We have Lee the marble statue and Lee the human being.
There is a debate about Lee "owning" slaves. He was responsible for his wife's slaves - almost 100. Since they were his wife's, the claim is made Lee did not "own" slaves. Some investigations show he "owned" four or five slaves at various times.
Regarding the slaves of George Washington Parke Custis, Lee had five years to free them (his understanding). The human beings he was responsible for (the slaves) thought they were to be freed immediately, Lee had to disabuse them of that fact.
Rather surprisingly, instead of saying Yes sir, the human beings tried to flee Lee's care and head for Washington City.
Lee was annoyed with this, recaptured some of these human beings and had them whipped.
Wesley Norris, one of those recaptured, wrote about the whipping, which included his sister:
http://fair-use.org/wesley-norris/testimony-of-wesley-norris
My name is Wesley Norris; I was born a slave on the plantation of George Parke Custis; after the death of Mr. Custis, Gen. Lee, who had been made executor of the estate, assumed control of the slaves, in number about seventy; it was the general impression among the slaves of Mr. Custis that on his death they should be forever free; in fact this statement had been made to them by Mr. C. years before; at his death we were informed by Gen. Lee that by the conditions of the will we must remain slaves for five years; I remained with Gen. Lee for about seventeen months, when my sister Mary, a cousin of ours, and I determined to run away, which we did in the year 1859; we had already reached Westminster, in Maryland, on our way to the North, when we were apprehended and thrown into prison, and Gen. Lee notified of our arrest; we remained in prison fifteen days, when we were sent back to Arlington; we were immediately taken before Gen. Lee, who demanded the reason why we ran away; we frankly told him that we considered ourselves free; he then told us he would teach us a lesson we never would forget; he then ordered us to the barn, where, in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty; we were accordingly stripped to the skin by the overseer, who, however, had sufficient humanity to decline whipping us; accordingly Dick Williams, a county constable, was called in, who gave us the number of lashes ordered; Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to lay it on well, an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.
Lee finally freed all his slaves as per above, Dec, 1863. I have yet to see any data about how many people he actually owned by then.
Lee had an extremely low opinion of black people, and after the war while President of Washington University, he wanted to take the franchise away from blacks. I quote:
Privately Lee remained bitter and worked to obstruct societal changes brought about by the war, including the enfranchisement of African Americans. (Encyclopedia Virginia)
New Edit:
I posted all of this before I saw the post on the slave whipping referenced above. The question originally was: was the "American Experience Show" factual.
So my question is first, was the historians correct or question two is history changing?
The historians were (are) correct. History doesn't change: the facts arranged, revealed, or suppressed by historians are always there.
Would you be surprised to know that Adolph Hitler loved small children and dogs? So he must have been a good man at heart.
Another German, Leopold von Ranke is famous for saying he had to tell history as it actually happened. But if Bobby Lee is the marble man then you better not detract from that.
But now I will get off my hobby horse of defending Lincoln, disliking Lee, and genuinely hating Nathan Bedford Forrest and George Pickett and consider they were lucky not to tried for war crimes.