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Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
It's hard to know how to view Lee IMO. On the one hand, it's easy -- he was a traitor to his country; rather than serving it he led an army against it and worse fought to uphold slavery. On the other hand, there has always been this romantic notion of the tormented warrior reluctantly siding with his beloved Virginia, and doubtless too the Civil War was far more complex than free vs. slave states and the South's grievances were not necessarily all illegitimate.
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At the risk of getting into !@#$% with the ideologues....
Lee wasn't exactly the proponent of slavery he is cast as today. He said he would eliminate it if he could and prevent the war. Little survives of his own ownership as a young man, the Lee's were prominent as a military family but not a wealthy one. It seems he owned a few he had no use for, as a military man, from an inheritance. What actually happened to them does not seem to survive in the record, as I recall. They must have been rented out for some time but that they just disappear later would suggest they eventually were either freed or sold. The slaves at Arlington were owned by his father in law, not him or his wife (often said today to be his wife's). He left his army headquarters in the 1862-1863 winter partially to file the paperwork to free his father-in-laws slaves pursuant to his will as the executor.
There is certainly a criticism of Lee here. But that criticism is that he was not a man ahead of his time. Lee was never a boat rocker in his social world. From today's view, he should have been. He was certainly racist, no moreso than men of his class and time in Virginia, but also not much less so, maybe a little. Lee was not a proponent of the institution he is now seen as the symbol of by the left, and had minimal involvement with it. It seems to have not been an issue he kept in mind much at all.
My personal opinion is that the traitor tag doesn't mean much for revolutionaries. Washington betrayed his country too by the exact same standard. He picked his state over the feds, after Lincoln raised an army to invade his homeland, just as Washington picked the colonies he lived in instead of the greater State ruling them. A fellow is a patriot when we judge his revolution right, a traitor when we judge his revolution wrong. A revolutionary is by definition a traitor. Lee himself saw it as defensive, he didn't want to do it but he could not join an invasion of his home and so did the obvious. I think most in that situation would, really. If the other states raised an army to invade my state, I don't see how I would join them even though I despise my state's corrupt government and radicalism. My friends and family are still here, it is my homeland. I have a hard time holding a man wrong for this choice. I find it easy to despise, say, the South Carolina planters for whom the slavery issue was the driver, but the North's tariff punishment of the South pushing them to leave surely bears some responsibility too. The South left, and aimed to go peacefully, but the North chose to make it a war of conquest. Raising 100,000 men to invade others, no matter how just the ones raising that army see it, will make the people who live in that place tend to prefer to fight against them rather than for. This seems to me natural more than an issue for political narratives.
History as political narrative of the now is popular everywhere, and usually total bunk, oft absurd, always misused. People of the past did bad things by our standards, we can still look at what happened and why, we can look at how values have changed and ask if they are good (in the particular example of slavery, the answer here is obvious, but am I speaking of a greater context of all history), we can look at the virtues and we can admire Lee's gentlemanly virtue, Grant's grace and honor in victory, Cato's dedication to the republic, Washington's military brilliance, Franklin's wit and practical intellect, Aristotle's genius; slave owners all who we can criticize for their acceptance or even advocacy of a thing we see as wrong and unnatural (which I agree with; I just don't see my moral views as eternal truth).