The Traitor Robert E. Lee Finally Gets His Just Desserts

[Celerity]

A gargantuan monument to the rebel general will come down in the capital of the Confederacy.

https://newrepublic.com/article/163557/bye-bye-robert-e-lee-richmond-statue



Last Thursday, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that a statue honoring one of the greatest traitors the U.S. has ever produced can, at long last, come down. The state of Virginia may now begin to disassemble the behemoth sculpture honoring Confederate general Robert E. Lee that resides on the city’s fabled Monument Avenue, on which statuary to Confederate luminaries (and much later, after considerable discord, homegrown Black tennis superstar Arthur Ashe) has long stood. While the timeline for the ultimate removal is yet to be determined, as Gov. Ralph Northam said upon the announcement of the court’s ruling: “Today it is clear—the largest Confederate monument in the South is coming down.”

The impending removal of Lee’s statue is hardly a panacea for ongoing racial strife in the U.S., not least after the past few years of a president who fractured race relations in unprecedented ways. It is, however, a chance to dismantle the hagiography surrounding a man who commanded troops to slaughter tens of thousands of American soldiers, all in pursuit of shattering the U.S. while expanding the enslavement of millions of Americans. It is a chance to finally place Lee among the pantheon of our nation’s most malignant enemies.

The Richmond statue to Lee—clocking in at six stories high, and some twelve tons in weight—isn’t simply the most prominent piece of Confederate remembrance still standing in the United States. When the statue was initially erected in 1890, in front of over a hundred thousand onlookers, it represented a clear turn in the burgeoning growth of Lost Cause mythologizing. As historian David Blight writes in Race and Reunion, “More than ghosts emerged from the Richmond unveiling of 1890; a new, more dynamic Lost Cause was thrown into bold relief as well.” With the unveiling of Lee’s statue, mewling protests about Northern aggression had given way to muscular Confederate memorialization—with national reconciliation, added Blight, now “dependent upon the dead leader of the cause that lost.” Gone were the days of faction and friction among white Americans, replaced by a white supremacist comity and Jim Crow regime built under the shadow of Lee’s new statue—a state of affairs that would last decades, entrenching an American apartheid of which Lee would have heartily approved.

It’s not as if Lee’s rank treason is any kind of secret. Lee may not have been as histrionic as some of the human enslavers leading state governments into the Confederacy, or as colorful as some of the other former American military officials who elected to lead the Confederacy’s white supremacist insurrection. In many ways, that distance remains part of Lee’s ongoing appeal. Bathed in alleged honor, clad in supposed chivalry, Lee, for decades, has stood as man more sinned against than sinning—a supposed titan of gentlemanly warfare swept against his will into the tempest of his times; the avatar of a willingness to stand in defense of one’s principles, however blinkered (and treasonous) they may be. As W.E.B. Du Bois once wrote, “It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees … will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral.” Du Bois is precisely correct. Rather than joining the hundreds of thousands of white Americans across the South who remained loyal to the U.S. during the Confederacy’s short-lived fratricide, Lee elected to join a traitorous band of effete, elite white Southerners bent on imploding the U.S., carving out new slavery territories across the American West and expanding chattel slavery as far as they could.

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[cinematicdiversions]

1. You know Robert E Lee had his US citizenship restored in the '70s

The 1970s...

So in all fairness he is no longer a Confederate... though I admit that was a bit Morman of Jimmy to do that. (Not that Jimmy is a Morman by any means)

[Rhiannon12866]

2. Mary Trump refers to that in her new book, how Gerald Ford restored his citizenship

[cinematicdiversions]

3. I stand corrected though it was as much congress as it was Ford.

On this day in 1975, the House restored U.S. citizenship to Robert E. Lee, who commanded the Confederate Army during the Civil War and became an enduring icon of the South’s “lost cause.” The 407-10 vote came after a campaign spearheaded by Sen. Harry F. Byrd Jr. (D-Va.).

Nonetheless, neither was Lee pardoned, nor was his citizenship restored. After receiving it, Secretary of State William Seward gave Lee’s application to a friend as a souvenir. Meanwhile, State Department officials, apparently with Seward’s approval, pigeonholed the oath.

In 1970, an archivist, examining State Department records at the National Archives, found Lee’s lost oath. That discovery helped set in motion a five-year congressional effort to restore citizenship to the general, who had died stateless in 1870.

