Robert E Lee The Great Emancipator

[tblunk]

(06-10-2013 06:51 AM)J. Beckert Wrote:  It's a shame that personal views have tarnished a thread that started out bringing to light a little known fact about a great man. He not only freed his slaves on his own volition, but made sure they were educated a bit before he did. A rare feat, indeed.

If you like to bash your country, Change.org has a discussion board, I think

The original thread, as I read it, was to burnish one reputation while tarnishing another.

To call Lee a great man is in itself, a personal view. The same goes for anyone being called great. You might think Lee is great. I might think Lee is great. That doesn't obligate anyone else to agree.

The record shows that Lee emancipated his father-in-law's slaves only when required to by the courts. Whether he would have done so anyway is open to question. As I understand it, he tried to keep them longer than the five years stipulated. That doesn't sound like he freed them of his own volition.

To say that Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation for political considerations as in the original post, oversimplifies a very complicated picture. I'm sure there were political considerations. But does that mean that those considerations were the sole reason for the proclamation? Every law that was ever enacted had political considerations behind it. Does that make every one of them meaningless?