GOOD ARTICLE ON GENERAL ROBERT E LEE AND HIS ATTITUDE TOWARDS SLAVERY

I covered most of this about 2 years ago after Alex Jones had Pastor Chuck Baldwin as a guest. Baldwin had recently published an article called "The Confederate Flag Needs To Be Raised, Not Lowered" in which Baldwin wrote that Lee freed his slaves before the US Civil War started. This was not true. Lee sort of inherited several hundred slaves through a will which stated that Lee should own those slaves for five years and then set them free. He did keep them but they were treated as many other slaves were treated in the Confederacy. He hired them out. He sold their children. And he had runaway slaves beaten. But one act of Lee that is not covered in this article is that before the five years was up Lee went to court three times to get permission to sell those slaves, but each time he lost. He held on to those slaves until the very last second of the five years and did not release them early.

But it looks like even Lee thought that erecting Confederate monuments was a bad idea. That's why most were erected well in to the 20th century when African-Americans started to demand civil rights.

“He was not a pro-slavery ideologue,” Eric Foner, a Civil War historian, author and professor of history at Columbia University, said of Lee. “But I think equally important is that, unlike some white southerners, he never spoke out against slavery.”

...The 1857 article in The Times noted that slaves’ own voices were missing from the story of Mr. Custis’s dying wishes. It said that when he told his slaves they would be freed, “no white man was in the room, and the testimony of negroes will not be taken in Court.”

But years later, in 1866, one former slave at Arlington House, Wesley Norris, gave his testimony to the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Mr. Norris said that he and others at Arlington were indeed told by Mr. Custis they would be freed upon his death, but that Lee had told them to stay for five more years.

So Mr. Norris said he, a sister and a cousin tried to escape in 1859, but were caught. “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,” he said.

And when the overseer declined to wield the lash, a constable stepped up, Mr. Norris said. He added that Lee had told the constable to “lay it on well.”

Dr. Foner said that after the war, Lee did not support rights for black citizens, such as the right to vote, and was largely silent about violence perpetrated by white supremacists during Reconstruction.

The general did, however, object to the idea of raising Confederate monuments, writing in 1869 that it would be wiser “not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife.”

[source : What Robert E. Lee Wrote to The Times About Slavery in 1858, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/us/robert-e-lee-slaves.html?module=WatchingPortal®ion=c-column-middle-span-region&pgType=Homepage&action=click&mediaId=thumb_square&state=standard&contentPlacement=1&version=internal&contentCollection=www.nytimes.com&contentId=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2017%2F08%2F18%2Fus%2Frobert-e-lee-slaves.html&eventName=Watching-article-click, 18th August 2017]