By Tom Bennett
I was raised in the South. Civil War soldiers fell not far from where I was raised.
I was taught to idolize the Confederate dead. I studied the history of the war both in school and on my own time. I ran through the field of my Georgia farm, pretending to be a rebel fighting off the Yankees.
Robert E. Lee was a household name. As I have learned more about him throughout my life, I believe he would never have wanted to be immortalized — and furthermore, if he were here today, he would call for the statues of Confederate dead to be taken down.
While it is true the Robert E. Lee was a slave owner as well as the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, the largest of the Confederate forces, he felt that slavery was “a moral and political evil that should end.”
After the war, Lee’s wife, Mary Custis Lee, paid for freed slaves to be send to the African free nation of Liberia. Lee’s slaves also attended school and learned trades. (This was illegal at the time.)
When asked about his view of Confederate war monuments being built, Lee stated that Americans “were not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow those nations who endeavor to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion those feelings engendered.”
A Confederate widow asked Lee what should be done with her old rebel flag. Lee suggested that she fold it away or give it to a museum.
Robert E. Lee was no Nazi. He was a Southern gentleman. Those who wish for “the South to rise again” and those who seek to use Lee as a symbol of division must understand that they share no ideology with the man. Lee would have stood against these Nazis and with his fellow man.
Robert E. Lee was a Confederate general; he was articulate and spoke well for himself. Let’s not seek to put words in his long-dead mouth. No one deserves the right to impose their philosophies upon him.
Robert E. Lee never wanted those statues, and he would want them to be taken down.
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