Sounds good and it is what we have been taught but think about it; what is a civil war? It is a war between two or more groups in a country or nation fighting for control. By definition it cannot be anything other than that. Both groups want to own the country and impose their will on the populace by winning the civil war and forming the government. What happened in the USA? Were there two groups trying to take over and own the nation? To form a government and control the USA? No, there were not. One group (the North under Lincoln) owned the government and never seriously risked losing it. They had control throughout. The other group (the secessionist states) only wanted to go their own way and form their own country, their own nation. They never offered a threat to the North or wanted to take over and run the USA. Thus by definition there was no civil war. The only war that was fought was a war to stop one group from leaving the union, a union that was voluntary and had no laws against secession in fact three other states had already seceded or threatened to secede with no action taken against them. Why? Perhaps it was to protect the racketeering US government's control over the South, to retain the income by the way of tariffs and to "wet it's beak". I can see that as true, and I can see easily that the t***h of the war will never be admitted lest it be shown as it truly was; an evil and calculated attack on a peaceful neighbor that had been driven to despair by the avaricious North and felt that leaving the Union was the only way they had to survive. Proof? If the South had won, something they could never have been able to do, do you think that they would have turned around and invaded the North? Taken over the government of the entire USA? Did they ever say or do anything that would make a reasonable person believe that? No, the best they could have had was the freedom to live apart from their mighty neighbors in the North. Independence. Something that the original United States had once believed in but, sadly, believed in no longer.

I've read up on Andersonville, and it was a horror show. There was a deadline several feet back from the walls. Any prisoner who wandered that far was shot, and many were shot that were well behind the deadline. There were 44,000 prisoners on just 16 acres of land. Someone said on this topic, that there was one stream or ditch, and that's true. The men peed in it to make it rise enough to get 'water' out. Then they boiled the crap out of it to be able to drink it. When a man died, his cloths were taken and passed over a fire to k**l the lice. The author said the lice popped like popcorn.
One of the meaner regiments was the New Yorker's ( I don't recall the number). If other prisoners had anything they wanted, food, bedding, clothes, they attacked as a gang and took wh**ever they wanted.
Once some local women brought a wagon load pf vegetables , melons, and fruit but were chased away with insults and cursing.
When the commanding officer was hung for war crimes, he stated that he, single handedly, k**led more Union soldiers than than anybody else in the war.

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.”

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: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.”

Soldiers under Lee’s command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender. Then, in a spectacle hatched by Lee’s senior corps commander A.P. Hill, the Confederates paraded the Union survivors through the streets of Petersburg to the slurs and jeers of the southern crowd. Lee never discouraged such behavior. As the historian Richard Slotkin wrote in No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, “his silence was permissive.”

In the minds of most Yankees, the Civil War was all about Southern s***ery. They seldom mention s***ery in the North that continued even after the Civil War. As for Robert E. Lee, it is amazing that books have been written with flare and not so subtle idiom about his mistreatment of s***es. For a man who wrote no memoir but did write personal letters that can only be described as a discordant mix of flirtation, joshing, lyrical touches, and stern religious adjuration coupled with official dispatches that are so impersonal and (generally) unselfserving as to seem above the fray, I find it amusing that a 600 page book was concocted to provide a personal inventory of his worth and merit as a human, a southerner, and a general. Of course to do this one must ignore everything else that has been written and indeed his own letters.

When Americans South, and begrudgingly, the North decided to embrace R. E. Lee as a national as well as a Southern hero, he was generally described as antis***ery. This conclusion was not based on any public position he shouted in public squares but rather on a very personal letter he wrote to his wife: “In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that s***ery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages.”

That passage would make one believe that he saw s***ery and the management of those s***es as wrong and should he have his way, they would be freed immediately. But, he goes on to write: “I think it however a greater evil to the white 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.”

So, does that passage in his personal letter lend evidence that he was a cruel s***e holder. Not hardly.

General Lee was a very complicated man and I believe him to have been heat broken about the war. He confided to a friend, “If Virginia stands by the old Union, so will I. But if she secedes (though I do not believe in secession as a constitutional right, nor that there is sufficient cause for revolution), then I will follow my native State with my sword, and, if need be, with my life.”

Our views are colored by the side one takes. Just as we do with our current leadership, there is no gray area.... President Trump, although rough and lacking in sk**ls of charm, he is loved.... or because he is rough and lacking sk**ls of charm, he is h**ed. So was the split in the Civil War. The North took secession as an act of aggression, to be countered accordingly. When Lincoln called on the loyal states for troops to invade the South, Southerners could see the issue as defense not of s***ery but of homeland. Virginia had already v**ed against secession 2 to 1, but with the invasion.... the winds of fickle providence changed to 2 to 1 in favor. One could sit and argue the sanity of this, or even the practicality. But, we would be arguing a decision clearly tainted by modern day views. We can not put aside what we know happened after the first bullets were loosened on the first human causality which would lead to years of blood shed. But, General Lee was not clairvoyant and the future was yet to be realized. Not once did he suspect that years later, just before his surrender at Appomattox, one of his nephews would find him in the field, “very grave and tired,” carrying around a fried chicken leg wrapped in a piece of bread, which a Virginia countrywoman had pressed upon him but for which he couldn’t muster any hunger.

