Robert E Lee The Great Emancipator

[Bill Richter]

Robert E. Lee: The Great Emanciaptor

In reading this thread I am reminded that it is said that boys who turn thirteen years of age in the South receive two gifts that mark their entrance into manhood: a .22 cal. Rifle or .410 gauge shotgun and the three volume set of Douglas Southall Freemen’s Lee Lieutenants.

Freeman’s Robert E. Lee is an American icon, the noble leader of the Confederacy even more than Jefferson Davis, a man who fought reluctantly against the nation he had served in the US Army for thirty years, a man of great self-control, who surrendered with dignity once the great cause was lost. This is the Lee the South and many in the North revere and admire. As one of the librarians in Louisiana once told me, he was a gentleman. In Like vein, historian Thomas Connelly called him the Marble Man.

Although an unreconstructed rebel, I much prefer Alan Nolan’s interpretation of the Southern hero in his Lee Considered. He points out that Lee’s resignation for the US Army came only after Lee was guaranteed a position in Virginia’s army; that he was a supporter if slavery as an institution, particularly as a social institution (replaced after the war by the Yankee version of race relations, which came to be called segregation of Jim Crow; a man of a controlled temper that rarely over cam him, but did; a man who sacrificed a generation of Southern boys to a strategy of attack; and all sorts of miscellaneous “evils.”

White Southerners quail at such criticism while Yankees glory in it. But Freeman’s version was so powerful that it caused historian Fawn Brodie to cry out in anguish in a 1962 article in the New York Times, “Who Won the Civil War, Anyway?” But it took 100 years after the Civil War that the North could assert its alleged superiority in historical interpretation of the noble Lee, because it took them that long to win the peace that followed that greatest of all American wars. It was not until the passage of the Civil Rights Law of 1864 and the Voting Rights law of 1965 that the North finally won the war, led by what many in the South still see as a traitor, Lyndon B. Johnson. I have called these historians who criticize the South and the Confederacy as criminal enterprises Neo-Abolitionists.

But was Lee the Great Emancipationist? I say yes. It was Lee who made possible the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment. He did not intend to do that but he did--simply by defending the South on the battlefield so well as to extend the war to 1865. Before Lee took over the Army of Northern Virginia in June 1862 and led it to victory after victory, look at where the Confederacy was. New Orleans had fallen, U.S. Grant had driven the Rebels out of all of Middle and Western Tennessee into Northern Mississippi because of Ft Henry and Ft Donelson causing the loss of Nashville, the naval Battle of Plum Run on the Mississippi River had yielded up Memphis, Union troops threatened Chattanooga (remember the Great Locomotive Chase?), and Commodore David Farragut’s fleet was parked just outside of Vicksburg.

In the East, Union troops occupied the Sea Islands of South Carolina, the USS Monitor had defeated the CSS Virginia, Joseph Johnston’s rebel army was in the trenches out side of Richmond, Union General George B. McClellan’s forces had just moved to the south side of the Chickahominy, seriously wounded Johnston with a shot in the chest, and could see the spires and hear the church bells in the Confederate capital. Richmond’s fall was eminent.

Jefferson Davis turned to the only man available, his military advisor, Lee. In a matter of twelve months Lee smashed the Union army in the Seven Days, driving it away from Richmond, beat the Yankees at Second Bull Run, fought then to a stand-still at Antietam, embarrassed them at Fredericksburg, humiliated them at Chancellorsville, and was plummeling them in the first two days at Gettysburg.

In December 1862 Lincoln has presented a plan to free the slaves in a matter of 50 years. Everyone in the North laughed. So did Europe. So did the South. In September, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. If the Confederates did not come back into the Union in three months, he would free the slaves in the Confederacy over which he had no control by presidential proclamation. I reality, he gave the South 90 days to make a deal with him and pledged not to disrupt slavery in the states. The South refused. Lincoln offered to buy the freedom of loyal slave states still in the Union. They refused. Forced confiscation of slaves through Emancipation was the only answer.

How many slaves the Proclamation freed and whether it was legal, do not matter. Lincoln had become an abolitionist. He corrected his legal stance by having Congress pass a proposed Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery completely. He was able to do all of this because Robert E. Lee kept the Confederacy alive for two critical years forcing Lincoln to act to deny the South its labor force and the North to accept this reality. In his own way, Lee was the Great Emancipator. He forced Lincoln to act to end slavery to win the war.