I'm no fan of John F. Kelly but to see him savaged by the court historians for daring to say that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man disturbs me. It has only been in the last few years that anyone suggested Robert E. Lee was NOT an honorable man. That is why so many statues of him have been erected over the years. As Kelly pointed out, General Lee was deeply conflicted but felt that his duty lay in protecting his state, Virginia, from a federal government that was attacking and invading it. Kelly merely pointed out the obvious, that there were people of good faith on both sides of the tragic conflict that killed so many Americans. He also reminded us, quite truthfully, that Americans in those days identified more strongly with their states than with their national government.
Slavery is, and always has been, a great evil, with the enslavement of one race by another the very worst form of this crime. For most of human history, slavery (like war and politics) has been considered a "necessary evil." While I would argue that no evil is necessary, I have to understand that most people throughout history have not believed this. Lee, like most slave-owning Southerners, had to justify the practice in his mind, as so many people today have to rationalize war and politics, but there were already many people in the South who understood that chattel slavery was wrong. Those people were fighting to protect their homeland from invasion by Northerners, not to perpetuate an institution that had little to do with them.
The idea that everyone on the Union side was fighting to "free the slaves," and everyone on the Confederate side was fighting to keep them enslaved is ludicrous. Imagine a military commander giving a pep talk to the troops saying "let's go out there and kill the enemy to free the slaves" (or keep them enslaved). But that is what the court historians of today would have us believe.
I'm old enough to remember a time when American history teachers were not quite so foolish as to say that slavery was the only cause of the war. But even in those days, they called it the Civil War, as if two factions were fighting for control of a government. The most neutral name for the war would be the War Between the States, but a more accurate and descriptive name would be the War for Southern Independence or the War of Northern Aggression. Now it seems like nationalist historians want to call it the War to End Slavery.
If the only way to end slavery in America was to fight a war over it, how was it that every other civilized nation in the world was able to stop slavery peacefully within a few years of each other? What has happened to our country and to our language that anytime someone tells the truth about the Confederacy and American history, he (or she) is automatically labeled a racist or white supremacist? Why are we not allowed to feel sympathy for not only the victims of racial injustice but also the victims of political injustice?
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