There's a lot of debate on Lee's views on slavery

Posted on: August 18, 2017 at 13:12:00 CT

depending on what time in his life you look at and what quote of his you pull and what context you give it, you can make good arguments that he may have actually disagreed with the idea of slavery or that he very much agreed with it and was pro-slavery. I tend to think both are true and his attitudes toward it changed at different times in his life. His wife and his mother worked to liberate slaves and offer them passage to Liberia. But at another point when he inherited a plantation from his father-in-law who had freed the slaves there, he actually sent a couple of them back into slavery for being insubordinate.

Seems like he was all over the map in that regard. I certainly think he should be held accountable as part of the forces that were helping to support the system of slavery at the time, yes. But I don't think he fits as the iconic symbol of slavery and oppression that we should all focus on either. He was just a military general, like Grant, not a politician. Jefferson Davis, if anyone, would seem like the better candidate to project all this sort of debate onto in that regard.