The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Classic-Xer]

(07-07-2020, 12:16 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(07-06-2020, 11:12 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-06-2020, 10:54 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: Robert E. Lee actually tried to reunify the country once the issue was decided.  There are many wo feel that the US will not survive this crisis as a 50 state nation at least. Makes you wonder if the southern states might try to reform the Confederacy. If so, would they be enlightened enough as to not attempt to re-form Jim Crow laws let alone slavery.  I would bet that they would be.  I can see the possibility of Alaska joining Canada and Hawaii becoming its own nation.  Many now question whether the idea of 50 states under one central government is any longer feasible.

This is worth remembering. General Robert E. Lee was an excellent general. Once he surrendered at Appomattox he made clear that the Confederate cause and slavery were dead beyond any recovery. He lived only five years after the Confederate defeat, and one can only imagine o- 

He did not like losing, of course, but note well that he opposed the "Lost Cause" violence against blacks. He advocated reconciliation and not resistance. The Klan cruelty was out of his sympathy. So give up slavery and go for a full recovery, whatever that took.

Lee is himself a tragic figure in American history... and far more complex than his image. One can obviously not confuse him with the proto-fascist Nathan Bedford Forrest.

I've read recently that he believed in white supremacy, and that was one reason he fought. He wasn't as great and gracious as is portrayed. I think it's right to take down his statues.

From The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...ee/529038/

White supremacy does not “violate” Lee’s “most fundamental convictions.” White supremacy was one of Lee’s most fundamental convictions.

Lee was a slave owner—his own views on slavery were explicated in an 1856 letter that is often misquoted to give the impression that Lee was some kind of abolitionist. In the letter, he describes slavery as “a moral & political evil,” but goes on to explain that:

"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 important, 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.

Lee’s cruelty as a slave master was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s 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 Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”...

Lee’s heavy hand on the Arlington, Virginia, plantation, Pryor writes, nearly led to a slave revolt, in part because the enslaved had been expected to be freed upon their previous master’s 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.”...

During his invasion of Pennsylvania, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia enslaved free black Americans and brought them back to the South as property. Pryor writes that “evidence links virtually every infantry and cavalry unit in Lee’s army” to the abduction of free black Americans, “with the activity under the supervision of senior officers.”

Soldiers under Lee’s command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender. Then, in a spectacle hatched by Lee’s senior corps commander, A. P. Hill, the Confederates paraded the Union survivors through the streets of Petersburg to the slurs and jeers of the southern crowd. Lee never discouraged such behavior. As the historian Richard Slotkin wrote in No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, “his silence was permissive.”...

Ahh... You completely missed the point as usual.