As has been stated many times when Reich-Wingers try to re-write history in their own image: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. They are NOT entitled to their own FACTS.”
Everything Coastes said is a FACT.
Lincoln was willing to allow slavery to continue well into the Civil War. He did not sign the Emancipation Proclamation until Jan. 1st, 1863, almost a full two years after the civil war began in April of 1861 and not until it was clear that the North would win the war. It was only a matter of time at that point. Once Vicksburg fell in July 1863 is was all over but the mopping up, which Sherman carried out with a vengeance, even though he was a Slavery supporter himself.
Lincoln’s writings clearly show he was willing, and repeatedly offered, to allow Slavery to continue in the South if it could avoid War, but the intransience and arrogance of the Southerners lead directly to the Civil War.
Kelly has shown with his actions and his words he is an unrepentant Southern Romanticist, longing for lost Dixie and the Antebellum South. He is also a LIAR and a casual racist.
“…there was a continuous push to expand the right of slavery to the entire United States.”
Let’s not forget that Congress had a “gag order” preventing any mention of abolishing slavery. John Quincey Adams spent part of his post-Presidential career as a Representative hammering away at this. (For more, see Joseph Wheelan’s Mr. Adams’s last crusade: John Quincy Adams’s extraordinary post-presidential life in Congress.)
But a realistic appraisal of any historical figure must rely on the morals and mores of his or her time, and not on an imposed set of mores from the present.
This is especially true of figures from times of strife and upheaval—and for figures who lived by standards we know little about from a personal standpoint.
This is a helpful article, in which you will find some facts about Lee that may make you uncomfortable with a smug dismissal of him as a traitor and slave-owner.
And this may shed some light for you, too.
"At the heart of Lee’s story is one of the monumental choices in American history: revered for his honor, Lee resigned his U.S. Army commission to defend Virginia and fight for the Confederacy, on the side of slavery. “The decision was honorable by his standards of honor—which, whatever we may think of them, were neither self-serving nor complicated,” Blount says. Lee “thought it was a bad idea for Virginia to secede, and God knows he was right, but secession had been more or less democratically decided upon.”
"Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume VIII, “Speech to One Hundred Fortieth Indiana Regiment” (March 17, 1865), p. 361.
Professional historians worry about “Presentism,” the viewing of historical events/people through the lens of current sensibilities. Lee makes an interesting test case.
Lee did not break his oath.
He resigned his commission, reluctantly, to defend Virginia. Loyalty to a state was above loyalty to the Union for many men of his time.
All us white folks know that, even if we don’t believe in white supremacy ourselves, or if we do, but we believe it’s wrong and try to suppress in our thoughts and actions, we know that a vast majority of white folks fully believe it and don’t think it wrong, even if they don’t express it openly in public.
I don’t know, but I do know that people in the 23rd Century, if there still are some, should view the 21st century through their own lenses. To do otherwise is to downgrade the value of education.
To expand a bit on what @thunderclapnewman has said, let’s consider A. Lincoln. By the standards of 1860, Lincoln was very progressive – “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” etc. These were fairly radical ideas. But judged by the standards of 2010, Lincoln was back somewhere behind The Bell Curve dudes. They were rightly excoriated as (pseudo)scientific racists.
But it’s an error to judge Lincoln by the standards of our time. It doesn’t diminish Lincoln to recognize that he was human and was as capable of error as any of us. Instead, we should honor his commitment to his personal principles: given his beliefs, it would be easy to conclude that slavery was working out well for those people, but he didn’t. Instead, he exhibited great empathy and decided that other people ought not be owned as property and decided that other people included humans who didn’t look like him.
Is it too much to ask, that when a person tweets a whole essay, that the text is formatted properly? It’s as simple as copy-paste, which they’re already doing with the embeds. Embedded tweets blur the line between reporting and promotion, a key issue for any news-watcher today. The deferential treatment of tweets by news media has enabled rotten people to spread their stink faster and further, and the seriousness with which they are now taken is the foundation of the WH’s policy of rule by four-in-the-morning fiat. Notably, the transgender military “ban” which has upended and suspended thousands of service members’ lives and wasted the valuable time of our courts.
But that’s neither here nor there. Mr. Coates makes good points. I’d add my own: the concept of honor typically afforded to Lee, the one which he practiced and the one which was recognized by the Southern self-anointed gentry, came directly from “Ivanhoe” and other (frankly frivolous) feudalist fantasies. Much like late Justice Scalia’s concept of due process came from TV’s “24” in which a latter-day paladin consistently places loyalty to his homeland over loyalty to the laws that embody it. Anyone who knows a little about medieval history knows that chivalry had little to do with morality or justice in the first place, and its reality would not even be publishable in the 18th or 19th centuries for a mass audience. Remarkably, these pre-industrial LARPers nevertheless managed to emulate and expound upon the historical abuse and exploitation of thralls/serfs/chattel, purely through intuition.
Naturally, we need better standards of honor than ones that were antiquated, revisionist fancies even two hundred years ago.
That is a good question. The CW certainly exposed the weakness of the Southern agricultural economy. Also,by the 1864 election lotsa black soldiers had been trained well and served well, including freed blacks from slave states. Good luck forcing them back into slavery. Anyone who has studied CW Louisiana would know how hard it would have been to go back.to pre-war conditions too.
I’m one of those that believes it happened just the way it was supposed to. I generally stay away from “What if…?” That’s always an unwinnable debate.
