a contract, a contract of duty and honor to him as their slave owner. So as a consequence he was entitled to punish them because they had violated their duty to him" (Jordan). Lee was proactive supporter of the Fugitive Slave Laws and demonstrated little tolerance with runaway slaves that were returned to his possession. "Lee paid to have runaways captured and whipped. He said that pain was necessary for their instruction as a race and an eyewitness recalled him urging a county constable who was lashing a female slave to 'lay it on well.' One slave at Arlington called Lee 'the worst man I ever see'" (American Experience PBS). Despite his apparent preference to be portrayed as being above the debate on slavery, biographer E. Pryor,