President Gerald Ford signed the congressional resolution on July 24, 1975, correcting what he said was a 110-year oversight. The signing ceremony took place at Arlington House in Virginia, the former Lee family home. Several Lee descendants, including Robert E. Lee V, his great-great-grandson, attended.

https://www.politico.com/story/2010/07/house-restores-citizenship-to-robert-e-lee-july-22-1975-040085

[Rhiannon12866]

5. And his family was compensated for his property, much of which is now Arlington National Cemetery

President Ford also received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2001 and Caroline Kennedy spoke of the restoration of Lee's citizenship along with his pardon of Nixon. Congressman John Lewis was the other recipient that year. *sigh*

And if you meant Jimmy Carter, he restored the citizenship of Jefferson Davis, president of the short-lived Confederacy. I was obviously surprised to hear that, since we know where President Carter's sensibilities lie. Mary Trump also mentioned that in her book. She covers a lot of our early history, particularly the atrocities committed against Black people which have obviously continued well past the Civil War .

[cinematicdiversions]

6. Ah that was the mix up.

I knew it was one of them.

[Rhiannon12866]

7. Exactly, and that's how I know, I have Mary Trump's new book and she brings that up

She criticizes President Ford for agreeing to restore the citizenship of Robert E. Lee and gives President Carter an "honorable mention" for Jefferson Davis. She says that neither Southerner was punished for being a traitor to the nation. In fact, Washington and Lee University was named after Lee.

[Celerity]

8. Sherman wasn't a traitor. Fuck Robert E. Lee and the horse he rode in on

Cannot believe you are playing whataboutism with the head of the Confederate Army who went to war with his own nation, with the main goal being that of preserving slavery. Or you going to start up with some historical revisionism on that?

This board sometimes, smdh.

[alphafemale]

9. Sherman was all for slavery.

I don't think any monuments should have ever been built for any generals, actually.

The wound torn in the earth with the names of every soldier of the Vietnam Memorial.

Yes.

[Lancero]

16. No, he had the centrist/moderate view at the start of the war.

He wasn't pro or anti slavery, but he felt that they deserved better treatment.

His views changed throughout the war somewhat. Changed signifigantly enough that he was one of the earliest people in favor of Reparations to slaves - Case in point, Special Field Order 15, which stripped land rights away from slaveowners and required that the land be partioned between roughly 40k slaves. It was the origin of the supposed 40 acres and a mule that the Union was going to give to freed slaves.

The politicians in DC disagreed with that, and overturned it. Meanwhile, they were paying out reperations towards slaveowners for their lost 'property'.

Even today people still balk at the thought of reparations to the African American community for our nations racist legacy that they still suffer for. Generational wealth is considered one of the driving factors for the systemic inequality that plagues our nation today - And had Shermans plans not been overturned, many African American families would have been able to build up generational wealth.

[UnderThisLaw]

10. I want a Sherman statue

in downtown Atlanta with a caption that says “Total Warfare”

[alphafemale]

12. Shock and Awe

He was the inventor of burning civilians alive,

[Lancero]

14. People have been burned alive during war, long before Sherman.

Olga of Kiev comes to mind as one person who used this tactic, and she predated him by about 900 years.

[Goodheart]

22. Yes, they did, and I'm NOT mistaken.

[Elessar Zappa]

11. My dad and I always fight

over the legacy of Robert E. Lee. My dad has long admired him, which doesn’t make sense because he’s further left than me and marched at a BLM event last year. He says he was a great general, a good man who only led the confederacy because of his love for Virginia, blah, blah, blah. I just simply say he was a traitor who fought to keep his fellow humans as chattel.

[alphafemale]

13. I don't admire him.

But he also was not the worst of that wretched few years.

But all Confederate monuments were erected in support of white supremacy.

There is really no way to argue around and out of that.

[Goodheart]

23. Well, that's some accolade right there: "he was not the worst"

LOL

[alphafemale]

24. About the best I can do. There were no "good guys"

Pretending the war was to free the slaves is a fairy tale near the magnitude of Paul Bunyon and Old Blue.

[Goodheart]

25. The war wasn't about freeing the slaves. The war was about KEEPING the slaves.

[Celerity]

15. Sounds like he's done little hard research on Lee's actions post Civil war (and likely pre as well)

He says he was a great general, a good man who only led the confederacy because of his love for Virginia, blah, blah, blah.

