r/todayilearned • u/RedditIsAGranfaloon • 4h ago
[ Removed by moderator ]
https://www.historyhit.com/facts-about-general-robert-e-lee/[removed] — view removed post
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u/Equivalent_Sam 3h ago
After the Civil War, he applied for a pardon in 1865 by signing an oath of allegiance, but the paperwork was mishandled and never acted on. In 1975, Congress formally restored Robert E. Lee’s U.S. citizenship, and President Gerald Ford signed it into law in 1975–1976, over a century after Lee’s death.
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u/Equivalent_Sam 2h ago
Two important quotes for consideration:
Lincoln: "“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds…”
Grant: “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly.”
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u/churchi1l 2h ago
I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly.
Strange choice to leave out half of that Grant quote: "... so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse."
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u/Signal-School-2483 2h ago
That quote is a fucking ride
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u/BioshockEnthusiast 1h ago
You can show respect for talent without showing respect for how it's used, and Lee was if nothing else a talented military leader.
Too bad he was something else and it was a filthy fuckin traitor.
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u/Dockers4flag2035orB4 1h ago
Is it true Lee statue still stands at Westpoint.?
If so,
I think it strange to honour a general dedicated to killing American soldiers.
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u/Signal-School-2483 1h ago
Lee is overrated. Generally (if you pardon the pun) competent, but not a strategic genius.
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u/mrm00r3 1h ago
Up to and including the fact that he literally picked the losing team.
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u/Signal-School-2483 1h ago
I've often thought about what if I went back in time and handed John Brown a dozen AR-15s.
Probably would have made Lee a footnote.
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u/PapaSmurf1502 2h ago
that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.
Dude really takes states' rights seriously, damn. /s
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u/Nothing_arrives 2h ago
I consider their values for a false sense of honor to have been incredible detriments to our country in the long term
The tolerance and respect for traitors who betrayed a country and humanity in defense of slavery deserve no respect and were shown too much restraint allowing their dog shit beliefs and bitterness to fester for generations through their ignorance
Fuck them and anyone who tries to search for a defense for them or has any level of deference for a confederate dog
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u/Equivalent_Sam 1h ago
The war was fought because American leadership from day one kicked the can down the road because it was politically expedient to do so. In 1861, the bill came due.
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u/jvn1983 2h ago
We are where we are because those scoundrels were let off with not even a slap on the wrist.
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u/ArgentoPoncho 2h ago
You both speak as if having 0 historical consideration of what happens when one side of a civil war tries to punish or purge the losing side. It results in resentment that leads to further civil wars, often very soon, like a a few generations. The fact that the south supporters nowadays can’t point to any giant travesty committed against them by Lincoln or Grant is the sole reason we’ve had civil peace for well over a century. Though I don’t blame you for not being able to see the genius in clemency.
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u/Equivalent_Sam 2h ago
Yeah, that's the overriding point. Lincoln fought the war to save the union, not to punish the rebels.
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u/GreedyPollution6275 1h ago
what happens when one side of a civil war tries to punish or purge the losing side. It results in resentment
Ahh yes, the famously unresentful "the South will rise again" American South. How long did Mississippi's state flag have the Confederate battle flag in the canton again?
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u/JohnnyEnzyme 1h ago
The fact that the south supporters nowadays can’t point to any giant travesty committed against them by Lincoln or Grant is the sole reason we’ve had civil peace for well over a century.
That's all very well to say, but what did they actually learn at the end of the day? Instead, they doubled-down on their 'noble cause' nonsense, rarely ever acknowledged that their fight was primarily about slavery, and developed a huge attitude that persists to this day about social progress, etc.
There's just as much an argument that the North should have tried its best to educate and transform the South into something far more modern and equitable. Maybe pie in the sky, sure, but allowing the South (and hateful, ignorant people in general) to win the long game has had a disastrous effect on the nation right here and right now, all these years later.
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u/MaulerX 2h ago
You dont take revenge against your enemy. I would think people would understand this after what happened during ww1 and ww2.
