# What's the Big Deal About Robert E. Lee? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 9, 2018, 5:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591 "2018-07-09T17:42:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/81 "2018-07-10T14:57:47Z")
> [@Jonathan\_Chance](#): > > But it’s a pretty spectacular piece of craftsmanship. It’s not on the level of Rushmore or the Pyramids (I’ve seen all three up close) but it’s up there. I just wish that, instead of destroying it, we could rebrand it somehow. I personally think it is errant vandalism of a beautiful natural feature (as is Mount Rushmore). But let’s not divert from the point that _it was specifically commissioned to commemorate the revival of the KKK by a pair of its founders_ and _opened on the centennial of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln_, two historical facts you will find stated nowhere about the mounument site. It also hosts regular demonstrations by the modern KKK, which was something I had to explain to a British friends who visited the monument and who’d first thought they’d come across some neo-Druidic celebration. They were aghast that such things still occurred _as should be anyone living in a developed liberal democracy_. > [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > People often find it racist to say that the war wasn’t about slavery. But really, the sad thing is that it largely wasn’t. If the slaves had been robots and the North was going to block the South from importing them and instead say that they had to hire humans, it would have been the same war, and that’s a tragedy. I’m not clear what the purpose of this analogy is, but let’s be clear about this: the Southern states started and fought the American Civil War over their continued ‘right’ to practice human slavery, an institution long recognized as reprehensible by nearly the rest of the developed world. (Brazil still permitted slavery, and many of the colonial powers continued to engage in forced servitude and peonage of native populations in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, but not in any formal trade in ownered persons.) Saying, “…if the slaves had been robots,” glosses over the fact that the South (and still some Northern states at the time that the Civil War began) held legal the possession of people as property for owners to do with as they wished, including torture, rape, and murder. This is what the Confederacy was fighting for: unrestricted human slavery in a modern industrialized nation. > [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Gtyj said it was the laser show that showcased reconciliation not the mountain itself. I haven’t seen the laser show (or Stone Mountain other than in pictures) but that’s certainly possible. People can stage an exhibit or ceremony at a site with the specific intent of repudiating the site’s original meaning. Like a memorial service held at Auschwitz or a freedom ceremony held at the remains of the Berlin Wall. [Here](https://youtu.be/PW1Zk3T00d0) is the “Stone Mountain Lasershow Spectacular in Mountainvision” for your edification. It’s about the furtherest thing from “tastefully done” in my opinion, but more to the point, it presents nothing indicating that slavery was wrong, the Confederacy was an immoral rebellion, or illustrates the many decades of legal repression and tacitly approved violence that former slaves were subjected to after Reconstruction. And again, presented on a site specifically dedicated to the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, a fact not stated in any brochure or plaque you will find on the property. Given the rise in white nationalist sentiment, it is time to stop making nice about “Southern culture” that is a transparent veil for racist hatred. There are some fine things that come from the South, such as Kentucky bourbon, bluegrass music, and Cajun cuisine, but the thin veneer of geniality concealing unmitigated bigotry in the guise of celebrating history is not something we should just be accepting as an immutable and palatable part of the South. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Silver\_lining](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aca169/32.png) [@Silver\_lining](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Silver_lining)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 3:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/82 "2018-07-10T15:08:45Z")
> [@Jim\_B](#): > > In Summer of 1998, ironically 20 years ago exactly now, my father and I took a historic tour of the east coast. Our trip also included part of the South. > > And I was surprised how fixated the South is on Civil War general Robert E. Lee. Almost obsessed, I would say. > > Monuments, statues, place names. You name it. In one state legislature, possibly Virginia, Lee merely walked into the room, stood somewhere for a couple of minutes, and then left. They erected a statue in the very spot he stood, to commemorate the event! > > I mean, there was more than one person involved in the Civil War, wasn’t there? What about Confederate President Jefferson Davis? You almost never hear of him anymore. > > Side note: of course it is now no longer PC to commemorate people who supported slavery. So ironically the trend is abruptly ending now. So take my question in the past tense, then. > > Thank you to all who reply:) Supposedly Lee was a great general. However, at the key battle of Gettysburg, I read he ordered his men to charge up a heavily defensive hill, taking heavy losses in the process with a goal of using their bayonet’s in close quarters. He said its all my fault boys. A good general on that day he was not. ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/83 "2018-07-10T15:20:28Z")
