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With due respect, can you cite evidence for this statement?
I will if I can come across it again. IIRR, it was in a book or article I read a few years ago on Lee's activities after the war. It is not a commonly seen view of Lee.
The article was not particularly ****ing of Lee, and does not indicate that he suddenly changed to a pro-slavery man after the war, or anything like that. It is more in the vein of Lee, striving to advance the interests of his soldiers after the war, seeing so many of them broken down, impoverished, and struggling, saw the Civil War as being brought on by the debate over the fate of the blacks and slavery. In his concern for his men and their families, in his devotion to Virginia, he seems to have made a few private comments that indicated what should probably be best described as irritation over the way more help was available to the ex-slaves than to his poor soldiers and their families. He'd be a saint for sure if he had not felt some resentment over that.
OTOH, there was also an incident after the war where Lee was in a church when a large black man came in, paraded up the aisle, and knelt down for Communion. In the shocked pause that followed, after a short time Lee got up, went and knelt down beside the man to set an example for the rest.
It is usually a mistake to think we understand another man entirely -- far less one we have never met. So much of Lee as we know him is legend and literature, as well as the facade he chose to project/the image he chose to pursue, that we should all occasionally seek to remind ourselves that Lee was a man like all men, and his worth is in how he chose to act, not in whatever private thoughts he might have had to overcome.
BTW, Lee himself believed that there was no "right of secession", that the Founding Fathers had never intended it to exist, and compared it to treason and anarchy in the Winter of 1860-61. Seeing his primary loyalty as being to Virginia (and understanding how his family would suffer in a Civil War), he followed her even believing she was wrong. After the war, Lee collected articles and discussions of the "right of secession" from newspapers, but felt that the question had been settled de facto by the Union winning the war. That isn't very surprising; Lee was a soldier first and last, and that would be a very practical view for a soldier to take.
Evidence, schmevidence. Can't argue with good old gut feeling.
Of course, that "good old gut feeling" is usually wrong.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ole
Basing the argument solely on economic factors overlooks the growing disenchantment with slavery in the border states and some of the upper south.
There didn't seem to be much growing disenchantment absent the war. Even during the war, Lincoln offered compensated emancipation to Delaware and was turned down flat.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ole
Drop the border-states and Delaware out of the equation and it would take only 21 states to pass an amendment overruling the 7. Say 10 states won't ratify an emancipation amendment and it takes 30 to overrule. When did the US pass 40 states?There was a change.
New Jersey and Kentucky both refused to ratify the 13th Amendment. Eleven slave states preferred to fight a war rather than give up slavery. So which states, besides Missouri and Maryland, will vote to abandon slavery? I don't see any that do so in the near future. We couldn't pass such an amendment today, after adding an additional 17 free states to the Union.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ole
The Corwin amendment, if it would have passed SCOTUS scrutiny, provided that there could be no amendment prohibiting slavery. Obviously, that provision was the proffered plum.
Ole
And just as obviously, the question of extending slavery was the key.
There didn't seem to be much growing disenchantment absent the war. Even during the war, Lincoln offered compensated emancipation to Delaware and was turned down flat.
Yes, but it is hard to see that as a reasonable choice in the circumstances. Maybe they were holding out for a better deal. Has anyone ever seen what the terms of Lincoln's offer were?
I ask because there was a compensated emancipation declared in Washington DC in April of 1862. The price there seemed low to me (about $300/slave, IIRR) by prewar prices. Slaveowners seemed upset. But then, the Federal government had a greater say there, and the locals little. Maybe the DE and MD slaveowners figured they could at least get more money due to their greater political position; if so, looks like they miscalculated.
New Jersey and Kentucky both refused to ratify the 13th Amendment. Eleven slave states preferred to fight a war rather than give up slavery. So which states, besides Missouri and Maryland, will vote to abandon slavery? I don't see any that do so in the near future. We couldn't pass such an amendment today, after adding an additional 17 free states to the Union.
Slavery in MD and DE had long been in decline. There were well under 1000 slaveowners in DE in 1860.
Odds are that both those states will eventually vote slavery out. Missouri seems likely as well. Kentucky seems likely to change eventually. Slavery there was closely concentrated in a few counties (the same ones where Confederate support was greatest. The demographics of KY were also changing greatly, due to the RR, the economic connection it gave to the North, and the immigrants flooding into the region along it. Ky in 1860 is changing rapidly from the KY of before 1850.
One factor seldom mentioned in all these guesses is the question of what to do with the freed slaves. Slave states that did go free (such as NY-PA-NJ) struggled on that issue, afraid of creating a burden on the state welfare and charity. None of these states would be likely to vote yes on this until they understood how that would be dealt with.
I suggest, then, you don't know what Lee sounds like.
"Considering the relation of master and slave, controlled by humane laws and influenced by Christianity and an enlightened public sentiment, as the best that can exist between the white and black races while intermingled as at present in this country, I would deprecate any sudden disturbance of that relation unless it be necessary to avert a greater calamity to both." [Robert E. Lee to Andrew Hunter, 11 Jan 1865]
Quote:
Originally Posted by larry_cockerham
an expressed desire for at least equality of opportunity.
That's a fantasy dream of Lee.
