The Civil War

In this passage/ speach from a novel called "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara an englishman observing the Battle of Gettysburg says in the first day of the war, "Your general Lee is a moralist as are all true gentlemen, of course..." General Robert E Lee, as stated in a letter to his sister (actual history) said that he entered the war on the side of the South simply becuase he could not go against his reletives and family. But to me he's still fighting for slavery to continue though others say they are fighting to uphold the constitution...

any comments? Because I'm completly perplexed and shocked... I would never consider the continuation of slaver to be moralistic and I'm refering to the South in general not to Lee, his character is not in question to me.

i think he was refering to Lee himself as a gentleman, not Lee as a Southern gentleman.
remember, Lee freed his slaves, although he fought for the South. i don't remember any chagrin or outrage when he lost, and i even think that in his heart of hearts he may have realized it was necessary.

yeah i guess...

comment: the civil war wasn't about slavery, it was about holding the union together and economics.

Slavery was a secondary issue in the conflict, an important issue, but a secondary one.

i'm confused as to how your question relates to Southerners, btw. the info you gave has everything to do with Lee and his personal views, and little to do with the South in and of itself (methinks)...

Yeah, I guess.... I reread that and believe that the guy was commenting on Lee alone, however I took as commentin gon Lee representing all of the South, and Fool, I'm taking a history course on the civil war and my professor stresses that slavery and cotton were the sole causes and from the books there's a lot about defending a way of life but I personally beleive that those factors you mentioned are major factors but if slavery was not present and abolitionists were not present then this war would not have been faught.

i would contend that the states would have still ceded, and the war would still have been fought.

really, but the reason why the states wanted to cede was becuase a) preserve a way of life protected by the constituion or b) keep their slaves either way if slaves weren't an issue perhaps the south would have been more industrialized because i miagine without slaves the cotton plantations would be very hard to maintain and with more industrilization they would not have been so different from the north.... and .... oh I'm jsut going so say that i beleive the root of the problem was slavery, if you take it out of the equation you would find so many things that would be different, of course it is possible that they would have tried to cede anyway.... maybe, but i doubt it...

Lee did not want to uphold slavery to prolong its existence, and if I'm not correct Lee himself had no slaves. Lee chose to fight on the side of the Confederate Army for the sole reason that he could not stand idly by watching his beloved home-Virginia- be grounds for war, what he in turn chose to do was defend his home. If you didn't know Lee was offered command of the entire Union army. Chew on that for a while.

Noted historian James M. McPherson observed, “The incongruity between Lee’s private character as a humane, courteous, reserved, kindly man, the very model of a Christian gentleman, and his daring, aggressive, but costly tactics as a general is one of the most striking contrasts in the history of the war.”

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Originally Posted by Jester

In this passage/ speach from a novel called "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara an englishman observing the Battle of Gettysburg says in the first day of the war, "Your general Lee is a moralist as are all true gentlemen, of course..." General Robert E Lee, as stated in a letter to his sister (actual history) said that he entered the war on the side of the South simply becuase he could not go against his reletives and family. But to me he's still fighting for slavery to continue though others say they are fighting to uphold the constitution...

any comments? Because I'm completly perplexed and shocked... I would never consider the continuation of slaver to be moralistic and I'm refering to the South in general not to Lee, his character is not in question to me.

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The commentator neglected the essential thing about the Civil War that many people forget: It was not about slavery. It was about centralization of power. Lee never fought for slavery. He fought against a central government that decided to steal powers that the states and the people never gave it. Lee foughht for his native Virginia against a federal government that sought to take power from Virginia. Lee fought for the U. S. Constitution and against usurpation of power. He lost, and the U. S. Constitution lost.

It's part of our revisionist imaginations that likes to imagine a noble north fighting for the rights of black slaves in the south when in historical understandings neither was true. The general northern view of the Black American was relatively similar to the image held by the Southern slaver, and if they themselves did not deal in slaves, legally there were many things keeping them on the slavers side. The idea of the underground railroad running to Canada makes a big point of this - why Canada and not running to New York. In truth the reason is simple, for a black person in New York, the slaver's law still required their deporting back to their master, with the same legal framework still enforced.

As for our moral compass - take a look at the rights of Black Americans before and after the war - in terms of technical vocabulary we can speak of "abolition", however from a legal, cultural and economic perspective, such practices would be further delayed, with progressive and regressive movements toward the current day. The idea that the day after emancipation the white Americans actually thought of their Black former slaves as equal, or even as human beings is suspect to further scrutiny. There were very, very few people who would from a racial perspective consider the white man on equal terms as the black, and quite simply, to the white American imagination, there seems nothing scarier than the sexual interaction of a white woman with a black male. Such understandings of gender and race are still quite apparent today, though progress has, of course, been made by many.

As for General Lee though, he ultimately seems more of a loyalist to Virginia than a slave master, and therefore becomes a more complex character. There is nothing to really suggest that the North was in any way ethically superior to the south, except for some light rhetoric from an abolitionist movement that limited itself to the end of slavery, not to equal treatment. Likewise, the rather complex relations of black Americans in the south would not have been as significant to the self-righteousness of the Northern predominantly white North (even today, the traditional southern states have a much more visible per capita black population).

Now, as to the freeing of the slaves myth, the only thing that really seemed to free the slaves from the cotton fields of the south was the machines that replaced them, and forced them north for work. The agricultural revolution in the southern states was the great altering factor, rather than the legal ideas of the North.

As for the idea of the States though, there had at that point been a continuous battle between State and Washington, especially since the whole idea of the union was to keep the central government out of the face of the state, or colonial authority. Lee, if I recall, was actually approached to be recruited by the North, but remained, like many other conflicted characters, loyal to their state.

As for the history, well, just look at these posters. We like to explain away the historical fact of near universal racism in the United States up until recent times by the myth of the North as somehow progressive, when both were near-equals in their racist campaigns and personal values. We can create a hero out of Lincoln despite the fact that he too, like Lee, was quite a racist.

The post civil war northern policy was very much a continuation of racist policy, which worked specifically to maintain the racist status quo. I doubt things would have been much different in terms of race relations had the South actually one.

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Originally Posted by Jack_Aubrey

Lee did not want to uphold slavery to prolong its existence, and if I'm not correct Lee himself had no slaves. Lee chose to fight on the side of the Confederate Army for the sole reason that he could not stand idly by watching his beloved home-Virginia- be grounds for war, what he in turn chose to do was defend his home. If you didn't know Lee was offered command of the entire Union army. Chew on that for a while.

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I'm not an expert on the Civil War, but from what I have read about Lee, you are correct. Lee was a West Point graduate, like most of the Union generals he fought against.

He laid down his arms and surrendered graciously at the end of the war, and the Union generals responded graciously in accepting his surrender. What strikes me as not so gracious was the way that Lee's property was subsequently confiscated by the US Government and turned into a National Cemetery.

Lee was undoubtedly a remarkable character but remarkable characters can be tainted by the choices they make. It is not just that war that forced otherwise decent men to fight for a frankly wicked cause but sometimes bad causes win. Not that time though.