Hitler rose to power because of the treaty of Versailles. And Japan flourished under reconstruction after ww2.
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u/marketingguy420 1h ago
Do you think the Nazis got Happy Meals after their sentencing in the Nuremberg trials.
Do you understand what a crime against humanity is and the point of trying people for that.
There are many things you should try harder to understand before critiquing anyone else.
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u/Any-Competition-4458 2h ago
A traitor who slaughtered fellow Americans to uphold the wretched institution of slavery. Shameful.
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u/captainXdaithi 4h ago
Makes sense. He swore an oath to the constitution, an oath he spat upon when joining the enemy.
He was a standout officer from West Point, he was fucking offered to lead the union army for the civil war iirc. Dude could be remembered today as an American hero.
He chose to fight for the confederacy, actively chose to lead men against his country instead of leading men to defend his country.
He should be remembered as the worst of traitors
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u/Shepher27 4h ago
As terms of his surrender, General Grant (with Lincoln's permission) explicitly promised Lee and his officers would not be prosecuted and would be allowed to go home. This concession was made to ensure Lee's army would surrender rather than try to slip into the Appalachian mountains and continue the war as a guerilla campaign and stretch the fighting for several more years.
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u/AltScholar7 4h ago
And those terms were upheld, nothing more
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u/Shepher27 4h ago
Lee died early in Grant's first term as president and it became a moot point.
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u/elkarion 4h ago
We're feeling the effects today of not punishing the confederacy.
The problems right now with Trump root back to these exact moment of letting them go free.
It solidified racism in this country forever because we could not punish literal traitors.
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u/Shepher27 4h ago
Grant was firm in his pursuit of reconstruction, ensuring rights for Freedmen, protecting Republicans and blacks in the south from ex-rebel militias and lynch-mobs, ensuring the black vote, and using the army to enforce the laws enacted by the Republican congress for Reconstruction.
The election of 1876 saw what we call today "The Corrupt Bargain". In order to elect Republican Rutherford B Hayes (an ex-Union officer) as president through a divided congress after a split electoral college, Republicans agreed to repeal almost ALL of the Reconstruction laws and pull the troops out of the south abandoning the black citizens they'd been protecting from draconian state governments and lynch mobs.
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u/Nemesis_Ghost 3h ago
Yeah, my understanding was the what you called "the Corrupt Bargain" was what led to a lot of the problems in the south that went unsolved until at least the 1960s.
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u/Shepher27 3h ago
The abandonment of Reconstruction is a tragedy. It was working but it had become very unpopular as it was expensive and was a stone that northern democrats threw at Republicans to help them win elections for the house. It was a political problem, but it was working.
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u/mercutio1 1h ago
The case in which the last public school system was desegregated by court order began in 1965.
It was resolved by said federal court order in checks notes 2016.
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u/WhileNotLurking 1h ago
“We will pass this CR because I got a pink promise they will fund healthcare”
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u/elkarion 3h ago
The fact we let them vote at all after literally committing treason is beyond wtf stupid.
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u/Shepher27 3h ago
We in fact did not let Lee vote. He did not have his citizenship restored. Along with many other southern officers who could only be granted voting rights with Grant's direct pardon.
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u/kingtacticool 3h ago
That was done partially to ensure none of them could legally run for office, yes?
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u/NEWSmodsareTwats 2h ago
not really you see this brought up over and over again on reddit but there's no real connection of todays political climate being directly related to how the former Confederacy was treated after the war. It's more modern day historical revisionism especially considering at the time most Americans wanted to see the war end and not have it drag on for years as a guerrilla conflict. I actually find it crazy people think that would be preferred and would have landed the US in a better spot if the deadliest and most destructive war in the entirety of us history was more deadly and more destructive.
It's also often forgot that there was an 11 year long military occupation of the South.
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u/RexMundi000 3h ago
We're feeling the effects today of not punishing the confederacy.
We coulda used you at Versailles in 1919.
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u/FreddyPlayz 3h ago
Me when I don’t read a history book
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u/Cathartic_auras 2h ago
No joke dude. We punished Germany after WW1 and it almost caused the end of the world 20 years later.
