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Since the responses to the OP are already mostly in GD territory, I think trying to force this thread back into GQ territory isn’t going to work very well. Better to just move it to GD.
Moving thread from General Questions to Great Debates.
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.
And yes, his state. Let’s dispense with this absurd notion that he chose loyalty to his state over loyalty to his nation. He was loyal to neither. The supreme law of the state of Virginia defines what he did as treason, and the fact that a lot of other Virginians committed treason along with him doesn’t change that.
This is factually incorrect. Moving or disposing of a statue has no effect on historical knowledge. When Germany removed or destroyed all of their pro-Nazi monuments, this did nothing to remove their knowledge of Nazi atrocities in history. In fact, this highlighted how horrible these atrocities were, and acknowledged that they should never be honored, but rather remembered as atrocities that must never be repeated.
Every nation has moved or removed monuments at times. There is nothing new in the modern push to remove or relocate monuments erected to honor and celebrate white supremacy.
When people use the “Erasing history” excuse, I like to link to the picture of the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down, and then ask them “Is this erasing history?”. They usually move on to other topics after that.
You’re right, George Bush Intercontinental Airport should also be renamed.
He was also, of course, the highest ranking military officer in the CSA. Whether he was the BEST general in the CSA is rather another debate, but most of the other contenders came down with a case of being dead before the war ended.
Lee was perfectly positioned to be the Lost Cause’s poster boy:
He was a very good general and the senior military commander in the CSA.
He commanded the Army of Northern Virginia for almost all of the war, and in the Eastern theatre, and indeed was hardly ever far from Washington and Richmond. Because it was close to the East coast and national capitals, things that happened in that theatre were more famous and are better remembered in popular culture than in the Western theatre. Everyone has heard of Gettysburg, but far fewer could tell you anything about Vicksburg, which happened at the very same time and was arguably more important.
He was superficially a gentleman, at least towards white people, and accepted defeat graciously. He was tall and handsome and from a distance generally seemed admirable.
As has been pointed out he conveniently died just five years after the war, having taken no real political position on anything, making him easily beatified.
It is interesting to compare Lee’s sainted reputation with that of Grant, who in my opinion was very obviously a vastly superior general - indeed, he was probably the greatest general America ever produced - but whose reputation wasn’t that of a saint. Grant didn’t look like a majestic leader; he was ordinary looking, short, and was introverted and disliked speeches. Even worse, after the war he became President, which he was not especially good at, and every President is the most disliked man in America. His greatest victories during the war were in the less famous western theatre, the greatest of the all being the Vicksburg Campaign, which is still studied in military academies far and wide, but didn’t capture the imagination in the USA the war the Eastern battles did; furthermore, Grant’s genius was strategic, not tactical, which isn’t easily captured in the mind’s eye or in a movie. (I had to say Vicksburg CAMPAIGN, you’ll note, not Battle of Vicksburg.)
Hell, hardly anyone in the US knows who Hitler was!
Where? I don’t see anywhere that the Virginia Constitution of 1851 required union with the United States, within their own laws it seems Constitutional for them to secede. He resigned his commission with the US Army and joined the Virginia military. I guess you could say he took an oath and broke it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean legal treason. Part of that oath also says that you’ll obey your officers, but I think we can agree that insubordination isn’t the same as treason, so simply breaking his oath wouldn’t constitute treason in and of itself.
I think that what you have to keep in mind is that prior to the Civil War, states still thought of themselves as independent nations joined into a single union. They thought of themselves much more like the EU than a single country like we see it today. The Civil War was essentially Brexit, but with a lot more violence thrown in. The Federal Government had not yet accumulated the amount of power that it has now and power was much more distributed. They still relied on states for funding and for military manpower. States still thought of themselves in voluntary union. It was only after the Civil War that things changed and the Federal government became more supreme and the states became more relegated to something akin to administrative districts. Virginia likely never considered it treason any more than someone would say that Julian King is guilty of treason against the EU. They saw it as an organization that no longer represented them that they no longer wanted to be a part of. The Federal government saw it a bit differently to say the least.
Lots of bad movements/causes have a “good guy” - or at least one whom people would like to see as good. As a Cracked article once put it, “the asshole with a heart of gold is always THE most interesting character in a movie.”
Robert E. Lee, Erwin Rommel, John Andre, etc.
On a side note, it was utterly ridiculous when ESPN removed a sportscaster from a game duty last year because his name was Robert Lee.
