Trude Lamb is the fastest female runner at Robert E. Lee High School in Tyler, TX. She is quite right to refuse to run with her high school name on her Jersey as long as it has
Lee on it.
In a letter explaining the reasons for her decision, she pointed to the
school's alma mater, which begins,
“Robert E. Lee we raise our voice in praise of your name. May honor and glory e'er guide you to fame,” and
asks “What has he done for him to be praised like that?” The answer is nothing.
Robert E. Lee was a racist, a traitor, a cruel slave owner, and almost certainly a rapist to boot!
Robert E. Lee was a cruel slave owner
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| George Washington Parke Custis |
It ran in the family. Robert E. Lee's father, known as
“Light Horse Harry,” wasn't just a slave owner, he was a crooked slave trader to boot. He would sell slaves, and help them escape so that he could sell them again. Lee's father once ordered a 15-year old girl hung because she knocked down the man whipping her while trying to run away. Eventually, he was tortured and left for dead by men he had cheated. He died a pauper in 1818 at 62.
Robert E. Lee
personally owned slaves that he inherited when his mother,
Ann Carter Lee, died in 1829. The Alexandria County Property Tax Book for 1847
list four slaves over sixteen years of age belonging to
“Col. Lee.” His son,
Robert E. Lee Jr. said they were three or four families. It is believed that he was referring to some of those slaves in a 24 Feb 1835
letter to
Charles Carter Lee when he wrote:
Mrs Nancy Ruffin & her three illegitimate pledges, sent to N. Kent when I broke up at Qrt O: P. are all of the race in my poss[ession]...
When his father-in-law,
George Washington Parke Custis (
grandson of Martha Washington and step-grandson and adopted son of George Washington) died in 1857, Lee took control of hundreds more slaves working on the plantations at Arlington, White House, and Romancoke.
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| The Arlington Slaves |
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| The Romancoke Slaves |
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| The White House Slaves |
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| The White House Slaves |
Lee had a slave whipping post installed as soon as he arrived in Arlington to remind the slaves of what would happen if they tried to escape. They tried anyway. Lee used bounty hunters to catch his
“runaways,” and those bounty hunters used slave catching dogs. Trump's threat to set
“viscous dogs” on the peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park goes all the way back to this legacy. The captured slaves were lashed to his whipping post, and they cried, begged, and pleaded to no avail. As blood flowed from their backs, Lee would yell
“Hit her harder - hit her harder” and
“Lay it on, lay it on”. Whipping was Lee's favorite form of torture, but he had others.
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| Arlington House |
Lee took part in the torture -- he ordered it, he decided how many lashes of the whip, and as you will see, screamed at slaves as they were tortured. He taunted the slaves, even child slaves, before they were tortured, according to witnesses.
Lee's
famous letter to his wife, where he describes slavery as
“a moral & political evil,” is often used to say he was opposed to slavery, but only the beginning of the letter is quote, not the part were he talks about the pain slaves
“must endure,” or when he called slavery a
“spiritual liberty,” and those against slavery
“are on an evil course.” In another letter Lee wrote that those against slavery were against the American Church.
Lee paid bounty hunters to go North to capture
“his” runaways. In one notice, dated 24 April 1858, he lists
“One, black, about 35 years old, named Caroline Bingham with a child about 6 mos: old...The other, mulatto, about 23 years old, named Catharine Burke, with a nearly white child about 2'/ 2 years old..” and says
“I have offered $ 10 for the apprehension of each of these women, upon their delivery in the Jail at Alexa & the expenses of transporting them there.”
From these bounty hunter instructions, we can see that Lee had
“nearly white” slaves as well as black slaves. In fact, after the Africans were emancipated, he backed a plan to
“dispose” of the Africans and replace them with Irish serfs.
