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.

The Myth of the Kindly General Lee

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.

Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in r*******n in defense of s***ery. This year, the removal of Lee’s statue in New Orleans has inspired a new round of commentary about Lee, not to mention protests on his behalf by w***e s*********ts.

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and dev**ed Christian man who abhorred s***ery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

There is little t***h in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.

But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase s***ery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”

There are unwitting victims of this campaign—those who lack the knowledge to separate history from sentiment. Then there are those whose reverence for Lee relies on replacing the actual Lee with a mythical figure who never truly existed.

In the Richmond Times Dispatch, R. David Cox wrote that “For w***e s*********t protesters to invoke his name violates Lee’s most fundamental convictions.” In the conservative publication Townhall, Jack Kerwick concluded that Lee was “among the finest human beings that has ever walked the Earth.” John Daniel Davidson, in an essay for The Federalist, opposed the removal of the Lee statute in part on the grounds that Lee “arguably did more than anyone to unite the country after the war and bind up its wounds.” Praise for Lee of this sort has flowed forth from past historians and presidents alike.

This is too divorced from Lee’s actual life to even be classed as fan fiction; it is simply historical illiteracy.

W***e s*******y does not “violate” Lee’s “most fundamental convictions.” W***e s*******y was one of Lee’s most fundamental convictions.

Lee was a s***eowner—his own views on s***ery were explicated in an 1856 letter that it often misquoted to give the impression that Lee was some kind of an abolitionist. In the letter, he describes s***ery as “a moral & political evil,” but goes on to explain that:

I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The b****s are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy.

The argument here is that s***ery is bad for white people, good for black people, and most importantly, it is better than abolitionism; emancipation must wait for divine intervention. That black people might not want to be s***es does not enter into the equation; their opinion on the subject of their own bondage is not even an afterthought to Lee.

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 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.”

His s***es regarded him as "the worst man I ever see"

Snip>>>The issue became a matter of litigation in the probate court of Alexandria County after several of the male members of the Bingham s***e family, Reuben, Henry, Edward and Austin, refused to accept assignments to work at jobs off the premises of Arlington.

Reuben, the leader of the r*******n, told General Lee, who was acting then as executor and manager of Arlington Plantation, that he and his brothers were as free as he. A melee ensued between them when General Lee organized a posse to forcibly remove Reuben and his brothers to the Arlington county jail.

After a short struggle, the rebelling s***es were subdued and taken to the jail where they were held until taken south to Richmond under guard. Wesley and Mary Norris, siblings in the Norris s***e family, fled across the Potomac into Maryland at this time, but were caught before they reached the Pennsylvania line and returned to Virginia: whereupon they too were sent down to Richmond.

In October 1858, General Lee wrote to the Adjutant General of the Army requesting an extension of his leave of absence from Texas. In his letter Lee stated that the terms of emancipation in Custis's will were subject to different interpretations, because in his view the timing of emancipation depended upon the condition in the will that called for the payment of the monetary legacies Custis bequeathed to Lee’s four daughters.

As executor of the Custis estate, General Lee was, in fact, bound by principles of equity to carry out the wishes of the testator under circumstances in which he believed the testator's wishes were in conflict. Custis apparently wished that the s***es be emancipated immediately, yet the only way payment of his legacies to General Lee's daughters could be funded was through the cash received from the labor of the s***es. To resolve this conflict, General Lee applied to the circuit court of Arlington for an interpretation of the will provisions, and for an order specifying the point in time when the will’s provision regarding emancipation must be executed. Eventually, the Court ruled that Lee was legally empowered to hold the s***es in service to the estate until the legacies were satisfied, but that, notwithstanding this, the s***es had to be freed no later than five years from the date of Custis's death, October 10, 1857. (The available evidence does not disclose whether the interest of the s***es were represented by independent counsel in the probate court proceeding, but the Court's ruling seems fair under the circumstances.)

It appears that, over the ensuing five years, in addition to paying the legacies, the income derived from the labor of the s***es was used by General Lee to renovate dilapidated farm buildings and repair farm machinery that had fallen into disuse in the years before Custis's death as well as tend to the farms. The healthy adult male and female s***es located at the tidewater farms were needed there to secure the animals, harvest the annual crops of rye, oats, wheat and corn and bring in the hay; while the s***es located at Arlington, who were not needed as garden boys, yard girls, gardeners, market men, coachmen, maids and the like, were available for hiring out to third parties for the value of their labor.

In December 1862, shortly after the battle of Fredericksburg, General Lee, as executor of the Custis estate, fulfilled the duty he owed the Custis family s***es by executing a deed of manumission which listed most of the s***es recorded on the estate inventory lists.

https://americancivilwar.com/authors/Joseph_Ryan/Articles/General-Lee-S***es/General-Lee-Family-S***es.html

There is quite a bit on Lee and how he treated s***es he inherited from his father-in-law if you look. Of course if you are happy knowing what you know then by all means ignore what is written and just keep on keeping on...