Lee was fighting with his ‘Army of Northern Virginia’. He would not go to war against his country men, ( Virginians). He was loyal that way. He was an honorable man before the Civil War. He had been distinguished in war many times. Plus he loved cats.
I do understand people having a bad taste in their mouth about monuments and place names for Lee. I live close to a little town that was occupied by a northern general snd his troops for most of the civil war. The house he commandeered for his use is now a Museum. By all accounts he was a cad, a gambler and a womanizer, and spent the war drunk. But we have a Museum to honour him. Weird.
If an American making war against the United States isn’t treason, nothing is.
It ios to some extent true that Americans were more state-oriented then than now, but it wasn’t analogous to the EU. Germany is absolutely a sovereign state. The example of Brexit serves to hurt your point; the EU has a method for member states to leave, because they ARe sovereign states.
The states in 1860 were not independent nation-states. They just weren’t. They had unambiguously surrendered most of their sovereignty to the nation-state knows as the United States of America. Lee swore an oath to the USA.
One can say the South disagreed, but it’s worth nothing they themselves quite specifically rejected any notion that THEIR member states could secede.
I’m sorry, that’s a ret-con of the situation, as you well should know. I’m no apologist for the South and the rebellion; quite the opposite. But Robert E. Lee did what he did in large measure because of a solid belief that a state was a political entity more important than the aggregation of the states as a polity. Had Virginia stayed in the Union, Lee would have stayed in the United States Army, and fought just as hard against those who had attempted secession as he did against the forces which attempted (in the end successfully) to prevent Virginia’s attempt at secession.
You might as well complain about that traitor General George Washington, who raised rebellion against his legitimate king and government. I’m guessing you aren’t all hot about the idea of re-thinking his role in our history because of that inconvenient characterization?
It’s treason against the United States; but is it treason against the state of Virginia? Lee never took up arms against Virginia.
Now, the federal government would argue that the supreme law in the state of Virginia was the US constitution, and therefore Lee had acted against the supreme law of Virginia.
Yeah, Lee has quite a bit of stuff up. However, he was a great general, and a gentleman, and knew when the war was lost.
The #2 memorialist is Nathan Bedford Forrest, which is 99% a dog whistle, and NBF was a terrible general (altho a very good cavalry raider) and the worst sort of illiterate racist. He shot captured black POWs down like dogs.
He founded the KKK, and most of the memorials are really memorializing the KKK and his racism, not him. Yes, later on he was threatened and gave up the KKK. But I dont think he even stopped believing in it.
There are still a LOT of Confederate memorials.
There Are Still More Than 700 Confederate Monuments In The U.S. | FiveThirtyEight
Note, those that simply memorialize the dead or a battle are perfectly OK. Those that make heroes out of racist traitors are not.
You know who else didn’t know who Hitler was?
The thing about Lee, too, was that he was from what was considered one of the best of families. His ancestry traced back to one of the “First Families of Virginia”. His wife was the step-great-grandaughter of George Washington. His pedigree was impeccable. You could hardly craft a better Southern Hero for white folks sympathetic in some way to the Confederacy.
How about less whataboutism and more defense of Governor Gun Grabber?
Compromise has been tried with the South both before and after the Civil War during the Jim Crow era. The North tried to let the South save face so it could move on but every inch given to the South has been used to push revanchist white Protestant supremacy, the rotten fruits of which we see today with the Tea Party, Trump and Neo-Nazis. It’s time Southerners go through the collective introspection Germans did after WWII.
No, they didn’t. Most people in 1860 thought that the individual states were just part of the United States. They did not think of them as independent nations.
The idea that states were independent nations and the United States was just an alliance was a myth promoted by Confederate politicians because it gave them a pretext for secession.
If it had been true, then the rest of the United States would have that said secession was regrettable but had to be accepted because it was a legal right. (Which is the way a lot of people saw slavery at the time.) Obviously, this was not the case. Their was widespread agreement, across the political spectrum, that what the southern states were doing was illegal. Even a lot of southerners felt that.
Even most of the Confederate politicians who claimed they believed that secession was a right didn’t really believe it. They certainly didn’t agree that anyone had the right to secede from the CSA.
How is it that I know a great deal of Civil War history having never been to the Lee County Commission chambers to see Lee’s portrait?
Perhaps “groper” was too kind. How about rapist? You know, that inconveniently named airport in Little Rock.