Lee believed that all African people should be slaves. Later, as a general leading Confederate troops, every foray he made into the North would involve kidnapping free blacks and taking them South to be sold into slavery. Historian
Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who wrote
Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters (New York: Penguin Books, 2007),
[RTM p.xx cites this] described such an atrocity:
Worse was the sight of Confederates kidnapping blacks who lived in the vicinity. It appears that several hundred African-Americans were dragged from their homes, and some sold again into slavery. According to witnesses, small children were roped to the front of rebel wagons and “driven just like we would drive cattle,” sometimes guarded by the company chaplain. This was not a set of random acts, but a willful policy of abduction.
...
Evidence links virtually every infantry and cavalry unit in Lee’s army with the activity, under the supervision of senior officers. “I do not think our Generals intend[ed] to invade except to get some of our Negros back which the Yankees have stolen and to let them know something about the war,” noted one of Jubal Early’s sergeants.
...
General Robert E. Rodes was said to have personally threatened to burn down a town after its citizens tried to rescue one convoy of captured African-Americans. Since the activity was so widespread, Lee must have known of the abductions and condoned them,...[RTM p.350]
Lee is said to have broken up every slave family he ever had under his control. He broke up families that had been together for generations under Custis. He liked to optimize the value of his slaves by sending some away from their families to work in the harsher conditions of lower Virginia. He would so
“hire out” the most rebellious slaves. No doubt, it was a constant threat he held over them all.
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| Rare Photo of some of Custis' slaves |
The slaves owned by Custis claimed that just before he died, he promised them their freedom, and many people, both black and white, said that Custis had long stated his desire to have his slaves freed upon his death. Most probably, he wanted to follow the
example of
George Washington, his step-father, who willed his slaves should pass to his wife, Martha, and then emancipated upon her death so that families would not be broken up, it was said.
Lee disputed the slaves version, and they couldn't testify against him in court, but what was beyond dispute was that
Custis' will stated that
“the said emancipation to be accomplished in not exceeding five years from the time of my decease.” As executor of his father-in-law's will Lee could have released them immediately. The will stipulated that he was to sell off some of the land to pay the costs of settling the estate. Lee preferred to make the slaves pay. Not only did he keep them as slaves, and work them hard, for the full five years, he went to court twice, once in 1858, and again in 1862, in attempts to keep them in bondage beyond that five year limit. He even asked the court for permission to send them further South beyond Virginia, so it would be more difficult to run away. He appealed all the way up to the Virginia Supreme Court, and lost. He finally did free Custis' slaves, under court order, on 2 Jan 1863,
one day after
President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.
We know a bit about the fate of some of the slaves that Lee controlled after his father-in-law's death, because of newspaper and court records. For example, an article in the
Boston Traveller, 24 Dec. 1857, and
reprinted in the New York Times six days later under the title
“The Slaves of Mr. Custis,” stated, in part:
“The emancipation of the slaves left by the late Geo. W. P. Custis of Arlington, will, it is feared, be much retarded, if not wholly prevented by the heirs,...”
“All attempts to see the will of Mr. Custis have proved abortive. After much inguiry, it has been admitted by the heir that the slaves are to be set free in five years. The poor darkies tell a different story. They of the Arlington House, say that they were called into the room, and stood at the deathbed of their master, and that after having taken leave of each of them personally, he told them that he had left them, and all his servants, their freedom. At Arlington there were about one hundred negroes. Mr. Custis owned two plantations about sixty miles below Richmond, on which were about 250 more slaves. According to the statement of those who were about him at the time of his death, he died in full possession of his senses. Besides, it is well known that the old gentleman always said that he intended to free his slaves at his death.”
The following week, the NY Times published the
“Response of R. E. Lee, Executor 4 Jan, 1858”, that said, in part:
“There is no desire on the part of the heirs to prevent the execution of its provision in reference to the slaves, nor is there any truth or the least foundation for the assertion that they are being sold South.”
We know from subsequent court filings that Lee specifically tried
“to prevent the execution of its provision in reference to the slaves,” and we have at least one account of slaves being
“sold South” to the even
harsher conditions of slavery there. Apparently, Lee's fabled sense of
“honor” didn't extend to the slaves left in his custody, or even his obligations as executor of his father-in-law's will.
