TO THE EDITOR:
I wholeheartedly appreciate Mr. Edwin Yoder’s recent response to my letter, both because I respect the time that he took to craft his reply and because he raises an interesting issue concerning how we are to judge the motivations of those in the past. I persist in my belief that the historical record does not provide support for Mr. Yoder’s view of Robert E. Lee’s feelings about slavery. While the evidence that we have may not justify concluding that Lee enthusiastically supported the institution of slavery, it also does not justify saying that he hated it.
Mr. Yoder and I both reference two key historical facts: first, that Lee wrote a letter to his wife on the subject of slavery and abolitionism; second, that Lee was the executor of the estate of George Custis. Mr. Yoder’s admonition against overconfident speculation on the motives of those long dead is well-taken.
In lieu of putting forth my own beliefs on the reasons Lee might have had for writing the letter to his abolitionist wife, I will briefly discuss its content. Lee does claim that slavery is a “moral and political evil,” but he found it a “greater evil to the white man than to the black race” and said that the “painful discipline (blacks) are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race.”
In fact, the purpose of the letter itself appears to have been to denounce abolitionism rather than to discuss the disadvantages of slavery, a discussion that Lee said would be useless. To uncritically take Lee’s lamentations of the evils of slavery at face value, preferring them to all the evidence to the contrary, is at best to be overly credulous.
With respect to Lee’s treatment of Custis’ slaves, two things seem relatively clear: first, that he felt no obligation to attempt to release the slaves before the expiration of the deadline imposed by Custis’ will, despite the requirement of expedience.
Mr. Yoder writes of Lee’s efforts to pay off Custis’ debts through slave labor, but neglects to mention that the method by which Lee ultimately did so — after his attempt to prolong the enslavement indefinitely was denied by the courts — was that originally specified in the will itself: the sale of land. I here cite “Reading the Man,” a book by leading Lee scholar Elizabeth Pryor.
The second thing that is clear is that Lee felt no obligation to treat Custis’ slaves humanely. Consider the testimony of Mr. Wesley Norris, a slave of Custis who escaped after some years with Lee and was recaptured: “(Lee) then told us he would teach us a lesson we never would forget … (the overseer) was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes … Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by and frequently enjoined Williams to ‘lay it on well.’” Lee then ordered that the wounds of the slaves be salted. What’s more, he stepped beyond the genteel code of paternalism that even pro-slavery men professed (again, citing “Reading the Man”) by splitting families and hiring them out to masters whose behavior he could not guarantee.
It may be the case that Lee enthusiastically participated in the institution of slavery; it may be the case that he did so reluctantly. It does not appear to be the case, though, that he hated it.