We, today, see ourselves as a nation, not as states. Back then, they saw themselves as states more than a nation. Men were very loyal to their state at that time. REL loved Virginia and would refuse to take arms against her. In those troubled times, I think it's unfair to call men t*****rs because they were forced to display their loyalty. The other West Point officers did the same. Lee spoke out against s***ery (and owned none) during the time that you mention.
Look up the various reasons for the war even happening. S***ery was a big part, but only a part.

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.”

Only because you pointed it out.... YES Lincoln was a horrible president. I bet you do not know much about him. So, another long history lesson.

Did you know, or were you ever taught that President Lincoln in 1864 had the military break into the offices of two newspapers, they took documents and closed them down. Why...oh, they printed unfavorable comments about him. And to make it worse, he put the poor men in jail for three months. In this day and age, we would call that government censorship. Not too bad, right.

Anyway, While we’re on the subject of free speech and all, let’s meet Clement L. Vallandigham. An Ohio Democrat during the dark days of the Civil War, he was by all accounts a bit of a miserable i***t, who liked nothing better than to rile his Republican rivals by opposing everything they stood for. Since this was the 1860s, that meant campaigning to end the war and criticizing Lincoln for his cavalier approach to civil liberties. A criticism Lincoln responded to by having Vallandigham arrested, tried by the military, and deported behind enemy lines. To be clear, Vallandigham was not a spy, a t*****r, or even a threat. He just campaigned against Lincoln.

Without waiting for congressional approval, Abe authorized the indefinite imprisonment of citizens across the Union, culminating in an 1862 attempt to have habeas corpus suspended for draft-dodgers—a suspension he intended to enforce by deploying the military against state judges. Although it was a measure born of desperate times, it allowed Jefferson Davis to portray the Confederacy as a place where liberty was valued—a move that nearly won the South some vital allies in Europe. It could have been an utter disaster—the fact that it wasn’t only proves how little appetite Europe had for declaring war. Sorry, I am assuming that everyone is familiar with the legal stuff. If you’ve ever so much as been in the same room as a lawyer, you’ll know that habeas corpus is an important legal principle. In essence, it means any state that orders your arrest has to then justify your continued imprisonment before a judge. Getting rid of it means anyone can be summarily rounded up, imprisoned, and left to rot.

For a president widely agreed to have been a strategic genius, Lincoln sure had a knack for picking incompetent generals. In November 1862, he ordered talentless nobody Ambrose Burnside to take control of the Army of the Potomac—an outfit so well-trained and equipped that anybody should have been able to lead them to victory. Do you want to guess what happened next?

Five days after taking up his post, Burnside unveiled to Lincoln his plan for a daring assault on the Confederate capital. The President gave his approval and Burnside marched his troops into the Battle of Fredericksburg—a humiliating slaughter that saw the Union defeated with embarrassing ease. Undeterred by his costly failure, Burnside waited just over a month before launching his next offensive—a little something known today as the Mud March.

Originally a plan to outflank General Lee’s troops, the Mud March quickly dissolved into farce after Burnside led his men through an apocalyptic rainstorm. Bogged down, the Yankees fell over one another, marched into each other’s units, and created a vast human traffic jam that sent the Confederates into hysterics. To make matters worse, Burnside attempted to boost morale by issuing each man hard liquor—resulting in a mass of disheveled, drunken Union soldiers brawling with one another in a seething mess of mud and idiocy. Lincoln finally removed the incompetent general in January 1863, but not before he’d single-handedly made a mockery of the entire Union war effort.

Everyone knows that Lincoln freed the s***es. But.... did you know about when Union soldiers under the command of General David H****r had managed to occupy a fair chunk of South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia. With the Confederacy now vanquished in the region, General H****r did something both deeply heroic and entirely unexpected—he declared all former s***es in the occupied states free. Sadly for the 100,000 or so s***es his proclamation affected, a week later the “Great Emancipator” reversed his order, crushing any dreams of freedom they may have had.

Sure, H****r never really had the right to issue his order, and Lincoln himself would devise the general Emancipation Proclamation just a few months later. Still, the incident remains a reminder that Lincoln valued other things above abolition—namely, his own inflated ego.

Now while we are talking about Generals, how can we ever forget General Joseph Hooker, he may not have been as comically incompetent as old Ambrose Burnside up there, but in his own special way, he was probably worse. Appointed to replace Burnside after the Mud March, he was so obviously unsuitable for command that Lincoln personally wrote him a letter telling him as much—an odd move, given that it was Lincoln who’d made the appointment. Within months of getting the gig, Hooker had already ratcheted up a decisive defeat—sending his troops into the hellish Battle of Chancellorsville.