As Pryor says in her C-SPAN interview (
beginning about the 56:30 mark), Lee fundamentally believed the master-slave relationship was:
The only relationship that could exist between the races; he had no grander vision, no ability to see beyond that. Master and slave was the only relationship and, unlike Mrs. Custis, he saw it very much as an economic relationship, that those slaves were there to work, and I think one of the reasons they thought he was mean is because he was very tough on them. He saw that he owned their labor. And I think it was a contrast to the situation they'd had a few years earlier.
Lee also supported a plan to send freed slaves to Liberia, a West African state created as a destination for freed slaves. This was the plan of the American Colonization Society, founded in 1816 by such well known US leaders as President James Madison, John Marshall, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster. Like many other slavers, Lee saw the existence of free Africans in the US as a threat to slavery, and wanted them all expelled. Although he never officially joined the society, he donated funds to it into the 1850s. As it turned out, few African-Americans wanted to immigrate to Liberia, and only about 19,000 were sent before the society withered and died.
On 2 June 1859, the
Carroll County Democrat reported that four fugitive slaves owned by then Colonel Robert E. Lee, of Arlington, Virginia
“had been arrested in Westminster, Maryland,” and returned to him. Notice, then as now, those charged with the coercive social control of African-Americans, used the same word
“arrest,” often leading to enslavement, although now only
“as a punishment for crime,” as a core method of that control. Those arrested this time included
Wesley Norris, his sister
Mary Norris, and their cousin,
George Parks.
Joe Ryan, in
a posting on
AmericanCivilWar.com gives us more details of what led up to this:
The slaves obtained support for this claim [That Custis had freed them] from white persons who came from across the Potomac and went among them in the fall of 1857, telling them that Custis's will had made them free immediately.
The issue became a matter of litigation in the probate court of Alexandria County after several of the male members of the Bingham slave family, Reuben, Henry, Edward and Austin, refused to accept assignments to work at jobs off the premises of Arlington.
Reuben, the leader of the rebellion, told General Lee, who was acting then as executor and manager of Arlington Plantation, that he and his brothers were as free as he. A melee ensued between them when General Lee organized a posse to forcibly remove Reuben and his brothers to the Arlington county jail.
After a short struggle, the rebelling slaves were subdued and taken to the jail where they were held until taken south to Richmond under guard. Wesley and Mary Norris, siblings in the Norris slave family, fled across the Potomac into Maryland at this time, but were caught before they reached the Pennsylvania line and returned to Virginia: whereupon they too were sent down to Richmond.
Notice how these
“police” functions where organized by the slave owner directly.
After the Civil War, on 14 April 1866, one of the now freed slaves, Wesley Norris, told his story to the
National Anti-Slavery Standard. I think it's worth citing
Norris' testimony in full, as it provides a bondsmen's view of the man celebrated by so many monuments in the South:
My name is Wesley Norris; I was born a slave on the plantation of George Parke Custis; after the death of Mr. Custis, Gen. Lee, who had been made executor of the estate, assumed control of the slaves, in number about seventy. It was the general impression among the slaves of Mr. Custis that on his death they should be forever free; in fact this statement had been made to them by Mr. C. years before.
At his death we were informed by Gen. Lee that by the conditions of the will we must remain slaves for five years. I remained with Gen. Lee for about seventeen months, when my sister Mary, a cousin of ours, and I determined to run away, which we did in the year 1859. We had already reached Westminster, in Maryland, on our way to the North, when we were apprehended and thrown into prison, and Gen. Lee notified of our arrest. We remained in prison fifteen days, when we were sent back to Arlington. We were immediately taken before Gen. Lee, who demanded the reason why we ran away. We frankly told him that we considered ourselves free. He then told us he would teach us a lesson we never would forget. He then ordered us to the barn, where, in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty. We were accordingly stripped to the skin by the overseer, who, however, had sufficient humanity to decline whipping us. Accordingly Dick Williams, a county constable, was called in, who gave us the number of lashes ordered. Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to lay it on well, an injunction which he did not fail to heed. Not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.