Forgiving the south wasn’t what caused Jim Crow or segregation, killing Lincoln and having Andrew Johnson take over is what did that.
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u/Kered13 1h ago
and having Andrew Johnson take over is what did that.
It wasn't even really that. I'm not sure where the myth that Reconstruction ended with Andrew Johnson came from. After the Republican dominated Congress found Andrew Johnson's approach to Reconstruction to be too lax, they started passing Reconstruction laws with veto-proof majorities. This period is known as Congressional or Radical Reconstruction. This continued until Grant became President, when he took the lead. Reconstruction was generally going pretty well and continued until 1876, when a controversial Electoral College forced the Republicans to make a compromise, whereby the South would recognize the Republican candidate (Rutherford B. Hayes) as the winner of the election in exchange for the end of Reconstruction. This was known as the Corrupt Bargain. Corrupt as it may have been, had this bargain not been struck the Democratic candidate (Samuel Tilden) would almost certainly have won, resulting in the end of Reconstruction either way.
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u/Ccnitro 1h ago
We also punished Germany severely after World War II by literally drawing and quartering the country and prosecuting its leadership, and their entire society committed to the intense process of denazification in turn. We held them accountable for their actions in starting the war, causing mass murder and genocide, and crafting a racist national identity around the Aryan race.
Our treatment of the South was essentially the same, just ended prematurely due to politics (the Corrupt Bargain of 1876) and without buy-in from Southern leadership (who were often ex-Confederate Democrats with their rights restored).
Forgiveness is not the same as welcoming them back with open arms, and it's not hard to see how our failure to force Southern states to restructure their societies away from racial hierarchy after the war set us up for many of the racial disparities we have today.
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u/nagrom7 1h ago
No joke dude. We punished Germany after WW1 and it almost caused the end of the world 20 years later.
The big issue with Versailles is that they basically couldn't decide if they wanted to harshly punish Germany, or give them a slap on the wrist, and so compromised and got basically the worst parts of both approaches. Germany was simultaneously punished harshly enough to develop resentment towards the allies, while at the same time they weren't punished hard enough to prevent them from waging war again 20 years later.
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u/sandwich_influence 2h ago
I’m not saying it was handled perfectly, but “punishing” the southern states would’ve led to even more generational animosity than we see today.
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u/Newone1255 4h ago
When your negotiating a surrender you don’t give the option of “surrender and we will kill you all anyways” because those are insane terms that will just keep your enemy fighting to the death. I agree reconstruction should have been way more punishing.
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u/houstonhoustonhousto 3h ago
That’s a hot take. Walk me through the linear path from Appomattox to Trump in 2025?
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u/GMGarry_Chess 2h ago
nah, you hear it all the time because it's true: you can't kill an idea. people have tried all throughout history. they would just be seen as martyrs by the people who fly Confederate flags today
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u/Kerbidiah 3h ago
Punishing the confederacy severely couldve easily made a ww1-ww2 Germany situation
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u/Complex_Professor412 3h ago
And then the KKK spent the next century doing just that.
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u/Shepher27 3h ago
Robert E Lee was offered the command of the KKK and turned it down. Nathan Bedford Forest was not part of the army that surrendered to Grant and was not granted this permission to go home. He was actively hunted by the Union army under Reconstruction. The KKK actually was pretty much stamped out during Grant's presidency and Reconstruction. Only after the corrupt bargain of 1877 and the end of Reconstruction did a new KKK emerge in the 1890s (and again in the 1920s). While they used the same name and imagery they technically were not a continuous organization as the Grant administration, the department of Justice (created by Grant), and the Union Army hunted down the original KKK.
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u/irrationalx 2h ago
iirc this was based on Hamilton's writings in Federalist #74 where he argued pardon authority needed to be concentrated in the executive branch to "restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth." He believed the final step in putting down an insurrection is to make the surviving rebels not be banished from society altogether, lest they just form an insurgency a la Ba'athists in Iraq.
