Removal of Confederate Monuments

[David Lockmiller]

(09-10-2017 09:55 PM)My Name Is Kate Wrote:  I don't see anything "religious" about Robert E. Lee's attempt to justify slavery using religion.

I quoted Robert E. Lee's 1856 entire letter in my post of Sept. 5. I copy over the "religious" portion of this letter immediately below.

"The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influences of Christianity than from the storm and tempest of fiery controversy."

"The doctrines and miracles of our Saviour have required nearly two thousand years to convert but a small portion of the human race, and even among Christian nations what gross errors still exist! While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is still onward, and give it the aid of our prayers, let us leave the progress as well as the results in the hands of Him who, chooses to work by slow influences, and with whom a thousand years are but as a single day."

It may be of interest to note that in other parts of the Christian world, "a merciful Providence" appears to have been moving much more swiftly. In 1807, Britain’s Parliament enacted the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. Britain followed this with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 which freed all slaves in the British Empire. I am certain that Robert E. Lee was aware of these historic facts at the time he wrote his letter in 1856.

I agree with you, Kate: "It's hard to imagine anyone preferring enslavement over freedom, no matter what the other contingent "benefits" of the enslavement may be."

And, I think that President Lincoln was also in agreement with you and expressed as late as March 17, 1865 his own "Christian" view on the imposition of slavery upon other people to an Indiana regiment:

"I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire for themselves, and secondly, those who desire it for others. When I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."