After this my cousin and myself were sent to Hanover Court-House jail, my sister being sent to Richmond to an agent to be hired. We remained in jail about a week, when we were sent to Nelson county, where we were hired out by Gen. Lee’s agent to work on the Orange and Alexander railroad. We remained thus employed for about seven months, and were then sent to Alabama, and put to work on what is known as the Northeastern railroad. In January, 1863, we were sent to Richmond, from which place I finally made my escape through the rebel lines to freedom.
I have nothing further to say. What I have stated is true in every particular, and I can at any time bring at least a dozen witnesses, both white and black, to substantiate my statements: I am at present employed by the Government; and am at work in the National Cemetary on Arlington Heights, where I can be found by those who desire further particulars. My sister referred to is at present employed by the French Minister at Washington, and will confirm my statement.
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| The interior of a slave pen in Alexandria. |
When he hired Norris out to Alabama, and away from his sister,
this was “contrary to the guidance of the court."
Norris’ testimony was
corroborated by two anonymous letters in the
New York Tribune.
The first, signed
“A Citizen,” published on 24 June 1859, alleged that not only had the slaves been brutally flogged, but that Lee himself had administered lashings to Mary Norris.
The second, published the same day included remarks on the general decline of living conditions among Custis’ slaves following his death.
John Reeves, a historian and author of the book,
“The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee: The Forgotten Case Against an American Icon,” has said “Every one of the facts in Wesley Norris’ account has been shown to be true.” Pryor has also
said “the facts are verifiable.” Pryor even found the receipt book showing payment to the constable. She had been granted exclusive access to two trunks of Lee correspondences that had never been studied before by the Lee family. What she found has done much to overthrow the
“Lost Cause” mythology surrounding Lee, and show him in a truer light. In
this video she tells a story about Arlington before Lee took over. Old man Custis came down one morning to find a big blog of red paint on the nose of one of the principals in one of his big revolutionary war paintings. A slave had put it there in protest! It would seem that defacing monuments has a long and rich history in the struggle against white supremacy. Pryor also tells us that Lee hated blacks, and opposed majority rule. After the war Lee supported a movement to
“dispose” of all the freed African-Americans, and replace them all with Irish serfs. One reviewer of Pryor's book
said:
Pryor demonstrates more fully than has anyone else that he broke up every slave family on the plantation and that he had slave protesters severely whipped. She also discovered letters from several former slaves under Lee’s control who considered him a terrible man.
Conditions of Slavery on Lee's Plantations
Long before US soldiers came upon Nazi concentration camps, Union troops came to occupy the plantation Lee ran at White House. They gave us another stark window into the world of Lee's slaves. Historian
Glenn David Brasher tells us about that. I quote him at length:
During the war’s 1862 Peninsula Campaign, United States troops temporarily occupied White House plantation, with General George McClellan establishing his headquarters at the site because it lay astride a railroad running directly to the Confederate capital of Richmond. Thus, Northerners came in close contact there with the plantation’s enslaved community.
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| Union soldiers at Arlington, 1864. |
A remarkably clear picture emerges of the life and sentiments of the peoples enslaved by Robert E. Lee and his family, based on their experiences as immediately recorded by soldiers and newspaper reporters. Such primary sources further challenge the depiction of Lee as a paternalistic slaveholder, completely dispelling the postwar creation of the “faithful slave” element of the Lost Cause.
Along with his father, Rooney Lee was in Confederate service, and his mother and family fled as U.S. troops descended upon the plantation. When the Yankees arrived, only the slaves and their overseer remained. “There has been about a dozen of families of slaves lived here,” a Pennsylvania soldier explained in a letter home, noting that many of the younger black men had already fled from bondage. During the Civil War, masters attempted to frighten African-Americans away from helping or joining U.S. soldiers by insisting that Northerners were evil devils who captured blacks, sending them to work in the Caribbean or South American jungles. According to a Baltimore American reporter, Lee’s family made the same vain attempt. They “told [their slaves] the usual stories about what the Yankees would do with them … but all these stories had no effect.”