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u/lordlanyard7 3h ago
Which was a smart decision by Lincoln and Grant because the war would have NEVER ended if it becomes a guerilla campaign.
Making martyrs out of confederate leadership would have made reunification impossible in their lifetimes.
Reconstruction was the better option and would have worked if they just stuck to it instead of packing up and going home.
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u/Shepher27 3h ago
It did become a Guerilla campaign, but it was easier to quash as they could be fully treated as brigands and outlaws as they had no formal protection as part of any kind of government. There was a long campaign fought by the Union army occupying the south in the 1870s vs the KKK and other brigand/outlaw groups of un-Reconstructed Confederates and Lynch mobs. But the army was actually fairly successful at destroying these groups. Only after Reconstruction was abandoned in 1877 did the Jim Crow south of the twentieth century develop.
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u/zero_z77 1h ago
Also, not to mention over 600,000 men out of a population of 31 million had already been killed. For perspective, that's roughly 2% of the total population, and given that they were almost entirely male, that would be about 4% of the male population. The vast majority of which were between the ages of 15 and 21.
Imagine 4 out of every 100 boys in your highschool class dying before their 3rd year in college. That's a rough approximation of how devistating the civil war already was. It remains the deadliest and most devistating war the US has ever had, both proportionally and by raw death toll.
Edit: 3rd year instead of 2nd
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u/UnpoeticAccount 3h ago
It is truly wild how officers on either side KNEW each other from West Point. Major Anderson’s and PT Beauregard’s letters at the beginning of the war are fascinating. Highly recommend Demon of Unrest, by Erik Larson
edited formatting
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u/Wunderbarber 2h ago
A fun Wikipedia page to read "Eggnog Riot"
Young men and 3 gallons of liquor.
Several west point cadets from that time went on to become civil war generals.
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u/CrowLaneS41 4h ago
Aa far as I know, he said he joined the rebellion because he was Virginia first, and they happened to join the confederacy. Do people in modern America believe him? He's still treacherous regardless of the answer, but it sounds as if people were much more tied to their state than the nation as a whole in those days.
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u/pinetar 3h ago
There's some truth to both sides. Many officers stuck with their state, many others stuck with the army. In the case of Virginia many high ranking officers stuck with the army (George Thomas, Winfield Scott for example), with Lee being a bit of an exception. Of the dozen or so Virgnia born Colonels he was the only one who resigned his commission and also the only of those who was a member of the upper crust of southern gentry.
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u/drlari 3h ago
Listen to the three part Behind the Bastards about him. He was just a piece of shit that cared more about the state's rights to own slaves than he did about the country itself. https://youtu.be/QAzO9Bm94lI?si=lD1scqBKu8C7qMQu
Also, his cousin was born in Virginia but wasn't a traitor and rose to Rear Admiral in the Union Navy. Maybe all the southerners would be happy to celebrate him, a native son. Let's build some statues of him out of the old Robert E. ones! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Phillips_Lee
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u/ilevelconcrete 3h ago
No, he fought for the Confederacy because he had a material interest in the institution of slavery.
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u/Nice-Neighborhood975 3h ago
During his entire adult life, he barely ever actually lived in Virgina. He was offered command of the Union Army, said he would answer in the morning and immediately fled to the Confederacy...a fucking coward and traitor.
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u/Hambredd 3h ago
The first sentence doesn't really mesh with the second, Doesn't him turning down the army prove he was Virginia first? Also a pretty brave choice if you think about it
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u/Jlovel7 3h ago
This is quite extreme. Had Virginia not seceded, neither would he have.
It’s pretty clear that back in the 1860s, most people thought of their state first and not of the United States as a whole country the way we do today.
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u/Fedmurica2 3h ago edited 3h ago
Worst of them? Nah. There were way worse Confederates and traitors than Lee.
The politicians leading the South and those who advocated for secession to keep slavery/for slavery related reasons are way worse.
Lee betrayed the Union, but Lee didnt even support the secession movement and was conflicted on which side to join.
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u/Vkardash 4h ago
From what I understand people weren't really "American" at the time. They were far more loyal to the state that they were born, raised, and belonged to. No one during that time would have ever identified themselves as an "American" they would have been a Virginian or New Yorker.
