General robert e lee slave owner

As a result of his father-in-law, Lee became owner of hundreds of enslaved workers. During the s, tensions between the abolitionist movement and slave owners reached a boiling point, and the union of states was near a breaking point. Lee entered the fray by halting a raid at Harpers Ferry incapturing radical abolitionist John Brown and his followers.

General robert e lee slave owner

When he was asked to lead Union forces, he resigned from military service rather than fight against his Virginia friends and neighbors. Lee has been widely criticized for his aggressive strategies that led to mass casualties. In the Battle of Antietam, on September 17,Lee made his first attempt at invading the North in the bloodiest single day of the war.

Antietam ended with roughly 23, casualties and the Union claiming victory for General George McClellan. Less than a week later, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The war dragged on for two more years until a victory for Lee became impossible. At the start of the war, Lee and his family headed South, leaving Arlington House, but they did not reclaim their property.

The federal government seized the estate now the site of Arlington National Cemetery and used it for military graves for thousands of fallen Union soldiers, possibly to prevent Lee from ever returning home. Lee Memorialand is open to the public for tours. As a well-educated man with considerable social and military experience, Lee is known for many of his quotes regarding slaveryduty and military service, including:.

In August ofsoon after the end of the war, Lee was invited to serve as president of Washington College now Washington and Lee Universitywhere he and his family are buried. Impressment of Enslaved People and Free Blacks. Race and Reconstruction Washington and Lee University. The First Vote. Death in the Pot, Boys! Manarin, eds. The Wartime Papers of Robert E.

Boston: Little, Brown, Fellman, Michael. The Making of Robert E. New York: Random House, Gallagher, Gary W. Lee the Soldier. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Horn, Jonathan. Pryor, Elizabeth Brown. Lee Through His Private Letters. New York: Viking, First Last. Still, Lee married into one of the wealthiest slave-holding families in Virginia — the Custis family of Arlington and descendants of Martha Washington.

When Lee's father-in-law died, he took leave from the U. Army to run the struggling estate and met resistance from slaves expecting to be freed. Documents show Lee was a cruel figure with his slaves and encouraged his overseers to severely beat slaves captured after trying to escape. One slave said Lee was one of the meanest men she had ever met.

After the Civil War, Lee resisted efforts to build Confederate monuments in his honor and instead wanted the nation to move on from the Civil War. The Lost Cause argued the South knew it was fighting a losing war and decided to fight it anyway on principle. It also tried to argue that the war was not about slavery but high constitutional ideals. As The Lost Cause narrative grew in popularity, proponents pushed to memorialize Lee, ignoring his deficiencies as a general and his role as a slave owner.

Lee monuments went up in the s just as the Ku Klux Klan was experiencing a resurgence and new Jim Crow segregation laws were adopted. The Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, went up in The subjoined statement, taken from the lips of one of his former slaves, indicates the real character of the man:. Custis, Gen. Lee, who had been made executor of the estate, assumed control of the slaves, in number about seventy; it was the general impression among the slaves of Mr.

Custis that on his death they should be forever free; in fact this statement had been made to them by Mr. Lee that by the conditions of the will we must remain slaves for five years; I remained with Gen.