Lee’s slaves immediately revealed that the family’s lies had not fooled them, showing no loyalty to their fleeing masters. One soldier recorded in his diary that the overseer “told the darkies not to cook anything for the Yankies.” Nevertheless, the African-Americans “were very kind to us & [gave] us corn cake, eggs, fresh herring, & salmon.” This was the beginning of a mutually beneficial relationship.
Referring to the infamous evil character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a Philadelphia Inquirer correspondent described Lee’s overseer as having “the look of Legree,” noting he told the enslaved community “he would cut them to pieces” for aiding the Yankees. Instead of cowering, an enslaved woman reported the overseer’s bullying to the Yankees. “A corporal [then] went to him, and ... threaten[ed] to drown him” in the York River. Emboldened, Lee’s slaves “refuse any longer to recognize [the overseer’s] authority.” The New York World’s correspondent noted that if the overseer tried to punish the slaves “there will be one less slave driver.”
The enslaved community’s living conditions on the Lee plantation were disgusting. “The more I see of slavery, the more I think it should be abolished,” a soldier opined. Another described the “long rows of ‘quarters,” containing “log huts with no windows … holes in the walls, and only a mud floor.” A New York officer was more blunt: “Their quarters look like a village of pigsties.”
An Inquirer reporter described the Lee slaves as “ragged, dirty, and the smallest nearly naked.” Few had ever been off the plantation their entire life. “There were all sorts of darkies there,” one soldier noted, “stalwart field hands, old worn out men … "Topsies" carrying buckets of water on their heads, strong-limbed boys, and little toddlers running around [barely clothed].” It is no wonder the Lee slaves “were a happy set of darkies when they learned that they were free.”
General Robert E. Lee was a slave owner that treated human beings in his control horribly.
Fighting for Slavery before the Civil War
Robert E. Lee led racist military campaigns in defense of slavery before the Confederacy was even born. As a 1829 West Point graduate, promoted to the rank of Lt. Col. in the US Army, Lee returned to Texas in 1860 to lead military operations against Indians and Mexicans with the purpose of securing this new territory for slavery. This was after he led the forces that recaptured the arsenal at Harpers Ferry and arrested
John Brown.
On background...
Slaves born in Mexico were freed in 1821 with The
Plan of Iguala at the end of the
Mexican War of Independence, and the last slaves were freed in 1829. Slavery was abolished in Mexico. That was the main impetus behind the Texas Revolution in 1835, and all that Alamo hypocrisy. It wasn't a fight for liberty against an autocrat. It wasn't the Disney version at all. The
“liberty” they were fighting for was the
“freedom” to own other people, and Mexico was having none of it! Since the revolution, Mexico was offering full citizenship to free Africans, including the right to own land. This attracted a lot of
free Africans to Texas, including many who had recently freed themselves from the Southern US. There was a less well known version of the
“Freedom Road” that headed south.
Also, in 1821, they gave one
Stephen F. Austin permission to bring Anglo settlers into Texas. Big mistake! IMHO. Austin didn't just bring in Anglos, he brought in slave owning Anglos and allowed an extra 50 acres for each slave. The more slaves you brought, the more acres you could buy. Such a deal! Do you see the brewing contradiction in Texas 1821-1835? Do I have to tell you which side won out? In 1836, the new Texas Republic made slavery legal again.
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| General Winfield Scott. 1860. |
But I digress. Lee served under
Winfield Scott during the
Mexican-American War (1846-1848). In 1845, the Republic of Texas was annexed by the United States. 1855-1857, Lee was in Texas with the cavalry suppressing Apache and Comanche tribes, and protecting slave owners. That tour of duty was cut short by his father-in-law's death. He headed back to Virginia to settle the Custis estate. When he returned in 1860, divisions over slavery in the United States were already in a crisis. Confederacy president in waiting
Jefferson Davis was Secretary of War (before the double-speak of
“defense”), Lt. Col. R. E. Lee was given the task of
“restraining rancorous Indians and marauding Mexicans.” [RTM p.256] Davis
handpicked the officers for this assignment, and it has been alleged that he used it to build the general staff for the Confederacy. In any case, sixteen of the officers so posted made general in the Civil War, eleven of them for the South, including
Albert Sidney Johnston,
John Bell Hood,
Edmund Kirby Smith, and of course Lee. Those four were half the full generals ever in the Confederate army. Coincidence?
