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Hi there-Civil War historian here. So, uh...this is really, really far from "The Truth." Got a minute? /1 https://twitter.com/senatormcdaniel/status/1029916257490018304
2/ Lee certainly did not believe slavery was wrong. In an 1856 letter to his wife, he said "The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race."
3/"How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence," Lee concluded. In other words, it was up to God, not Man, to abolish slavery. This was a typical slaveholder dodge one would hear throughout this era. Lee was no different.
4/ If you read Elizabeth Prior Brown's biography of Lee, you'd learn that Lee broke up every family on his plantation by 1860 by either renting or selling them apart. He once ordered an enslaved man whipped, and then had brine poured over his back. No "Christian Gentleman" here.
5/ As for the assertion that Lee "opposed secession," well, that's just dumb. He may have lamented the fact that secession had to occur, but there was never a choice when it came to the South or the Union: Lee wanted to protect Virginia, the South, and its "institutions"
6/Bear in mind that Lee forsook the oath he took to the Constitution and Union when he left the US Army, *where he was a career officer*, to join the Confederacy. One does not oppose secession and then take such a dramatic action to fight for...secession.
7/Lee consistently referred to Union forces as "those people," the enemy who threatened everything he and his state and region supposedly stood for. If you read the secession proclamations of the Confederate States, the preservation of slavery is clearly "what they stood for."
8/Don't just take my word for it-read Virginia's secession ordinance, condemning the federal govt for actions taken "*not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States.*" [The emphasis is in the original document]
9/The inclusion of "slaveholding" in an important signifier. The South was seceding not just as "the South," but the "Slaveholding" South. When southern whites talked about "injuries" and "threatened rights" in the Union, they meant the fate of slavery. Full stop.
10/I'm not going to relitigate secession, because it's crystal clear from the documents and other evidence from the period that secession and the preservation of slavery were inextricably linked in the eyes of Confederates, whether or not they "owned" slaves themselves.
11/Read the letters of southern "secession commissioners" collected by Charles Dew in his excellent book _Apostles of Disunion_. Read the state secession convention debates. Read the letters. Read the Confederate Constitution. The perpetuation of chattel slavery suffuses it all
12/To deny that someone like Bob Ed Lee supported slavery or secession is to buy into the post-Civil War propaganda where eminent white southerners like Lee sought to softpedal their prewar and wartime stances to make themselves more palatable for re-entry into civil society.
13/even after the war, though, when Lee was president of Washington College, the school had a KKK chapter and there were two attempted lynchings on campus, which Lee turned a blind eye towards and did not punish the students involved. He continued to argue Blacks were "inferior"
14/The local chapter of the Freedmen's Bureau repeatedly charged Washington College students with abducting and raping Black girls. Lee--the PRESIDENT OF THE COLLEGE--never responded to any of the charges or cooperated with the Bureau to investigate.
15/Lee *testified in front of Congress* against black suffrage, arguing "the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power."
16/What @senatormcdaniel is doing here is giving you the santized version of Lee, the "marble man" myth-it's an image that has no basis in fact and is easily disproven by the historical record. I mean, this stuff isn't secret.
17/But McDaniel and other Confederate apologists don't care. They ignore what the Confederates themselves said (read Alexander Stephenson's 1861 "cornerstone speech, FFS) and peddle this racist, whitewashed version of history where the Confederates were "heroes."
18/But to do so, to deny Lee was a supporter of slavery and secession, is to deny that the Civil War occurred because a substantial white regional minority refused to abide by the results of a legal election because they saw it as threatening their "right" to own other people
19/ So, @senatormcdaniel, you have a curious way of defining "The Truth," but I suspect you're more interested in dog-whistling to anti-Black racists than you are in historical accuracy. Because your assessment of Lee flies in the face of all available historical evidence.
The standard disclaimer before going on to do... absolutely nothing. Like I said, no different from every other slaveholder. It would be naive to equate that empty platitude w actual opposition to slavery. If he was truly opposed, he could have freed his. Some southerners did.