Those are neo confederate talking points 101.

more on Lee:


The Confederacy, as American general (and future president) Ulysses S. Grant would later write, was “one of the worst [causes] for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” It was a movement that sought, as historian Stephanie McCurry wrote, to build “something entirely new in the history of nations: a modern proslavery and anti-democratic state, dedicated to the proposition that all men were not created equal.” It was one that was willing to decimate and destroy as many loyal Americans as it needed to get there. And it was one that Lee joined with enthusiasm—all for, The New York Times noted, “the protection of slavery.” Lee, like the Confederates he freely joined, viewed the maintenance of white supremacy as his central tenet, and as the primary reason he spent years helping cause the deaths of innumerable American troops. Prior to the war, Lee had no problem bloodying the Black Americans he owned, nor in shattering the families he personally enslaved, with one historian noting that by 1860 Lee “had broken up every family but one on the estate.” During the war, Lee’s white supremacy turned darker yet, with his troops abducting and enslaving Black Americans, and massacring Black American troops attempting to surrender.

He spent the latter years of his life stupendously failing to earn redemption. After the war, Lee hardly aided in the kind of racial reconciliation pursued by the Lincoln or Grant administrations. While bands of white supremacist terrorists ransacked Reconstruction-era governments, obliterating efforts to create a multi-racial democracy, Lee sat on his hands. He joined a large swath of Confederate leaders after the war who, as historian Elizabeth Samet writes, did “little to further the postwar settlement. In many cases, they worked to undermine the government’s policies, especially with regard to African-Americans.” Added author Clint Smith, Lee “did not become open to the creation of a society based on racial equity; he actively opposed it. He argued, for example, that Black people should not have the right to vote.”

Disavowing his oath of loyalty to the U.S., leading a movement to carve up the U.S. while extinguishing the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, in the hopes that he and his compatriots could throw off their American citizenship and continue enslaving millions of Black Americans: Lee belongs firmly among the highest ranks of American quislings, mentioned in the same breath as those like Benedict Arnold. For all who can see him clearly, Lee’s treason shines brightly, a century-and-a-half after he led insurrectionists bent on disintegrating this country. Thousands of Confederate memorials remain scattered like a pox across this country, honoring the most anti-American movement the U.S. has yet seen. (Imagine if, say, London constructed hundreds of statues to George Washington, or Mexico created hundreds of monuments honoring Sam Houston.) It wasn’t until 2021 that an American president finally and accurately described the Confederate flag as a “symbol of hate.” But the removal of the statue in Richmond is both a capstone to the anti-Confederacy movement that’s begun rippling across the country in recent years, and a sign of a tide finally, decades after it should have, beginning to turn.

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Not all Americans are there yet, of course; some still refuse to see Lee for the rank traitor he was, claiming such framing is a fleeting fad of the times.

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They couldn’t be more wrong. “There are but two parties now, Traitors and Patriots and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter,” Grant wrote about the movement Lee led. Immediately after the war, a federal grand jury specifically indicted Lee for treason – and only avoided charges when Grant interceded, claiming such charges would abrogate the surrender agreement at Appomattox.

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The only reason Lee never faced treason charges he rightfully feared was thanks to the man who’d bested him on the battlefield—the man who remained loyal to his country, and who put paid to the idea that Lee, as his supporters still believe, was some kind of military genius. Such a move kept Lee from the gallows, and from American ignominy for far longer than he deserved. But with the bulldozing of Lee’s statue in Richmond, we can finally dismantle the myth cloaking one of the greatest enemies the U.S. has ever seen—and finally see Lee as the traitor he’s always been.

[Elessar Zappa]

17. It's weird because my

dad hates the Confederacy and the confederate flag but holds onto those beliefs about Lee. Not sure why other than he must have been brainwashed in some classroom when he was younger. Some of those old school textbooks are horrible when it comes to the facts about the Civil War.

[Celerity]

18. Have him read this OP article and read all the hyperlinked sub articles, if he will. Surely, if he

has an open mind, it may start to disabuse him of the bullshit he has bought into.

[Elessar Zappa]

19. I'll definitely ask him to read these articles.

Thank you for your post and research!

[Celerity]

20. good luck, the battles in times of non kinetic warfare are won one mind at a time

[UnderThisLaw]

21. When people justify

military officers siding with secessionists I always consider this scenario.

In the 60s, an insurrection breaks out in the South Bronx. A rising Army officer named Colin Powell decides he must remain loyal to the area in which he was raised and supports the rebellion, which is quickly crushed.

Would Powell be viewed as positively as some view Lee? Not very likely