Lee
“termed the natives “hideous” and maintained that the government's job was to “humanize” them,” according to Pryor. When the
“the pursuit of these red wolves” ended in indiscriminate killing, Lee lamented:
“It is a distressing state of things that requires the applications of such treatments, but it is the only corrective they understand, & the only way in which they can be taught to keep within their own limits.”
R. E. Lee was always a strong advocate of the use of coercive force to keep people of color suppressed.
The False Cause
After the Civil War, a white supremacist alternate history was propagated. It painted the cause of the Confederate States as just and heroic, and became known as
“The Lost Cause.” General Robert E. Lee was promoted again, after the war, to the position of heroic icon of
“The Lost Cause.”
Central to the mythology of
“The Lost Cause” is that the war wasn't about slavery at all. It was about
“State's Rights” and
“Liberty,” although, again, not for the slaves. After the Civil War, finding a pro-slavery Southerner was as hard as finding a Nazi in Germany after WWII. So, before hundreds of monuments to him could be put up all over the South, Robert E. Lee needed to be scrubbed clean, so he was re-branded as being opposed to slavery. Some even taking the fantasy to the point of claiming he never owned any slaves.
Douglas Southall Freeman wrote
the supposedly “definitive” Lee biography. He cites a selective line from a
27 Dec 1856 Lee letter to make Lee sound like he's opposed to slavery, but Freeman leaves out the juicy parts, which makes it clear that in the letter Lee is lamenting that slavery is
“a greater evil to the white man than to the black race.” Oh! Shades of
“White Man's Burden;” that's not exactly an anti-slavery position, not when you are living off the labor of slaves, and suing in court to continue doing so past their emancipation date. Freeman also leaves out the part about how
“The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race,” and how he thinks slavery will be ended in a maybe two thousand years
“by a wise & merciful Providence.”
Ken Burns paid homage to
“The Lost Cause” in his famous PBS
“The Civil War” series when he introduced Lee as:
“The courtly, unknowable aristocrat who disapproved of session and slavery, yet when on to defend them at the head of one of the greatest armies of all time.”
This sort of fan fiction continues today. For example, right-wing writer
Jack Kerwick, railing against the movement to remove public tributes to Lee as part of
“a campaign against the European heritage of Western peoples,” has named him
“among the finest human beings that has ever walked the Earth.”
The truth was that he not only owned slaves, and treated them meanly, his comfortable life at Arlington was supported on the backs of hundreds of slaves he technically didn't even own!
State's Rights and the real causes of the Civil War
The Southern states were all for federal supremacy before they claimed the right to secede, and there is no secession clause in the US Constitution because they didn't want it there. They had an out-sized influence in writing the Constitution, and got pretty much anything they wanted, including having slaves be counted as 3/5 of a person to give Southerners more political power than the citizens of other states. They strongly opposed
“State's Rights” when it came to passing and enforcing federal fugitive slave laws,
and “found it outrageous that they could not 'sojourn and travel' with their slaves into free states.” After Kansas became a state, and rejected slavery 98%-2%, the Southern bourgeoisie went crazy. They called popular sovereignty - the right to reject slavery - as
“a trick of the devil.” They not only demanded that slavery be spread to Kansas, but also to the free state of California, where, a Southern newspaper
argued “all mining operations can be carried out more certainly and more profitably with slave than with free labor.” They simply didn't believe that states had rights to reject people as property. The first demand of the Confederacy was the spread of African slavery to the Territories. Its second demand was the above mentioned right to
“sojourn and travel” with their property in slaves. Its third was that fugitive slave laws be enforced everywhere in the US, and its fourth was that no anti-slavery laws be passed by any state. They expected the federal government to protect slavery everywhere, and work for its extension. Up until Lincoln it had done just that. The secessionists were motivated by fears that was about to change.
