Steven Hahn: Rebels Robert E. Lee and Toussaint Louverture
[HNN Editor: In this article, excerpted here, Steven Hahn compares Robert E. Lee and Toussaint Louverture, using two recent biographies to make his points. He calls them both rebels. Below is a section pertaining to Lee. Click on the SOURCE link to read about the Haitian leader.]
Steven Hahn is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of A Nation Under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration.
... [Robert E.] Lee was extremely reticent about his political views. His father was a Federalist, and he appears to have been a Whig (both parties favored a strong and activist central government) until around 1850, when, according to Pryor, he began to sympathize with the Democrats (who favored state rights). But we do not know how he ever voted, and we have no evidence of his participation in party politics. In some respects, Lee's ideals--in good part a product of his experience as an engineer--seemed close to those of an emerging middle class: he appreciated innovation, self-advancement, and self-control. In other respects, they reflected the worlds of the military and the landed gentry, with emphases on order and hierarchy. He was very much a nationalist as well as a Virginian. Although he appears to have found slavery distasteful, his attitudes and behaviors fit in well with those of many other slaveholders.
ee, in sum, was a muddle of contradictions; and he resolved most of them badly. He owned or had an interest in slaves for about as long as he could hold onto them. He believed that black people were better off as slaves in the United States than they would have been had they remained in Africa, and that they should appreciate their circumstances. He thought that slavery was far more of a burden to white people than it was to black people, and he especially disliked slavery's inefficiencies and messiness. He detested abolitionists and blamed them for the country's woes. He was a white supremacist. And when he was instructed to emancipate nearly two hundred slaves as executor of his father-in-law's estate, he did everything possible to postpone it.
Lee's contradictions were most consequential in the secession crisis. During the 1850s, he appeared to symbolize what was left of national cohesion: he served as an officer in the military arm of the federal government of the United States, and even did a brief stint as superintendent of West Point. He enjoyed the fruits of what government largesse had to offer, benefited from a federally sponsored education, and helped to advance the nation's imperial designs; and, although he embraced President Franklin Pierce's bitter denunciation of abolitionism in 1856, he also described secession as "anarchy," as "nothing but revolution."
Why, then, did he resign his post in the U.S. Army, even after the newly elected President Lincoln offered him command of all Union forces, and join the slaveholders' rebellion against the federal government? The answer is that Lee's loyalties to the United States conflicted with his loyalties to Virginia, and he always said that, if required to choose, he would choose his home state. While most scholars recognize this dilemma and regard it as a matter of political principle that they can respect, Pryor is a much tougher critic. Lee, she argues, had several options open to him. He could have stayed in the United States Army, as about 40 percent of Virginia's officers did (including Winfield Scott); he could have sat the war out, supporting neither side, as some other officers did; or he could have made an effort to keep Virginia in the Union or broker a peace, as both statesmen and relatives pleaded with him to do. Instead he "fell back on his old passivity" and "remained resolutely out of the discussions"; when the time came, he threw his lot in with the Confederacy. Whereas Toussaint Louverture became a rebel against slavery, Robert E. Lee became a rebel in its defense, in close accord with the reactionary secessionists, Pryor tells us, on most everything save secession itself.
The misgivings about secession and the Confederacy that Lee may have harbored were jettisoned very early in the war when the Union Army seized and occupied Arlington, the Custis and Lee family estate. "It is hard to overstate the effect the seizure of Arlington had on the Lees," Pryor writes. "From this time forward their identification with the fate of the South never wavered." Indeed, when he assumed command of what would come to be called the Army of Northern Virginia in June 1862, Lee displayed an aggressiveness, a combativeness, and an intent to destroy his enemy that would remain hallmarks of his military disposition....
Read entire article at New Republic
Steven Hahn is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of A Nation Under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration.
... [Robert E.] Lee was extremely reticent about his political views. His father was a Federalist, and he appears to have been a Whig (both parties favored a strong and activist central government) until around 1850, when, according to Pryor, he began to sympathize with the Democrats (who favored state rights). But we do not know how he ever voted, and we have no evidence of his participation in party politics. In some respects, Lee's ideals--in good part a product of his experience as an engineer--seemed close to those of an emerging middle class: he appreciated innovation, self-advancement, and self-control. In other respects, they reflected the worlds of the military and the landed gentry, with emphases on order and hierarchy. He was very much a nationalist as well as a Virginian. Although he appears to have found slavery distasteful, his attitudes and behaviors fit in well with those of many other slaveholders.
ee, in sum, was a muddle of contradictions; and he resolved most of them badly. He owned or had an interest in slaves for about as long as he could hold onto them. He believed that black people were better off as slaves in the United States than they would have been had they remained in Africa, and that they should appreciate their circumstances. He thought that slavery was far more of a burden to white people than it was to black people, and he especially disliked slavery's inefficiencies and messiness. He detested abolitionists and blamed them for the country's woes. He was a white supremacist. And when he was instructed to emancipate nearly two hundred slaves as executor of his father-in-law's estate, he did everything possible to postpone it.
Lee's contradictions were most consequential in the secession crisis. During the 1850s, he appeared to symbolize what was left of national cohesion: he served as an officer in the military arm of the federal government of the United States, and even did a brief stint as superintendent of West Point. He enjoyed the fruits of what government largesse had to offer, benefited from a federally sponsored education, and helped to advance the nation's imperial designs; and, although he embraced President Franklin Pierce's bitter denunciation of abolitionism in 1856, he also described secession as "anarchy," as "nothing but revolution."
Why, then, did he resign his post in the U.S. Army, even after the newly elected President Lincoln offered him command of all Union forces, and join the slaveholders' rebellion against the federal government? The answer is that Lee's loyalties to the United States conflicted with his loyalties to Virginia, and he always said that, if required to choose, he would choose his home state. While most scholars recognize this dilemma and regard it as a matter of political principle that they can respect, Pryor is a much tougher critic. Lee, she argues, had several options open to him. He could have stayed in the United States Army, as about 40 percent of Virginia's officers did (including Winfield Scott); he could have sat the war out, supporting neither side, as some other officers did; or he could have made an effort to keep Virginia in the Union or broker a peace, as both statesmen and relatives pleaded with him to do. Instead he "fell back on his old passivity" and "remained resolutely out of the discussions"; when the time came, he threw his lot in with the Confederacy. Whereas Toussaint Louverture became a rebel against slavery, Robert E. Lee became a rebel in its defense, in close accord with the reactionary secessionists, Pryor tells us, on most everything save secession itself.
The misgivings about secession and the Confederacy that Lee may have harbored were jettisoned very early in the war when the Union Army seized and occupied Arlington, the Custis and Lee family estate. "It is hard to overstate the effect the seizure of Arlington had on the Lees," Pryor writes. "From this time forward their identification with the fate of the South never wavered." Indeed, when he assumed command of what would come to be called the Army of Northern Virginia in June 1862, Lee displayed an aggressiveness, a combativeness, and an intent to destroy his enemy that would remain hallmarks of his military disposition....