I’m fairly anti-Lee on a number of fronts, and very much against the false image of him conjured up by Lost Cause writers. But I also think as is typical when correcting a perceived wrong, people are going too far in the other direction. I would disagree that Lee was a “famously cruel” slaveowner. He owned slaves, and he had slaves beaten and whipped for misbehavior, he also advertised for the capture of runaway slaves. This does not actually constitute “famously cruel”, in fact it would be considered mainstream behavior by the entire slaveholding population of the United States during Lee’s lifetime and even by much of the non-slaveholding population.
Slavery is innately cruel, keeping slaves obedient requires extreme, evil cruelty. This is why slavery is an abominable practice. But when we go on to say someone was a famously cruel slaver, we’re saying that their activities in the standards of their time marked them out for infamous and unusual cruelty towards slaves. I do not see anything in the biography of Robert E. Lee that does that would justify that claim.
I also frankly do not believe it is untrue that he abhorred slavery. I think given a lot of the textual evidence at hand, we know that that was not a particularly unusual sentiment. Particularly for someone of Lee’s background–an educated southerner who wasn’t born into a great slaveholding family (he was born into a moderate one-and in fact around the time of Robert’s birth his father had to do time in debtor’s prison and mostly fell into permanent financial ruin and abandoned Robert and his wife and other children to go live in the West Indies), but Lee did marry into a family with more substantial slaveholdings.
From all historical evidence Lee did genuinely believe in ultimate emancipation, but was not anywhere close to an abolitionist. He and members of his family financially supported the American Colonization Society, which sought to emancipate and emigrate slaves to Liberia, and he sponsored several slaves along that path.
Lee was also a white supremacist and a racist–entirely in line with almost the entirety of the Western world in the mid-19th century (even most white abolitionists were extreme white supremacists by modern standards–those few who were not stand out as shining lights in the darkness but represents a very small portion of white society in the era); and his views were not particularly unusual. There were a few currents of thought about the practice of owning slavery. Some pro-slavery whites viewed it as a “positive good” because of the belief blacks could not live productively left to their own devices. Lee’s view was not that one, Lee and his wife had extensive letters that show they viewed slavery as a moral evil, but their focus was much more of a white supremacist view. While they thought the practice of slavery was a stain on white men’s souls, he did not feel that this justified putting the interests of blacks ahead of whites. He only supported vague and non-specific longer term gradual emancipation, and strongly opposed anything that would have caused economic harm to people like him and the South.
I’m not super interested in an argument about “what that makes Robert Lee”, I don’t feel compelled to think too much about that. Lee was a product of his times, my typical interest in him is from a military perspective and to disabuse people of various myths and delusions promoted about him by Lost Cause writers. But I do think it is not supported by historical fact that Lee was any “especial” type of villain contemporary to other people of his time.
From The Atlantic article
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.”
I do not believe this makes Lee a particularly cruel slaver by the standards of his time. In fact the sentimentality behind not breaking up slave families in the Custis extended family tree (which goes back to George Washington and particularly his wife and her first husband) is more of an aberration than a standard. And while Washington did not deliberately break up slave families, he himself had no issue paying for the capture of runaway slaves and their vicious physical punishment.
I’d also note that at least part of the reason Lee broke up slave families is he was tasked with financially cleaning up the accounts of an estate to which his wife was heir, to comply with terms of a will (part of the terms of that will actually required manumission of his wife’s inherited slaves. I’ll note that the Atlantic article, based on my other readings of Lee’s responsibilities in regards to the Custis will and the settlement of that estate, somewhat misrepresents Lee’s activities there. For example like most slave plantations the Custis inheritance was encumbered with debts, and Lee could not have just set all the slaves free without settling those, they represented legal property to which debtors had claim if the debts could not be settled (at various times, banks were the largest slaveholders in America for reasons such as this.) Virginia and all the other Southern states also required lengthy conditions be met before any slave was manumitted, which usually included a provisions of the slave holder providing some amount of money for their upkeep and emigration out of the state.
Lee also appeared to deeply hate the time in which he was basically pressed into life as a planter and running a slave plantation (which occupied several years in the middle of his life largely as a result of inheritances of his wife); from my reckoning he mostly just hated the “lifestyle”, he did not enjoy managing a plantation or managing slaves. I don’t think this was because he felt bad about the lot of the slaves so much as he found the work unengaging and unenjoyable.
I have very little defense for Lee’s conduct during the war, but still don’t find it out of ordinary pernicious, considering some eleven states and most of their people were united in the cause. That doesn’t excuse Lee, but it also doesn’t make him a special villain to my mind.