Most Southerners opposed secession
Historian
William W. Freehling said that
“most Southerners wanted no part of secession.” Most didn't own slaves, and of those that did, most didn't think Lincoln was a threat to their property. In his
inaugural address, Abe Lincoln indicated support for an irrevocable constitutional amendment
protecting the existing slave states from federal interference. Even as late as five days before the attack in Charleston harbor that started the Civil War, the Virginia Secession Convention voted two to one against secession. Thirty-seven Virginia counties refused to leave the Union at all, instead of seceding from the Union, they seceded from Virginia, and formed the new state of
West Virginia in 1861, so Lee couldn't even claim that he was siding with the whole of his state when he supported secession.
Lincoln, along with the abolitionist movement, and the growing power of industrial capital in the North, was a growing threat to the plans of the Southern bourgeoisie for a
"Vast Southern Empire" that could eventually stretch as far south as Brazil and as far west as California. To this point, the United States of America had served as a first-rate platform for the expansion of slave power because they controlled it. From
Andrew Jackson and
John Tyler to Jefferson Davis and
Alexander Stephens, prominent members of the Southern bourgeoisie made the preservation and expansion of slavery
central to US foreign policy. Ten of Sixteen US presidents before Lincoln
were born in future Confederate States. Both the annexing of Texas in 1845, and the policy of pro-slavery solidarity and cooperation with Cuba in 1843 or
1854, served pro-slavery interests. They hoped to bring Cuba into the Union as another slave state.
But the worm started to turn with the emancipation of the British West Indies in 1833. The UK
Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 also outlawed the slave trade. All slavery had ended in Mexico by 1829. In
1832, serious agitation for secession kicked off in South Carolina. The writing was already on the wall when the
Missouri Compromise gave way to bloody Kansas and John Brown's militant abolitionism, so with the election of Abraham Lincoln, they decided that they needed a new platform, and while they may have been a minority, they were a powerful minority that had a lot of experience in tricking the majority into going to war. They did it the old fashion way. They claimed the other side started the fight and made it a question of backing
“our boys.”
Because they lacked a majority, secessionists resisted a
“Southern Convention” which would put the question to a vote of all the Southern states. Instead, they pursued a plan to have individual states declare for secession, starting with South Carolina, and then encouraging others to follow by making it a question of
“honor” and supporting fellow Southerners. When President Buchanan said he was reinforcing Fort Sumter, they spread false claims that he was sending reinforcements to all the federal forts in the South. After fighting broke out in Charleston harbor, it became a question of
“supporting our boys,” or
“supporting our fellow Southerns,” and the game was on.
General Robert E. Lee was a leader in the Southern bourgeoisie, of course, but even he equivocated on the question of staying loyal to the Union or joining the slaveholder's rebellion. This is not how
“The Lost Cause” tells the tale:
“How dare you call General Lee an oath-breaker! Accusing him of Treason!” This is how Shelby Foot excused Lee's treason in Ken Burn's
“The Civil War" :
When Lee had to choose between the nation and Virginia, there was never any doubt what his choice would be. He went with his state, he said “I can't draw my sword against my native state.”
Foote also
thought emancipation was rushed.
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A cartoon made of Lee at West
Point after he decided to fight
for the South. |
This is how they let Lee skate on a very difficult, and bad, decision. It was by no means, a
“no brainer,” that he go with the Confederacy as
“The Lost Cause” propagandists have sold it. Lee's mentor,
General Winfield Scott, was also from Virginia, and
he stayed with the Union, as did two-fifths of West Pointers from Virginia. Others just retired and sat out the war. Two-fifths of all Virginians in the US Army at the time of session fought for the Union.
Lee also said
“I could not raise my hand against my home and my family,” but ended up with family on both sides of the conflict. His sister sided with the North, and he never saw her again. Her son, and two of Lee's cousins fought for the North. So, Lee faced this dilemma whether he broke his oath or not. As with most who lived off of slave labor, Robert E. Lee's views on what was proper and honorable were very opportunistic.
