Robert E. Lee: Homicidal racist

AP Photo: Steve Helber 

Later: I added "homicidal" to the title, since simply calling Robert E. Lee "racist" seems inadequate given the number of black Americans whose murder he condoned. He was not a garden variety racist. He condoned what we would now call war crimes against black American troops.

Daily Kos quotes the Atlantic:

Soldiers under Lee’s command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender. 

Then, in a spectacle hatched by Lee’s senior corps commander, A. P. Hill, the Confederates paraded the Union survivors through the streets of Petersburg to the slurs and jeers of the southern crowd. 

Lee never discouraged such behavior. As the historian Richard Slotkin wrote in No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, “his silence was permissive.”

....As the historian James McPherson recounts in Battle Cry of Freedom, in October of that same year, Lee proposed an exchange of prisoners with the Union general Ulysses S. Grant. “Grant agreed, on condition that black soldiers be exchanged ‘the same as white soldiers.’” 

Lee’s response was that “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.” 

Because slavery was the cause for which Lee fought, he could hardly be expected to easily concede, even at the cost of the freedom of his own men, that black people could be treated as soldiers and not things. 

Grant refused the offer, telling Lee that “government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers.” 

Despite its desperate need for soldiers, the Confederacy did not relent from this position until a few months before Lee’s surrender.

Trump's moronic interpretation of removing the statue.

Trump uses Robert E. Lee to rehab his own reputation.