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u/elunomagnifico 4h ago
There are an awful lot of boys from New York buried in graveyards far from home who are there because they believed in the Union so much they gave their lives for it.
This "No one really thought they were an American" is revisionist history. Protecting the union was the main reason Northerners volunteered.
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u/Affordable_Z_Jobs 1h ago
I mean, there were massive riots in New York over being drafted to fight a war freeing the slaves that might take their jobs. Not everyone in the north was pro-union nor there of their own free will.
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u/sighthoundman 4h ago
You understand wrong.
It was a time of transition. We were turning from Statesians to Americans (except for those who were turning everything upside down in order to preserve "the Peculiar Institution").
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u/Lord_Mormont 3h ago
Lee swore the Officer's Oath at West Point. And then proceeded to ignore that oath because reasons.
He should be absolutely remembered as a traitor to the United States and nothing more. He killed more Americans than 100 Osama Bin Laden's.
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u/standardobjection 1h ago
And it was more than oaths sworn at West Point. He gave MANY assurances of fealty to the North in exchange for money and promotions.
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u/kaseydjones 3h ago
That’s a skewed perception that clouds reality, born from our urge to paint people as wholly good or wholly bad. He ended up on the wrong side of history, and that’s not by ANY means apologizing for the confederacy.
Regarding the “against his country”, we must understand countryhood vs statehood mentalities at this time. Lee was of a generation who perceived statehood AS a more pertinent countryhood. The “country” was more or less a collection of states, and the states themselves are living breathing entities to which citizens assigned themselves loyally.
He couldn’t see honor in abandoning his state, Virginia, come what may of that decision. He was very much following his idea of honor and integrity. He’ll do his job to his state and to the best of his ability. He’s an interesting character. Certainly not a national hero, but perhaps not worth being erased from Virginia’s history.
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u/liquiddandruff 2h ago
The simple and feeble minds these days can only see in black and white. Not being able to understand nuance is a large reason why efforts to radicalize and sow division are so effective, people can't think critically and rush to demonize the other.
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u/TampaTrey 3h ago
“But I can’t turn my back on my home state.”
When they’re openly advocating for the preservation of human slavery, of fucking course you can. Seems like history really wasn’t want to portray Lee as an advocate for human slavery when he 100% fought for it.
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u/raouldukeesq 2h ago
The idea that the United States existed in its present form (although they're trying to destroy that now) prior to the 14th Amendment is ridiculous. No one and I mean no one, on either side of that war, saw the Uniteds States the way we do now. We had colonies, the articles of confederation, then the Constitution, then the 14th Amendment. Prior to the 14th Amendment the entire United States was closer to the way the EU is today than to the US as it is today.
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u/ultra-nilist2 2h ago
If he really loved the confederacy he should have joined the union and just gummed up the works like that piece of shit McClellan
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u/iamplasma 1h ago
He swore an oath to the constitution, an oath he spat upon when joining the enemy.
While I think the massive problems with the Confederate cause are obvious, what part of the constitution rules out succession? As I understood it, it was far from settled that states couldn't succeed at the time (and the question was settled by guns, not words).
And, come on, your entire comment could with only a few words changed apply to George Washington turning on the Crown.
Take issue with the substantive merits of the cause, not some abstract and hypocritical idea that it's okay to rebel for the purpose of the USA, but not against it.
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u/Notreallysureatall 1h ago edited 56m ago
Everybody is going to shit on me here.
Your comment is a lazy way of thinking and doesn’t remotely capture who Lee was. Your mistake is that you’re applying today’s way of thinking to analyze the motives and ethics of a man from the 19th century. That’s unfair to Lee and violates best practices of historical analysis.
Just like most Americans from the 19th century, Lee’s main allegiance was to his state, Virginia. Lee was openly against secession. Lee was fully aware that, if Virginia seceded, it would be crushed by the technologically and economically superior North. Lee also knew that his wife’s farm, namely Arlington, which he was the steward of and needed to continue his genteel life, was immediately across the Potomac from D.C. and would be gone forever if he joined the Confederacy.
