Lee’s cruelty as a s***emaster was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his own writings, Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting s***e families,” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation of s***e families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of s***ery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s s***es regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”

The trauma of rupturing families lasted lifetimes for the ens***ed—it was, as my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates described it, “a kind of murder.” After the war, thousands of the emancipated searched desperately for kin lost to the market for human flesh, fruitlessly for most. In Reconstruction, the historian Eric Foner quotes a Freedmen’s Bureau agent who notes of the emancipated, “in their eyes, the work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by s***ery were reunited.”

Lee’s heavy hand on the Arlington plantation, Pryor writes, nearly led to a s***e revolt, in part because the ens***ed had been expected to be freed upon their previous master’s death, and Lee had engaged in a dubious legal interpretation of his will in order to keep them as his property, one that lasted until a Virginia court forced him to free them.

When two of his s***es escaped and were recaptured, Lee either beat them himself or ordered the overseer to "lay it on well." Wesley Norris, one of the s***es who was whipped, recalled that “not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”

Lee was always out manned and out gunned by the Union army. Lee had several complete victories. He pushed it at Gettysburg, only because he was s**k of the war and he wanted it to be over, one way or another. Do you really think that Lee didn't know what the cost would be crossing those open fields with the Union army holding the high ground and entrenched behind stone fences and bulwarks. The high ground at Gettysburg cost Lee the war. Or you could say that Bragg cost Lee the war at Chickamauga, as he didn't pursue the defeated Union army back to Chattanooga. ( My home town BTW). Lee was clever and lucky to last four years with an ever growing under supply problem, while at the same time, the Union Army got bigger and better provisioned.

Lee’s cruelty as a s***emaster was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his own writings, Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting s***e families,” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation of s***e families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of s***ery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s s***es regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”

The trauma of rupturing families lasted lifetimes for the ens***ed—it was, as my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates described it, “a kind of murder.” After the war, thousands of the emancipated searched desperately for kin lost to the market for human flesh, fruitlessly for most. In Reconstruction, the historian Eric Foner quotes a Freedmen’s Bureau agent who notes of the emancipated, “in their eyes, the work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by s***ery were reunited.”

Lee’s heavy hand on the Arlington plantation, Pryor writes, nearly led to a s***e revolt, in part because the ens***ed had been expected to be freed upon their previous master’s death, and Lee had engaged in a dubious legal interpretation of his will in order to keep them as his property, one that lasted until a Virginia court forced him to free them.

When two of his s***es escaped and were recaptured, Lee either beat them himself or ordered the overseer to "lay it on well." Wesley Norris, one of the s***es who was whipped, recalled that “not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”

Wh**ever the t***h about Lee and s***ery, he was a t*****r.
His career was the United States Army as was his free education.
His loyalty to Virginia cost hundreds of thousands of lives when if he accepted Lincoln's
Offer to command the army would have shortened the war.
Had he led by example there is a good chance other ex-West Point officers would have stayed loyal to the Union. Thus the war would have been shortened.
He could have spoken up against s***ery, undermining the South's justification for secession and war.
I consider Lee an abominable t*****r.