Say whaaat? I said, as I hope any Virginian, however young, would still say. We all know that, while making military service a career at all is morally questionable, and transferring from the U.S. to the Confederate army was imprudent, and even if we concede that it was ethically right to fight in defense of Virginia, the way Lee sacrificed the other two-thirds of Virginia to his own corner is debatable. At best the General is remembered for having made a bad decision based on emotion, and stood by it, and played out the role he'd chosen with admirable fortitude and integrity. But apart from that, we all learned at school, the worst accusation Lee's enemies could make about his character was that as a church member he made a wisecrack about a church controversy that came to sound like a dirty joke. It was a joke about church matters, which was bad enough in those days, but it wasn't dirty at the time. Even before The War, General Lee was part of Virginia's peculiarly blessed and peculiarly awkward landed-poor class, which is why that detail was considered worth notice: the landed poor must never act trashy, as in cracking a dirty joke about a church controversy.
In reply, a Northern apologist shared this link. Read it, fellow Virginians. Though the author is obviously playing picador, read his charges and see if you agree with me on what makes this article credible...and appalling:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/
What's new about Adam Serwer's perspective is that he seems to imagine that these accusations are as new to everyone else as they seem to be to some Yankee readers. They're not new. Recent biographies have tried to skim lightly over this type of thing...
http://fair-use.org/national-anti-slavery-standard/1866/04/14/robert-e-lee-his-brutality-to-his-slaves
In fact, if you've read any substantial amount of nineteenth century American history this discussion of Lee as slaveholder seems a bit like a pious vegan emoting over the details about how "...they not only drank milk, but they ate beef! And some of them even ate...HAM!"
General Lee was not regarded as especially brutal by very many other slaveholders, nor were his views on the benefits of being enslaved to Christians peculiar to slaveholders, to the few who still argued in favor of slavery by 1850, or to White people. (Slavery itself was legal in Africa, and many enslaved people went quietly and even tried to do good work--as long as they believed they would be able to earn their freedom and come home with money, perhaps with wives/husbands and children, and other benefits legal slavery had had in almost every country except the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.)
In claiming that slavery was doing slaveholders more harm (economically) than slaves, Lee was singing along with a considerable choir. Pro-slavery arguments like John C. Calhoun's came from a different generation; General Lee's generation had lived to see just how mistaken Vice-President Calhoun's views had been.
In being wary of slaves' family ties, and breaking up families, Lee might have been less humane than some of his friends but was thereby in the mainstream of his culture.
And when slaves tried to escape, terrorism is the only word for what became standard U.S. practice. Merely tearing off the slave's shirt (he or she might or might not have another shirt that year) and ordering the biggest, meanest man who could be found to take a whip and "lay it on" was normal; washing the crushed, bleeding wounds with salt brine or alcohol was a semi-humane touch a really brutal slaveholder would have withheld; leaving the wounds to be nibbled by vermin, and the slave to die of infections, was one of the tortures the cruel slaveholders were allowed to use. There were others. Those who pressed the matter found that in some times and places there was no actual law against killing a slave outright. In fact there was an unofficial incentive, as the number of slaves exceeded the number of jobs slaves could be trusted to do.
The practice of slavery was the subject of many books in the early nineteenth century. Most went out of print because the best of these books are disgusting to read. Here's one that fits well into the totalitarian undercurrent that's always been rejected by most Americans, but has run through royalism, capital-C Communism, fascism, and modern big-government philosophy ("statism" or socialism):
 |
| https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/10 |
Or consider this testimony from a genteel Southern Lady, showing the extent to which she was able to avoid seeing things considered too disgusting for her to bear:
 |
| https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/10 |
I've found others, while browsing in academic libraries; at the time I felt no desire to buy the books or note the references. You can probably find plenty of material about the "patrollers" and "passes" and regulation of slave churches and so on, if you go to a university library and browse the history section for this period. It won't be fun reading. The simple fact was that slavery as practiced in the United States served the Highest Good of very few people (although Phillis Wheatley may have been one) and didn't even serve the selfish short-term interests of many people. It was foul and filthy and not even profitable. The scramble to fix slavery was not unlike the current scramble to fix Obamacare. "This whole issue is ethically unacceptable if you insist on thinking about it, but since thinking about it would cost me money, let's try not to think about the ethics but just try to save the part that seems to work, in some short-term way, for me!"
So, yes: General Lee was a respectable gentleman you would probably have admired, trusted, even liked if you'd known him personally, and he also did things that turn your stomach, because those were things respectable gentlemen did back then. And if you or I had lived at that time, those things would have been part of our definition of "normal." If we'd been lower-class Whites we would have admired the courtesy of landed-poor-perceived-as-rich Whites whose contempt for us was at least refined enough to be considered subtle, and if we'd been Black we would probably have agreed that runaway slaves could expect a good whipping and ought to be grateful to have their wounds excoriated with salt (which reduced the risk of death from infection); and if we'd been rich Whites we would probably have tsk-tsked about what a pity it was that such a fine couple as the Lees were so much less wealthy than most of their social peer group, and if we'd been in the landed poor class we would probably have agreed that, whatever else they did, the Lees were a good role model for the rest of us. Those were things normal human beings did back then.
I wonder which of the normal everyday things we do will seem barbaric and indefensible to the sixth generation after us, if humanity survives for so long?
No comments:
Post a Comment