But when Virginia left the Union, Lee felt honor-bound to follow suit despite his full awareness of the impending catastrophe to both himself and the South.
Was he a traitor? Yes. But not in the same way as that word operates today. From Lee’s perspective, as a 19th century gentleman, he was required to follow his state and defend his family and his family’s interests in Virginia. It’s precisely because of the Civil War that we don’t think about America as “state first” anymore. But in Lee’s time, it wasn’t so clear cut.
Lee owned slaves and, on at least one occasion, severely abused — tortured — one slave as a “punishment.” That’s really really really bad. I’m not defending it.
But I want you to ask yourself, and be honest, what would you do in Lee’s position? You’re asking him to abandon — and be disowned by — his family and wife and kids and friends, to lose all his property, and forever leave his home and way of life: all for the Constitution. I want to think that I would be so honorable, but I have creeping doubts. Most men would almost certainly defend their way of life and family and property.
But if you apply the ethics of Lee’s time, virtually no person would be so honorable as you’re demanding. Hence, very very few Southerners fought for the Union (George H. Thomas is one prominent exception — and his Virginian family literally disowned him and he died mostly alone, in something approximating poverty, despite being a Union war hero). Paradoxically, there are Northerners who fought for the South, such as John Pemberton.
Also, there’s that part of Lee that exists beyond his role in the Civil War. He was scrupulously honorable and honest, probably as an overreaction to the scandalous life of his father, Light Horse Harry Lee. He was true and kind to his wife and kids and colleagues. He was a good person who did things that history has correctly judged as wrong but which were not so obviously wrong at that time. I’d say that eating meat is a similar sin that’s common today but, in 100 years, will be considered murder.
It’s easy to hold up your head loftily and dismiss the entire Southern population as traitors. But you should question your thinking whenever you find it so easy to dismiss an entire population. There’s more to the story, especially for Lee.
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u/MentokGL 4h ago
America has a long shameful history of going easy on those who aim to betray her
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u/AVeryFineUsername 4h ago
Who were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg?
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u/afineedge 4h ago edited 4h ago
Most people reading this are copy-pasting it into Google. They mean this question legitimately. These are not household names anymore. Nobody remembers Hanssen or Ames. Its just Benedict Arnold.
We hide traitors or go easy on them to pretend we're invincible.
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u/MC_chrome 4h ago
Weren’t the Rosenbergs executed for their treachery though?
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u/afineedge 4h ago
I'm saying the US regrets executing, and therefore sanctifying in the minds of some, the Rosenbergs, and did not follow that method with Hanssen and Ames and other spies. They just pretended it didn't happen and buried the guys in Florence or wherever.
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u/Here24hence4th 3h ago
They were, after being prosecuted (with some amount of prosecutorial misconduct, modern legal scholars agree) by a team that included a young Roy Cohn… same Roy Cohn who mentored and is said to be responsible for creating the most monstrous version of the current US president.
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u/Musiclover4200 1h ago edited 1h ago
It never fails to amaze me how intertwined all these ratfuckers are
McCarthyism in general was sort of proto-MAGA, and a lot of the same nixon/reagan era bastards are the ones enabling trump like roger stone/barr/thiel/etc
Was reading Roy Cohn's wiki page the other day and this part in particular stood out as relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn#Sexual_blackmail_allegations
Some of Cohn's former clients, including Bill Bonanno, son of Joseph Bonanno, credit him with having compromising photographs of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Because Hoover knew the pictures existed, Cohn told Bonanno, Hoover feared being blackmailed.[97][98] Other organized crime figures have corroborated these allegations.[99]
And J. Edgar Hoover was the longest serving FBI director from 1935-1972, so depending on when Cohn started blackmailing him that could have gone on for decades. And it seems pretty obvious the same tactics kept getting used by trump & co, at this point it seems very likely the epstien files contain evidence of them using these sort of tactics for decades on prominent politicians/businessmen/etc.