By rights, this should have been an easy Union victory. Lee’s army of 60,000 was spread thin and facing a Yankee force of over 130,000 men. Instead, Lee’s military genius and Hooker’s complete lack of it combined to create a Union slaughter. 17,000 Yankee troops were k**led or wounded, 5,000 more than during the nightmare of Fredericksburg. When Lee’s victorious troops subsequently made a dash for Pennsylvania, Hooker completely failed to stop or counter them and wasted valuable time focusing on the Confederate capital instead of giving chase. Finally, on the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg, Lincoln removed him from his post—the first smart move he made in nine months of hiring i***ts.

Now back to the s***es. Lincoln’s modern reputation is that of a brilliant man who would stop at nothing to do the right thing, especially regarding s***ery. The t***h is somewhat less perfect. In reality, Lincoln was first and foremost a pragmatist. Sometimes that pragmatism led him to support some truly d********g laws.

Take the Fugitive S***e Act. This depressing bit of psychopathy made it a citizen’s duty to hunt down and report runaway s***es on pain of imprisonment and an enormous fine. It also stripped all black people of what few rights they had and made it possible for free-born men to be ens***ed if a plantation owner simply claimed they were a runaway. Not only did Lincoln not oppose this law, he ran on a platform of enforcing it in the Northern States, most of which had traditionally ignored it. But even this doesn’t come close to his support for the 13th Amendment.

Yes, there were two 13th Amendments—the one Lincoln’s now associated with, and the one he openly supported in his inaugural address. The purpose of this original 13th Amendment was to make it illegal for congress to interfere with s***ery in the South, virtually guaranteeing it would last forever. That’s right—the man who eventually “freed the s***es” very nearly condemned them to an eternity of servitude instead. How different history could have been.

By now, you’ve probably guessed that Lincoln wasn’t exactly the great e******y-lover that Hollywood likes to pretend he was, but there’s one ethnic group who felt that more keenly than perhaps any other. For all their talk of e******y, the first Republican presidency in history was marked by a shocking wave of brutality toward Native Americans.

In 1863, the Lincoln administration oversaw one of the biggest land-grabs in history—turfing the Navajos and Mescalero Apaches out of their New Mexico territory and into a reservation called Bosque Redondo 725 kilometers (450 mi) away. The journey there was the very definition of a death march. Thousands of people were herded across the baking desert with little in the way of supplies, surrounded by an army who summarily executed stragglers. When the survivors made it to Bosque Redondo, they were shoved into squalid, disease-ridden camps and simply left to die. By the time the decision was reversed, one-third of those interred were dead of exposure or starvation.

As bad as that is, it’s far from the only example. Massacres were frighteningly routine during these years and often went unpunished—unless it was the Native Americans doing the massacring, in which case execution was de rigueur. That’s before we get onto the devastation caused by the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 and the thousands it displaced. In short, the presidency of Abraham Lincoln wasn’t a great time to be Native American.

Concentration camps was not just a German thing. No, It wasn’t just Native Americans who got to experience death camps during the Lincoln years. Welcome to Camp Douglas—the sort of place for which the phrase “hell on Earth” was coined. If you were a Confederate troop during the grim years of 1862–65, there was a good chance you’d wind up there—and an equally high chance that you’d die soon after. Intended to house 6,000 prisoners, it usually held closer to 12,000, and such severe overcrowding had consequences.

There wasn’t enough food, so inmates were fed on spoiled meat and potatoes. Sanitation was nonexistent and a lack of sewers meant piles of waste built up, creating a haven for bacteria. Smallpox, malaria, and other diseases ran rife, k*****g dozens. Rainstorms would turn the camp into a fetid mud bath, while the winter would freeze inmates to death. Vermin had run of the place and the prison hospital was overflowing with the bodies of the sick and disabled.

It was Lincoln’s Guantanamo—a chamber of horrors on American soil that made a mockery of any claims of decency and justice. Although Jefferson Davis’ Confederacy oversaw equally brutal camps, Douglas remains a stain on Lincoln’s record as a place where ideals of hope and democracy went to die.

All of these things are bad... practically damning. But, the number one reason he was on my list as a VERY BAD PRESIDENT ....
Most of us probably don’t associate Abraham Lincoln with concepts like ethnic cleansing, but Honest Abe had one thing he wanted almost as much as a s***ery-free America—an America that was completely and utterly devoid of black people.

For nearly his entire life, Lincoln supported—and, at times, was the driving force behind—a plan to round up every black person in the country and forcibly ship them to another one. This wasn’t just an idle wish, either. In 1863, Lincoln personally approved an order for freed s***es to be sent to remote colonies in Central and South America. A “test” shipment of 450 emancipated s***es was even dispatched to Haiti, where their new colony was devastated by smallpox and starvation and the survivors had to be rescued. As late as fall 1864, Lincoln still intended to go ahead with this plan in some form or another, believing that w****s and b****s would never be able to live together as equals. It’s possible that he even held this less-than-enlightened position right up until the very end.

It turns out that old Abe wasn’t quite the saint everyone would have you believe.
Before anyone asks. No, there is no internet link for what I wrote. You will need to visit a library and read a real book....