> [@Jonathan\_Chance](#): > > I get this. I do. > > But it’s a pretty spectacular piece of craftsmanship. It’s not on the level of Rushmore or the Pyramids (I’ve seen all three up close) but it’s up there. I just wish that, instead of destroying it, we could rebrand it somehow. How about equipping each of the four traitorous bastards with a giant red clown nose? ---
**Author:** ![Gatopescado](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gatopescado/32/5711_2.png) [@Gatopescado](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gatopescado)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 3:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/84 "2018-07-10T15:33:35Z")
Laser shows should be restricted to performances of Pink Floyd music exclusively. ---
**Author:** ![Bijou\_Drains](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bijou_drains/32/2814_2.png) [@Bijou\_Drains](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bijou_Drains)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 3:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/85 "2018-07-10T15:54:25Z")
for those that don’t know , Arlington Cemetery in VA was started when the feds took land from Lee without due process . His family went to court after he died and got the land back but by that point there were so many graves the family sold the land back to the feds. I only learned this when I visited the cemetery. Not too many Lee statues in this part of central NC but there was one at Duke which was smashed last summer and then removed. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/86 "2018-07-10T16:00:15Z")
> [@Silver\_lining](#): > > Supposedly Lee was a great general. However, at the key battle of Gettysburg, I read he ordered his men to charge up a heavily defensive hill, taking heavy losses in the process with a goal of using their bayonet’s in close quarters. He said its all my fault boys. > > A good general on that day he was not. Given the remarkable number of battles Lee fought, he was going to lose some. The measure of a great general isn’t winning battles. It’s winning campaigns. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/87 "2018-07-10T17:32:39Z")
> [@The\_Peyote\_Coyote](#): > > Quite a few black prisoners were killed after the Battle of the Crater. Guess who was in command? Marse Robert > I’m not excusing Forrest for Ft. Pillow, but he was hardly the only Confederate general who was okay with murdering blacks. True. But NBF seemed to _enjoy_ it. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/88 "2018-07-10T17:33:47Z")
> [@Jonathan\_Chance](#): > > I get this. I do. > > But it’s a pretty spectacular piece of craftsmanship. It’s not on the level of Rushmore or the Pyramids (I’ve seen all three up close) but it’s up there. I just wish that, instead of destroying it, we could rebrand it somehow. Yeah, you got a point… We could change the heads to American Independence heroes? ---
**Author:** ![Gatopescado](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gatopescado/32/5711_2.png) [@Gatopescado](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gatopescado)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/89 "2018-07-10T18:06:34Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > I personally think it is errant vandalism of a beautiful natural feature (as is Mount Rushmore). > > Stranger Ya know, it occurred to me that I’ve never really seen it, so I looked up some pictures. Yeah. That is unfortunate. That was a handsome rock. ☹ And for Rushmore, completely unimpressive when standing under it. Looks better in pictures, strangely. 😕 ---
**Author:** ![Snarky\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a183cd/32.png) [@Snarky\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snarky_Kong)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/90 "2018-07-10T19:14:05Z")
> [@Buck\_Godot](#): > > Who? 😕 We have no statues of Hitler. We erased all history of him. So nobody knows who Hitler is. Or that would be true if the Confederacy apologists’ argument had any merit. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/91 "2018-07-10T19:29:08Z")
> [@Gatopescado](#): > > Ya know, it occurred to me that I’ve never really seen it, so I looked up some pictures. > > Yeah. That is unfortunate. That was a handsome rock. ☹ > > And for Rushmore, completely unimpressive when standing under it. Looks better in pictures, strangely. 😕 I stopped by Rushmore on a trip many years ago. Thought, “looks just like the pictures.” Got back in the car and drove off. It really is one of those places where seeing a good-quality pic is every bit as good as being there. Not to mention, a lot less hassle. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/92 "2018-07-10T19:36:40Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > Saying, “…if the slaves had been robots,” glosses over the fact that the South (and still some Northern states at the time that the Civil War began) held legal the possession of people as property for owners to do with as they wished, including torture, rape, and murder. This is what the Confederacy was fighting for: unrestricted human slavery in a modern industrialized nation. Sure, but at the same time, we mentally differentiate between “steak” and “murder”. When we, modern people, say that the South was fighting to preserve slavery, we mean it as that they were fighting to preserve their right to enslave, rape, and torture black people. And while it’s true that they were, in their minds it was more like they were fighting to preserve the right to eat steak, against the complaints of a bunch of vegetarians. And that’s sad. Their willingness to look at themselves and understand the plight of African Americans was so low that, it didn’t register to most of them that there was anything wrong with where things were. And, personally, I find that more horrific, because it tells us more about humanity than the other way of looking at it. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/93 "2018-07-10T19:43:29Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > in their minds it was more like they were fighting to preserve the right to eat steak, against the complaints of a bunch of vegetarians. Somewhere in between, probably. One of the common defenses of slavery back then was that they’d ‘saved’ these heathen Africans because now they were Christians. So they were human enough, in the slaveowners’ eyes, to have immortal souls. ---
**Author:** ![Quintas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/48db29/32.png) [@Quintas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quintas)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/94 "2018-07-10T19:55:07Z")
> [@Bijou\_Drains](#): > > for those that don’t know , Arlington Cemetery in VA was started when the feds took land from Lee without due process . His family went to court after he died and got the land back but You’d think they’d have just accepted their losses and been thankful he wasn’t hanged. ---
**Author:** ![Anne\_Neville](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/95 "2018-07-10T20:09:28Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > You know who else didn’t know who Hitler was? Robert E. Lee? ---
**Author:** ![Anne\_Neville](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 8:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/96 "2018-07-10T20:12:56Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > He was sufficiently gung-ho about slavery that he was willing to commit treason against his nation and against his state in order to perpetuate it. Any Confederate leader is going to be someone who was willing to do that, pretty much by definition. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/97 "2018-07-10T20:35:51Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > Lee had a larger need to fight in the name of his hometown than to defend the oppressed. > > Really, the only thing that lifts him from the bottom of the barrel is that everyone at the time was racist. The South seceded because of the economic ramifications of losing slavery, and the North went to war because it couldn’t allow the Union to splinter. > > People often find it racist to say that the war wasn’t about slavery. But really, the sad thing is that it largely wasn’t. If the slaves had been robots and the North was going to block the South from importing them and instead say that they had to hire humans, it would have been the same war, and that’s a tragedy. This…makes no sense at all. Do you see people today defending the right to own machinery? No you don’t, because owning industrial machinery is not a controversial idea. Of course, the transatlantic slave trade had been abolished in 1807. There was no fear of the abolition of slavery in 1860. Abraham Lincoln wasn’t going to abolish slavery. What he was going to do was prevent the expansion of slavery into new territories, which would eventually make slaveholding states a minority, which would eventually lead to the abolition of slavery. In any case, putting robots to work is not the same as slavery. I can’t even understand why you would write something so ridiculous. Slaves are human beings. How does the quote go? “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Except if you’re a slave. Please don’t tell me that Southerners didn’t consider slaves to be human beings, because that’s just nonsense. And of course, scientific racism as a justification for slavery was a product of the middle 1800s, not back in the 1700s. The founding fathers, even the slaveholding ones, recognized that slavery was incompatible with the principles of the founding of the United States, and at some point the contradiction would have to be resolved. They expected it to be resolved by the gradual abolition of slavery, someway, somehow. Except that didn’t happen, and slavery became more and more entrenched, as the ruling classes of the South depended 100% upon slavery for their wealth. But no country can remain half slave and half free, it will either become all one or all the other. And the Southern slavocracy was determined to see the expansion of slavery into the whole country. The fugitive slave act is a perfect example. It doesn’t matter that slavery is now illegal in New York, the mere act of moving to New York state doesn’t mean