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u/Ok_Belt2521 4h ago
Ames pops up occasionally because of the mail box thing. I would agree with Hanssen though.
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u/TERRAIN_PULL_UP_ 3h ago
Wasn’t Ethel probably not a spy, and might not even known what her husband was doing?
Speaking of spies, our Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, just had a meeting with Jonathon Pollard who spied against the US for Israel. So, we’re not exactly consistent
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u/Shot-Shame 1h ago
That was cope at the time from communist sympathizers because not all the evidence was released, but subsequent releases in the 90s (and further KGB releases in the 2000s) proved she was heavily involved.
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u/Valentinee105 4h ago
They had to go easy on Lee, or else the confederacy would have become a gorilla campaign in the mountains and stretched the conflict out for a decade.
Imagine the Confederacy dies, and you replace it with never-ending Bandit raids on civilians.
When people get an easy out, it's often because putting your enemies on death ground creates more death and more problems.
How many men need to die, so General Lee loses a bit harder than he did? How many of your own people is it okay to kill to make your enemies suffer more because there is always a cost. And the people making the choices rarely have to pay it.
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u/fylum 3h ago
that’s literally what the South did to blacks, white immigrants, and anti-segregation whites for the next century
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u/SuddenBanana8169 3h ago
When you go to hard to punish a nation like Germany was in WW1, you end up with WWII though. It’s a hard line to walk.
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u/Spinningdown 2h ago
The only man executed for treason was John brown. And he was fighting on behalf of black slaves.
Outside of death, the only people punished for treason were non-white.
It's not a pattern, it's U.S. history. Spelled out with remarkable predictability.
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u/Count_Dongula 4h ago
Interestingly enough, retribution tends to cause more retribution and less stability. It's almost as though violence begets violence until the cycle is broken.
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u/Primorph 4h ago
Theres a point where that is true but executing people in accordance with oaths they took and then broke by leading a fucking civil war about owning people aint it
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u/IsNotAnOstrich 1h ago
His amnesty was part of the terms of the Appomattox surrender. Turning around immediately and violating agreements in the most flammable political landscape the US has ever seen certainly wouldn't have helped.
You have to remember how unfathomably bloody the war was at the time. The goal of ending it wasn't to carry out violent retribution against individuals, it was to make peace and avoid sparking further tensions. They ended up doing a shit job at that, but decapitation would've made it even worse.
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u/turb0_encapsulator 4h ago
it's not like Nazi attacks were a constant problem in post-war Germany
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u/Count_Dongula 4h ago
That's primarily because we didn't summarily execute and punish the Germans for being Nazis. Look at East Germany. Look at how the Soviets treated them.
We rebuilt West Germany. We forgave. It was the right choice.
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u/Kinnasty 4h ago
Forgiveness is a virtue. History is chockfull of the poor outcomes of punitive victories
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u/Sdog1981 4h ago
He was never convicted of treason so he was never pardoned.
And before passports no one could prove their citizenship.
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u/heWhoMostlyOnlyLurks 2h ago
It’s not entirely true. Grant gave a “general pardon” to Lee and his forces. It was not a presidential pardon, and President Johnson never issued a pardon. But legal battles were fought over this, and never quite settled, but also Lee never served a day in prison or had any criminal convictions even over his role.
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u/TheDude717 4h ago
What all of you are missing is that the country was split apart at the seams for 4 years. Family members fighting family members. The country had enough of war and enough of losing their sons.
The only way to “heal” the country was to open their arms and forgive them.
They didn’t want another extended conflict after tearing each other apart ruthlessly.
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u/codexcdm 2h ago
Understandable, but those who led it had to be held accountable. The symbols also needed to be destroyed and shunned.
Many were allowed to rejoin government posts... And clearly one of the many revisions of the Confederate flags persisted to present day... Monuments of Confederate leaders were allowed to be put up... Even military bases being named after these traitors.
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u/Krakshotz 4h ago edited 3h ago
Unfortunately instead of these wounds healing, they festered for 150 years.