Rape on Lee's Plantations
Considering the social conditions created by African slavery in the South, the power imbalance between an African slave and her white master, or any white man, for that matter, was such that pretty much any sex between them constituted rape, and the rape of black women by white men was an integral feature of this Southern way of life. Pryor tells us that rape was
“common” at Arlington, she quotes an elderly former slave years later saying
“Did de dirty suckers associate wid slave wimen?...Lord chile, dat wuz common. What we saw, couldn’t do nothing "bout it. My blood is bilin’ now [at the] thoughts of dem times.”
Writing about Pryor's work in the Atlantic,
Ta-Nehisi Coates says:
Running beneath this bright Potomac idyll was the dark and ugly undertow of miscegenation. Whether occurring by violent assault, threat or coercive persuasion, these encounters all amount to abuse, including forcable rape, by white men with virtually unlimited power over women of color. “The Custis family has a reputation for interracial dalliance,” Pryor writes, “and many of the mulatto servants had clearly descended from illicit ties.”[RTM p.137] People of mixed race represented roughly ten percent of the South's population in the decade before the war; they accounted for over half the slaves and all the free persons of color living at Arlington listed in estate records and the census of 1860. Rumor—more than mere rumor—had swirled around Custis men for decades, and there is ample circumstantial evidence that the practice reached down to George W. P. Custis himself. Over his lifetime he freed a handful of female slaves and their mulatto children; even the Congressional Record acknowledged this and suggested that Custis was showing something like a “paternal instinct” in the process (emphasis original). Pryor notes that “there is no evidence that Lee himself indulged in sexual activity with the slaves, but certainly he was aware of it."
There may be no evidence of Lee indulging in sexual activity with slaves, but certainly he was aware of it.
“Everyone was so mixed, half-colored and half-white,” concluded a daughter of Arlington slaves.
“Those were terrible times. Nothing pleasant to think about.”
Robert E. Lee preferred dark skin women
Pryor tells us in another passage that Lee was most attracted to women of a darker complexion. This comes out as she is telling us about feelings he shared with a close friend while stationed in Texas in 1860
[RTM p. 257]:
Evans was a friend special enough to enjoy Lee’s irreverence and to share indiscretions that few were allowed to witness. With Evans he smuggled whiskey into the garrison in his water barrel, confided his “fancy” for belles “neither white nor yellow,” and once even used his official powers to transport Evans’s “woman”—not wife—in a specially escorted wagon to Camp Cooper. “I hope you will have great comfort in her,” Lee drily remarked.
In Summary
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| Confederate dead at Gettysburg |
Although it may be argued that Robert E. Lee was not an especially bad man given the circumstances he was born into, he wasn't an especially good man either. He was born of the wealth and privilege of the Southern slave owning class. He never transcended that outlook, in fact, with necessary modifications, he defended it till his dying day. He was a thoroughgoing white supremacist with little respect for the Africans, Mexicans, or Natives that he shared the country with. For most of his life, he lived off the labor of slaves. He became a warrior so that he could fight to defend and extend slavery. When the country & constitution to which he had taken a solemn oath to defend, decided against slavery, he broke that oath to lead a military defense of slavery that cost more than 600,000 US lives. Yes, he may have been a talented general, but he used his talents for an evil purpose. He became celebrated in monuments, be they statues, street names, or schools, by white supremacists attempting to paint a false picture of antebellum slave society, and the civil war that ended it, in the furtherance of reaction in their time, and today.
Robert E. Lee, himself, opposed the idea of raising Confederate monuments, in 1869
he wrote that it would be wiser
“not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.” These are wise words. All true supporters of R. E. Lee should follow his example in that regard.
It is high time his name is ripped down from any high place, and shown in a truer light in the museums of history. On 16 July 2020, the Tyler ISD's Board of Trustees
held a special meeting. The school board voted 7-0 to change the names of Robert E. Lee High School and John Tyler High School. This decision was long overdue. Trude Lamb was very happy.
Clay Claiborne
