Robert E Lee The Great Emancipator

[Laurie Verge]

Robert E. Lee's wife and mother had both worked in movements to secure colonization in Liberia for freed slaves. His wife's mother had established a school at Arlington plantation to teach basic education to slave children, and Lee and his wife continued that school even after the State of Virginia declared such institutions illegal.

Lee's father-in-law's will stipulated that his slave property was to be manumitted upon his death IF the estate was financially sound. If not, they would continue as slaves no more than five years hence. Mr. Lee determined that the estate needed more security and that the slaves needed more training in skills that would benefit them when freedom came. That freedom came within the specified five-year period on December 29, 1862 -- beating the deadline of the Emancipation Proclamation (which was ignored by the Virginians anyhow) and the deadline of Lee's father-in-law for manumission.

A key source cited by defenders and critics is Lee's 1856 letter to his wife:

... In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. 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, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.
—Robert E. Lee, to Mary Anna Lee, December 27, 1856

Freeman's [Douglas Southall] analysis places Lee's attitude toward slavery and abolition in a historical context:

This [letter] was the prevailing view among most religious people of Lee's class in the border states. They believed that slavery existed because God willed it and they thought it would end when God so ruled. The time and the means were not theirs to decide, conscious though they were of the ill-effects of Negro slavery on both races. Lee shared these convictions of his neighbors without having come in contact with the worst evils of African bondage. He spent no considerable time in any state south of Virginia from the day he left Fort Pulaski in 1831 until he went to Texas in 1856. All his reflective years had been passed in the North or in the border states. He had never been among the blacks on a cotton or rice plantation. At Arlington, the servants [under the Custises] had been notoriously indolent, their master's master. Lee, in short, was only acquainted with slavery at its best, and he judged it accordingly. At the same time, he was under no illusion regarding the aims of the Abolitionists or the effect of their agitation.