"In 1856, and as late as July 1860, he expressed a willingness to buy slaves. Those blacks who were in his possession were frequently traded away for his own convenience, regardless of the destruction it caused to the bondsman's family. He ignores justice to the slaves and defends the rights of the slaveholder in both his 1841 and 1856 letters to his wife, and he continued to uphold laws that constrained blacks well after the war." [Elizabeth Brown Pryor, _Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters,_ p. 145]
"His disdain for peoples unlike himself certainly reflected the society he lived in, but does not rise above it. Whereas some of his fellow officers found the Indians to be fascinating and honorable, Lee simply dismissed them. 'They are not worth it' was Lee's disdainful phrase for interacting with anyone who was not white." [Ibid., p. 150]
"To manage such a complex world of peoples and cultures, Le professed a simple and inflexible social order, as tidy as the mathematical laws that governed his engineering. 'Though climate, government and circumstance have produced changes in the character of the people,' he once wrote, 'yet in all essential qualities they resemble the races from which they are sprung; and to no race are we indebted for the virtues and qualifications which constitute a great people than the Anglo-Saxon.' Blacks were clearly at the bottom of this racial scale. Lee believed that they were innately inferior to whites and that destiny favored the ascendancy of the Anglo-Saxons." [Ibid.]
"[In 1867] Privately he appears to have advocated restrictions on franchise rights that would exclude a great number of blacks as well as some whites from the polls. Finally, in the election of 1868 he openly backed the rightist [and racist] policies of the Democratic Party, sponsoring a meeting of former generals and other conservative southern leaders at the White Sulphur Springs. The group wrote a manifesto that called for an end to 'oppressive misrule,' dismissed legitimate power-sharing with the blacks, and proposed a return to the 'kindness and humanity' of their former social system." [Ibid., p. 451]
"Like others of his region, he persisted in truly believing that blacks were incapable of functioning on their own, that they had no inclination to work, and aspired to nothing beyond daily comfort and amusement. ... From the end of the war he took care to distance himself from the ex-slaves as much as possible, maintaining his control by aloofness. He tried to employ white rather than black servants in his household, though in the end the family acquiesced to hiring three or four 'tolerable ... respectable, but not energetic' freedmen. As before the war, his expectations fulfilled long-honed stereotypes. He told Congress he thought the ex-slaves less able than whites to acquire knowledge and inclined only to work sporadically on 'very short jobs ... they like their ease and comfort, and I think, look more to their present than to their future condition.' He advised his planter friends to shun black labor, for he felt the freedmen would work against their former owners and destroy property values. 'I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him,' he told one cousin, 'and wherever you find the white man, you see everything around him improving.' Although he did not always state it so starkly, he continued to think, as he had told the _Herald,_ that the blacks had best be 'disposed of' and endorsed the idea of importing European workers to replace them. Lee particularly hoped that English immigration could be increased so that the South would benefit from 'good citizens whose interests & feelings would be in unison with our own.' " [Ibid., pp. 452-453]
"Lees vision did not include granting African-Americans the same option of productive citizenship that he wished to offer to immigrants. He explained to the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that 'at this time, they cannot vote intelligently' and that he opposed black enfranchisement on the grounds that it would 'excite unfriendly feelings between the two races.' He was also concerned about the educational opportunities being provided to the blacks by the Freedmen's Bureau and private northern charities, preferring they be taught by white Southerners, who were 'acquainted with their characters and wants.' Most of all he feared that blacks might procure enough political leverage to offset white control. The blacks lacked the capacity 'necessary to make them safe depositories of political power,' stated Lee and his compatriots." [Ibid., p. 453]
In any rate, his post-war attitude towards them was different, perhaps understandably so, than his pre-war attitude.
In actuality, it was remarkably consistent. See Elizabeth Pryor Brown's new book, _Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters._
OTOH, there was also an incident after the war where Lee was in a church when a large black man came in, paraded up the aisle, and knelt down for Communion. In the shocked pause that followed, after a short time Lee got up, went and knelt down beside the man to set an example for the rest.
"As the document is written, however, Lee kneels some distance from the black man, underscoring the established custom of the Lord's table--'even there--black, white, and brown, separate according to caste.' Likewise Lee simply ignores the man's presence, signaling more that the new order could not sway him from the rituals of his life than that there has been a shift in social expectations." [Elizabeth Brown Pryor, _Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters,_ p. 454]
Yes, but it is hard to see that as a reasonable choice in the circumstances. Maybe they were holding out for a better deal. Has anyone ever seen what the terms of Lincoln's offer were?
Yes. It was $500 per slave.
Quote:
Originally Posted by trice
I ask because there was a compensated emancipation declared in Washington DC in April of 1862. The price there seemed low to me (about $300/slave, IIRR) by prewar prices. Slaveowners seemed upset. But then, the Federal government had a greater say there, and the locals little. Maybe the DE and MD slaveowners figured they could at least get more money due to their greater political position; if so, looks like they miscalculated.
Regards,
Tim
$300 per slave might seem quite low if all we were talking about were prime field hands. But "per slave" also means children and slaves who couldn't do much work, and not all adult slaves were prime field hands.
Consider Lincoln made this offer after Butler's contraband interpretation, and after the Confiscation Act. Consider also that compensated emancipation by Northern states had been paid for by the states themselves, not by the Federal government. How likely would it be that there would be a better offer?
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It is not a commonly seen view of Lee.
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