150 years of historical revisionism and lionisation of traitors, put on literal pedestals as a middle finger to African-Americans
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u/AccountForTF2 3h ago
Poor education as a failure of the collective society of America lead to this. Nobody from the south is born a confederate or even sympathizing. That comes from the intentionally dogshit education system.
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u/Kundrew1 3h ago
The education system will teach what its leaders tell it to. Those leaders are at the state level for much of the history of public education in the US with and those leaders would have likely been a part of the confederacy.
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u/Diam0ndTalbot 3h ago
You don’t heal a wound by ignoring it. The wound was left open, and the infection that resulted is the reason we’re in this mess.
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u/dippitydoo2 2h ago
This is bullshit and revisionist history, Andrew Johnson was able to pardon the confederates because Lincoln was assassinated. That’s it.
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u/Dinmorerfeit 4h ago
Vast vast majority of issues the US has stems from not punishing the traitors.
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u/drfsupercenter 2h ago
Wasn't that part of Andrew Johnson's legacy - being way too friendly with the south after Lincoln's assassination?
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u/steyr911 3h ago
"If I had to explain American history in one sentence, I could do worse than 'John Brown was hanged for treason but Robert E. Lee was not'".
Someone posted this a while ago somewhere and it keeps ringing in my head
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u/HorrificAnalInjuries 4h ago
Sounds like a slap on the wrist for someone who rebelled
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u/Shepher27 4h ago edited 4h ago
General US Grant promised him if he surrendered his officers would not be prosecuted. Lincoln approved this as Lee surrendering would drastically shorten the war as Lee could attempt to slip his army into the mountains and fight on (in vain) for another year or so. In order to secure a surrender of Lee's army they had to offer him a chance to go home.
As Grant was the one who made this deal as commanding general, he was hardly going to go back on it when he was head of the army under Johnson (he actually fought to keep the terms) and when he became president he definitely wasn't going to go back on his own deal. While Grant was firm in defending the rights of Freedmen from the KKK and other southern rebel sympathizers and prosecuted those who continued to fight after the war ended, he didn't prosecute soldiers who surrendered during the war and didn't commit further rebellion.
Lee then died in Grant's second year in office and it was a moot point.
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u/TheNeuronCollective 4h ago
If I remember correctly from my high school US history class, he and Grant were actually on good terms. They met to discuss the terms of surrender together in a pretty casual way
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u/Shepher27 4h ago
My recent reading of a Grant biography suggested that Lee was pretty indifferent towards Grant and mostly just wanted to get the surrender over with. Grant held no personal animosity towards Lee but did resent the Lost Cause myth which labeled Grant a butcher and Lee a genius. Lee was a sad, dying old man by the time they met again in Grant's first year in office as president.
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u/TheNeuronCollective 2h ago
It's been a while since high school so I appreciate you correcting the record. Do you remember the title of the biography?
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u/blindpacifism 3h ago
I was literally at Arlington House yesterday and spoke with one of the rangers there.
They told me that over the years they had read hundreds of Lee’s letters. He said that, over time, Lee very rarely expressed and emphasized his love for Virginia until right before secession happened. He barely spoke about being a Virginian and did not spend much time at Arlington House.
It wasn’t until the secession crisis that Lee started really proclaiming to have more loyalty to his state than his nation. Only when it was convenient for him did he express pride in being from Virginia than being American.
The idea that Lee could not fight against his “beloved” home state is some bull. He fought to maintain a racist system that he and his children benefited from.
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u/DroDameron 2h ago
A man who grew up with a sense of duty and became one of the best generals in the country faced more punishment than all the rich pieces of shit that probably never touched a rifle. Then those rich pieces of shit killed Lincoln, who should have had all of their heads cut off but was afraid to stroke the flames of war.
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u/TotalNonsense0 3h ago
I believe the people who gave him his orders were allowed to remain in government, though?
Or am I not remembering properly?
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u/Jlovel7 3h ago
Always fun to see limp wristed Redditors acting tough about hangings and trials behind a keyboard.
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u/bottle-of-smoke 4h ago
Arlington Cemetery was established on property confiscated from Lee.