that a slave is now free. They are still a slave, and thus bound to service back home. And since a slave is not entitled to due process, how can an escaped slave be entitled to due process? And so anyone could be kidnapped and taken to a slave state and enslaved. Oh, only black people? Except how was that going to work? Because if you had 7 European great-grandparents, and one African great-grandparent, what did that make you? And so, even the 7/8ths White children of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings where slaves. It doesn’t matter if your father is the fucking president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson literally owned his own children as slaves. Because why? Because their mother was a slave. And Sally Hemings was a slave, despite being the half sister of Jefferson’s wife Martha, because Sally’s mother was a slave. Slaves. Not the same as robots. The conflict between the North and the South was over slavery, not farm machinery. Farm machinery doesn’t try to escape and go to a place where using farm machinery is illegal. People don’t insist on the right of a state to make owning farm machinery legal. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/98 "2018-07-10T20:57:16Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > Sure, but at the same time, we mentally differentiate between “steak” and “murder”. We differentiate between “steak” and “murder” because we don’t kill people to harvest steak, and regardless of what you think about raising and eating animals for food (“carnism” in the terminology of Melanie Joy) there is near universal agreement that a bovine is not equivalent in intellect, self-awareness, or any other metric to which we would apply the moral standard in terms of the severity of enslaving or killing them, notwithstanding that the domestic bovine is specifically bred as a meat and dairy animal. One can excuse past cultures for practicing human slavery insofar as the concept of classical liberalism (the right of self-determination and personal sovereignty of an individual) are a fairly modern political innovation, but at the time of the Civil War _every developed Western nation except for the United States and Brazil had forsworn the slave trade and keeping of domestic slaves as a legal practice_ (even if many nations continued to use native peoples in colonial possessions as de facto slaves). It isn’t as if the South could claim that even at the time the notion that slavery was a moral evil was foreign to them, and apologists and obscurists today who want to claim that slavery was just not that bad or try to normalize the practice are being disingenuous at best, and many if pressed would admit that they thought the pre-emancipation era was a better society than the one today with the supposed “moral relativism” of progressive politics, e.g. the Voting Rights Act, protection of civil liberties, et cetera, hence the mass movement of blacks in the “Great Migration” to the North in the first half of the 20th century (where they were scarcely better treated but could at least vote and own property without severe legal strictures). Regardless, to the topic of Lee, in the end he sought to heal the wounds and minimize the cultural divide between the Confederate South and the Union, and to that end clearly appealed not to worshipfully memorialize the Confederacy. Sticking his name on every street sign, school building, public house, barnhouse, and outhouse, or raising statuary and carvings of him in parks and in front of courthouses was explicitly contrary to his desire to mend the wounds of a war he helped to perpetrate. The people who seek to venerate him and other Confederate “heroes” not only lack a proper historical context, they are in direcrt contradiction to the lesson to be learned from it, e.g. that the nation is better as a unified body than as a fracticious rabble squabbling over an issue that the rest of the developed world has already settled as immoral. It would be like Germany raising a statue of Eric Honecker in Alexanderplatz, or China putting out a giant banner featuring the Gang of Four outside Zhongnanhai; not only offensive, but bizarrely celebrating a history that is an embarrassment to rational people. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/99 "2018-07-10T21:45:36Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > But it wasn’t about robots. Saying the war was “about the economics of slavery” but not about “slavery” is a distinction without a difference. But, yeah, the South and the North had different motivations. The North did not go to war to end slavery, even if the South went to war to preserve it. As you say, the North went to war to preserve the Union. Ending slavery came later. But the “preserve the Union” part is also about slavery, ultimately. The reason the North felt it had to preserve the Union was that many of the slave states seceded. Slavery is the root cause, whether it’s “preserve the Union” (North) or “preserve our economy” (South). ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2018, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591/100 "2018-07-10T22:18:04Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > You know who else didn’t know who Hitler was? Kurt Waldheim? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-about-robert-e-lee/817591.md?page=6)