Lee Trunks... Slave Ledgers...

[5fish]

Remember those trunks found in a vault a while back... Elizabeth Pryor gets to be the only person to read everything and write about it. I think the biggest thing is the slave ledgers and little is spoken of them... She did publish a book from the letters....

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143113909/?tag=civilwartalkc-20

Here is an article about a person trying to do research on General Lee... but finds the protective nature of the Lee family and learns about those two trunks in a vault...

http://www.salon.com/2011/07/31/lee_papers_lafantasie/

The two trunks that were found have been open a while back...
https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-193840798/treasures-of-robert-e-lee-discovered-a-lee-descendant

Here is a question and answer interview with Elizabeth Pryor

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2007/06/24/the-private-thoughts-of-robert-e-lee

Remember Lee did not punish his slaves well it s not true... Elizabeth Pryor confirms 1859 stories...

http://www.crossroadsofwar.org/wp-content/uploads/CWS_Robert-E.-Lees-Slaves.pdf

Then there is this site that reviews Elizabeth Pryor work and thinks she glossed over Lee's failing...

http://leepapers.blogspot.com/

 

[Matt McKeon]

I read Pryor's Reading the Man, and recommend it. The little chart in the above post is not sometime Pryor argued. Pryor was offering a useful, and well researched, corrective to an iconic portrait, but this seems like its going the other way.

 

[5fish]

, but this seems like its going the other way.

You want the romantic version of Lee... not this one... A white supremacist one...

The Myth of the Kindly General Lee

The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.

www.theatlantic.com

Snip...

White supremacy does not “violate” Lee’s “most fundamental convictions.” White supremacy was one of Lee’s most fundamental convictions.

Snip...

Lee’s cruelty as a slave master 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 slave 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 slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”

Snip...

Pryor writes, nearly led to a slave revolt, in part because the enslaved 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.

Snip...

During his invasion of Pennsylvania, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia enslaved free black Americans and brought them back to the South as property. Pryor writes that “evidence links virtually every infantry and cavalry unit in Lee’s army” to the abduction of free black Americans, “with the activity under the supervision of senior officers.”

Snip...

As Pryor writes, “fighting against brave and competent African Americans challenged every underlying tenet of southern society.” The Confederate response to this challenge was to visit every possible atrocity and cruelty upon black soldiers whenever possible, from enslavement to execution.

Snip...

Lee counseled others to hire white labor instead of the freedmen, observing “that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving.”

Snip...

Publicly, Lee argued against the enfranchisement of black Americans, and raged against Republican efforts to enforce racial equality in the South. Lee told Congress that black people lacked the intellectual capacity of white people and “could not vote intelligently,” and that granting them suffrage would “excite unfriendly feelings between the two races.” Lee explained that “the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.” To the extent that Lee believed in reconciliation, it was among white people, and only on the precondition that black people would be denied political power and therefore the ability to shape their own fate

Snip...

As the historian James McPherson recounts in Battle Cry of Freedom, in October of that same year, Lee proposed an exchange of prisoners with the Union general Ulysses S. Grant. “Grant agreed, on condition that black soldiers be exchanged ‘the same as white soldiers.’” Lee’s response was that “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.” Because slavery was the cause for which Lee fought, he could hardly be expected to easily concede, even at the cost of the freedom of his own men, that black people could be treated as soldiers and not things. Grant refused the offer, telling Lee that “government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers.” Despite its desperate need for soldiers, the Confederacy did not relent from this position until a few months before Lee’s surrender

You need to read the article to get the full effect of it...

 

[diane]

I'd say demonizing the man is just as bad as romanticizing him. Again, one needs to understand the 'peculiar institution'. It was at work in all aspects of Southern life, spilling into Northern life as well. Forrest and Lee were on exactly the same page about race and slavery - except Lee would likely have excluded Forrest from his aristocratic company for being a slave trader. The above descriptions of Lee's cruelty are actually what was thought to be fitting and correct behavior toward slaves. (I do think it's exaggerated to fit a bill, however.) Ought to watch Green Mile - those ingrained ideas continued for at least three generations. Like Israel, the South had to wander in the wilderness until a generation not raised in Egypt came forth!

 

[Matt McKeon]

You want the romantic version of Lee... not this one... A white supremacist one...

The Myth of the Kindly General Lee

The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.

www.theatlantic.com

Snip...

White supremacy does not “violate” Lee’s “most fundamental convictions.” White supremacy was one of Lee’s most fundamental convictions.

Snip...

Lee’s cruelty as a slave master 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 slave 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 slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”

Snip...

Pryor writes, nearly led to a slave revolt, in part because the enslaved 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.

Snip...

During his invasion of Pennsylvania, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia enslaved free black Americans and brought them back to the South as property. Pryor writes that “evidence links virtually every infantry and cavalry unit in Lee’s army” to the abduction of free black Americans, “with the activity under the supervision of senior officers.”

Snip...

As Pryor writes, “fighting against brave and competent African Americans challenged every underlying tenet of southern society.” The Confederate response to this challenge was to visit every possible atrocity and cruelty upon black soldiers whenever possible, from enslavement to execution.

Snip...

Lee counseled others to hire white labor instead of the freedmen, observing “that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving.”

Snip...

Publicly, Lee argued against the enfranchisement of black Americans, and raged against Republican efforts to enforce racial equality in the South. Lee told Congress that black people lacked the intellectual capacity of white people and “could not vote intelligently,” and that granting them suffrage would “excite unfriendly feelings between the two races.” Lee explained that “the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.” To the extent that Lee believed in reconciliation, it was among white people, and only on the precondition that black people would be denied political power and therefore the ability to shape their own fate

Snip...

As the historian James McPherson recounts in Battle Cry of Freedom, in October of that same year, Lee proposed an exchange of prisoners with the Union general Ulysses S. Grant. “Grant agreed, on condition that black soldiers be exchanged ‘the same as white soldiers.’” Lee’s response was that “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.” Because slavery was the cause for which Lee fought, he could hardly be expected to easily concede, even at the cost of the freedom of his own men, that black people could be treated as soldiers and not things. Grant refused the offer, telling Lee that “government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers.” Despite its desperate need for soldiers, the Confederacy did not relent from this position until a few months before Lee’s surrender

You need to read the article to get the full effect of it...

Friend, you've a little free with deciding "what I want." I refer you to every single post I've ever made here or at the old place.

 

[5fish]

you've a little free with deciding "what I want."

I am free to tease you as well...

 

[Jim Klag]

I am free to tease you as well...

No, you're not.

 

[O' Be Joyful]

No, you're not.

Why not?

Cain't you take a joke...oh...never mind.