I would very much like to say that General Lee did not make mistakes, but the t***h is, he made mistakes on the battle field and in executing his father-in-laws estate (where his wife inherited s***es). I could point out that each major blunder of his subordinates—Ewell’s failure to take the high ground of Cemetery Hill on July 1, Stuart’s getting out of touch and leaving Lee unapprised of what force he was facing, and the lateness of Longstreet’s attack on the second day—either was not a blunder at all (if Longstreet had attacked earlier he would have encountered an even stronger Union position) or was caused by a lack of forcefulness and specificity in Lee’s orders. Although all true, does not change the outcome of the battle of July 1-3, 1863. The mistake he made in executing his father-in-laws estate was not immediately freeing those s***es. However, in his defense, the estate will was clear, the s***es were to be freed in seven years. And General Lee, as honoring the wishes.... did in fact release all the s***es on the seventh year.

Now for some hard to wrap the mind around facts about s***ery. It is a myth that all white settlers owned s***es and farms could not exist without their labor. In fact, the first documented s***e owner was a black. Another issue with the newly taught history they conveniently leave out facts, such as less than 5 percent of w****s in the south owned black s***es. Did you know, prior to 1654, all Africans in the thirteen colonies were held in indentured servitude and were released after a contracted period with many of the indentured receiving land and equipment after their contracts for work expired? Probably not.

If you love history and digging through old records, you may know this, but in 1860 only a small minority of w****s owned s***es. According to the US census report for that last year before the Civil War, there were nearly 27 million w****s in the country. Some eight million of them lived in the s***eholding states. The same records has an eye-opening set of records. There were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned s***es. Even if all s***eholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of w****s in the country.

The figures show conclusively that, when free, b****s disproportionately became s***e masters in pre-Civil War America. The statistics outlined above show that about 28 percent of free b****s owned s***es—as opposed to less than 4.8 percent of southern w****s, and dramatically more than the 1.4 percent of all w***e A******ns who owned s***es.

And Georgia, often thought of as a large s***e state, actually placed a ban on s***e ownership. James Oglethorpe (1696–1785) was a British general who founded the colony of Georgia in 1732. From the very beginning, Oglethorpe ensured that s***ery was banned in the colony, and that Africans were barred from entering the territory.

Can anyone justify the treatment of s***es.... I do not think anyone would even try to justify how many were treated. Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. S***e owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives. Cruelty abound; they were beaten, hung, mutilated, and men were castrated for disobedience. But, I do not need to go further into the gory details. Enough is written about s***e trade, but if you are thinking about those captured by b****s on the African Continent, you would be wrong.

King James II and Charles I led a continued effort to ens***e the Irish. Britain’s famed Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor. King James II began the white s***e trade when he sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as s***es to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main s***es sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish s***es.

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early s***es to the New World were actually white.

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were k**led by the English and another 300,000 were sold as s***es. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as s***es in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also t***sported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as s***es to English settlers.

Many people today will avoid calling the Irish s***es what they truly were: S***es. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish s***es were nothing more than human cattle.

If you are, and I have sincere doubts that you are, still reading I can provide more historical facts. But, as most in today's society, my bet is you stopped reading around the second paragraph. Too much information to be absorbed in the 63 second attention span of most progressives. One last comment, or answer to your unasked question.... no, I am not Irish.

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.”

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: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.”

Soldiers under Lee’s command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender. Then, in a spectacle hatched by Lee’s senior corps commander A.P. Hill, the Confederates paraded the Union survivors through the streets of Petersburg to the slurs and jeers of the southern crowd. Lee never discouraged such behavior. As the historian Richard Slotkin wrote in No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, “his silence was permissive.”

#1, Lee did not own any S***ES. His wife inherited S***ES from her father when he died. She owned the S***ES. He released the S***ES upon the will of his father-in-law's instruction, WILL, not before, not after. Robert E. Lee was in the service of the US Military until he was forced to chose between the Government and his home State of Virginia, he chose Virginia as at that time there were States rights and your home State took precedence over the Federal Gov. Go Back and read the history Penny Lynn has laid out for all of us to read. She has gone to a lot of trouble to make it simple to understand. I don't know if you l*****t can't read, can't concentrate, or just are too hard headed to appreciate the written word and history. Mike