Robert E. Lee: a traitor and a bad person

[struggle4progress]

The president who calls himself a student of history either doesn’t know or doesn’t care much much about it.
Sophia A. Nelson
04.26.19 8:37 PM ET

... he turned traitor and gave up his commission in the US Army for a stint as commanding general of the “Confederate States of America” after South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter, South Carolina in April 1861, as an act of war. A devoted son of Virginia, Lee returned home and took up arms against the United States of America whose Constitution he had sworn to protect and defend.

... but for the grace of President Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and their whole posse should have been hanged for treason ...

Adam Serwer laid out the history in a powerful piece last year, The Myth of the Kindly General Lee. Lee not only harshly disciplined slaves, but discontinued his wife’s family tradition of respecting slave families and keeping them intact. By 1860, Lee had broken up every family but one on their estate.

The real issue today is not a dead traitor from a different time. It is a living American president who is by no means the “student of history” he called himself during his impromptu press gaggle on Friday, and who does not care about the history he knows. As the president praised Lee, he expressed no concern for Heather Heyer, who was intentionally rammed by a car driven by a crazed white supremacist since convicted of her murder ...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-great-general-robert-e-lee-was-a-traitor-and-a-bad-person

[struggle4progress]

1. What Grant would tell Trump about Lee

By Daniel Fried
April 26 at 6:05 PM
Daniel Fried .. served as a U.S. diplomat for 40 years ...

President Trump today tried to justify his defense of the 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville by invoking the memory of Confederate commander Robert E. Lee. The demonstrators, argued the president, doubling down, were indeed “very fine people” because they “felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general” ...

For more than 100 years, Lee, and other generals of the Confederacy, have been invoked to justify the cause of segregation and Jim Crow bigotry. Their statues — including the one of Lee in Charlottesville — were erected in the South when the federal government abandoned Reconstruction and allowed Southern whites to disenfranchise, and then terrorize, the newly-freed African Americans living among them. Those statues, and the romanticized memory of the Confederate cause that they are intended to evoke, serve a bad cause. Today, Trump again identified himself with that bad cause ...

In his memoir, Ulysses S. Grant, a general greater than Lee, described his feelings upon meeting Lee in April 1865 at Appomattox, as Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia. Grant wrote, “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

In one sentence, Grant manages to distinguish between Lee’s qualities as a general and the terrible cause — the destruction of the United States for the benefit of slavery — to which Lee put his talents ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/26/what-trump-gets-wrong-about-robert-e-lee/?utm_term=.3438c04ff963

[Martin Eden]

7. +1

Grant was a more thoughtful person than he is given credit for, actually a gentle soul and a gentleman. He wasn't at all like the gruff whiskey drinker he is often portrayed as.

[struggle4progress]

2. In Trump's world, FBI agents are traitors and Lee isn't

By Philip Bump
April 26 at 1:59 PM

... On Friday morning, while on his way to Indianapolis for an event associated with the National Rifle Association, Trump addressed it again. He was asked whether he still thought there were “very fine people on both sides,” as he said at the time ...

Every time Lee won a battle, Americans died. He was a traitor, in the most direct sense of the word.

For Trump, though, Lee is a useful symbol. Trump’s embrace of the general means taking a stand in a cultural fight over the legacy of the Confederacy and the self-image of Southern states. Closer to the fringes, Trump’s repeated return to the subject sends a message about the acceptability of racially questionable views and white pride. There’s some precedent for this. Schools were named after Lee and other Confederate generals not at the end of the Civil War but largely during the civil rights era as a way of expressing opposition to school integration and expanded rights for black Americans.

Reducing a rally with prominent, proud swastikas to a defense of U.S. history is a way of glossing over those swastikas, as effectively as claiming that the group included some “very fine people.” Trump does it because he recognizes that some of those in his base support the goal of the rally ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/26/trumps-world-fbi-agents-are-traitors-robert-e-lee-isnt/?utm_term=.468ed5922330

[struggle4progress]

3. Stephen Moore wrongly claiming that "Lee hated slavery"

April 26, 2019 3:45 PM EDT
ERIC HANANOKI

... President Donald Trump recently picked Moore for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board. Moore is a right-wing commentator who has objectionable views on women and the economy.

Moore previously worked as a commentator for CNN and appeared on the August 17, 2017, edition of CNN Newsroom, shortly after the violent Unite the Right rally in which white supremacists claimed to march against the removal of Lee’s statue in Charlottesville, VA. On August 12, 2017, neo-Nazi James A. Fields Jr. killed anti-racism activist Heather Heyer with his car during the protest.

During that CNN appearance, Moore defended the legacy and reputation of the Confederate leader, stating that “Robert E. Lee hated slavery. He abhorred slavery, but he fought for his section of the country.” He added that “the Civil War was about the South having its own rights,” and slavery “was a big part of it, but it wasn't only that.”

CNN anchor John Berman told Moore during the exchange: “I can't let it slide. Robert E. Lee held slaves. He ordered the beating of slaves. He ordered the return of fugitive slaves and he fought for the dissolution of the Union to maintain slavery” ...

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/04/26/stephen-moore-defended-slave-owner-robert-e-lee-wrongly-claiming-lee-hated-slavery/223577

[trueblue2007]

4. i just posted to Facebook. Hateful, Ignorant and a monster, these words describes Trump to a "T" ...

[Me.]

5. Here Is A Very Informative Article About Lee

What a cruel and dishonest person he was. No wonder trump likes him


https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/

[smirkymonkey]

6. Thanks for that.

Very good article.