[Cross-posted on Prawfs Blawg]
In a recent speech at Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, former President Trump had this to say about the Battle of Gettysburg:
The Battle of Gettysburg. What an unbelievable — it was so much and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways. It represented such a big portion of the success of this country. Gettysburg, wow. I go to Gettysburg’s Pennsylvania to look and to watch, and the statement of Robert E. Lee, who’s no longer in favor, did you ever notice that? No longer in favor. ‘Never fight up hill, me boys. Never fight up hill,’ he said. Wow. That was a big mistake. He lost his great general.
That was not Trump's first expression of admiration for Robert E. Lee, who committed treason in defense of slavery and did not talk like a pirate. In 2017, Al Brophy and I published an oped in the Chicago Tribune explaining why Trump's comparison of Lee to George Washington was offensive and wrong:
Why Trump is wrong to equate George Washington with Robert E. Lee
By Alfred Brophy and Steven Lubet
PUBLISHED: August 20, 2017
The recent neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Va., was purportedly held to protest the municipality’s decision to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. In an alarming news conference, President Donald Trump seemed to indicate respect for the marchers’ goal, if not their tactics.
If the Lee monument is removed, he asked rhetorically, “are we going to take down statues to George Washington?” The president’s personal lawyer was even more explicit, circulating an email that directly equated Washington with Lee. Under the subject line “The Information that Validates President Trump on Charlottesville,” the email said: “You cannot be against General Lee and be for General Washington (because) there literally is no difference between the two men.”
The comparison, now made by both the president and his attorney, is deeply offensive for some reasons that should be obvious to everyone and others better known to historians.
First and foremost, of course, is the fact that George Washington was a patriot and Robert E. Lee was a traitor. Washington led his countrymen in battle to win the independence of the United States, while Lee did his utmost to destroy our “more perfect Union” for the sake of chattel slavery.
And make no mistake, the very purpose of the Confederacy was to perpetuate and expand slavery. The Confederate Constitution, which Lee took an oath to uphold and defend, prohibited laws “impairing the right of property in negro slaves,” meaning that no state could ever abolish slavery even if it wanted to. In all, there were 10 specific references to slaves or slavery in the Confederate Constitution. The 11 state secession conventions focused on Abraham Lincoln’s election as a threat to slavery, and declared the need to leave the Union to create a slaveholders’ republic.
It is true that Washington was also a slaveholder, but that is where his resemblance to Lee ends. As Matthew Yglesias pointed out in Vox, we revere Washington today because of his many accomplishments on behalf of the nation that had nothing to do with slavery. He was the military leader in the Revolutionary War, he presided over the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and, perhaps most important, he established the precedent of peacefully leaving office at the end of his term.
Lee, in contrast, had virtually no achievements other than the military defense of slavery, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. If Washington is remembered despite his connection to slavery, Lee is remembered only because of it. To be sure, Washington’s slaveholding is, and must be, an indelible stain on his reputation. Lee, by contrast, would have no historical reputation at all if he had not committed treason to defend human bondage.
There is one more distinction between the two men that depends on an understanding of abolitionist history. The lives of Washington (1732-1799) and Lee (1807-1870) did not overlap, and they were divided by a crucial inflection point in American attitudes toward slavery.
It is well understood that the American abolitionist movement began in 1831 when, William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper. There were anti-slavery activists before that time, of course, but they were primarily devoted to measures such as ending the slave trade or limiting the expansion of slavery, as opposed to stamping it out completely. There were emancipationists, but not abolitionists.
During his entire life, Washington was never exposed to the idea that slavery could be entirely abolished. Although it is painful to recognize today, slavery was regarded as normal — or at worst, a necessary evil — among the intellectual elite of the late 18th century. In 1776, every one of the 13 colonies recognized slavery, including those that we now think of as the free states of the North. In 1787, when the Constitution was written, only Massachusetts and Pennsylvania had taken any steps toward emancipation. Washington prospered from the forced labor of slaves. Although some white people in his era knew that slavery was wrong and opposed it, Washington lived in an age when there were few who challenged slavery. Slavery was often considered distasteful, or even morally questionable, in Washington’s lifetime, but ending slavery was never actually a political issue.
In contrast, Lee came into adulthood when slavery was the political issue dividing the United States. Beginning with the Missouri Crisis of 1819-20, there was never a time when slavery — first its extension and later its abolition — was not front and center in American political discourse. As the scion of two leading families in Virginia, it would have been impossible for Lee to ignore the growing demand of freedom for the enslaved.
Washington had no opportunity to hear voices such as Frederick Douglass’ — who was, in fact, doing great work in the 1840s and 1850s — but Lee could not have avoided them. Washington had no way of knowing that the British would abolish slavery throughout their empire, but Lee saw it happen in 1833.
Washington took the small step of freeing some enslaved people in his will — which was far too little to balance the moral ledger — but he never truly comprehended a world without slavery. Lee, however, saw freedom coming and did all he could to resist it.
There can be no defense for slaveholding at any point in history, but Washington’s relationship to the institution was nonetheless far different from Lee’s. The Confederate generals understood exactly what they were fighting for, and it wasn’t just independence. We should all recognize that, even if President Trump doesn’t.
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