Robert E. Lee was a monster. Period.
Robert E. Lee defended a system of human bondage in which more than three million souls were denied the most basic liberties. They were worked to the bone. Raped. Tortured. They were made victim of a broad and horrifying range of unspeakable indignities. Their families were split and their children sold away.
The “gentlemen” and the “ladies” who owned and ran the plantations committed these acts upon their “property” themselves, and/or had such acts committed on their behalf with their full knowledge and support. They reaped the economic benefits of the sweat and the blood and the progeny of the human beings they held in perpetual multi-generational bondage.
Robert E. Lee defended monsters, and fought on behalf of the system those monsters fashioned for their own economic gain and twisted pleasure.
By no stretch of the imagination may Robert E. Lee be considered noble, ethical, moral, or just. His name belongs etched into the annals of 19th Century infamy along with such notables as Franz Joseph. Lee’s name should evoke the kind of shudder we reserve for the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Slobodan Milosevic….
The only place any statue of such a monster should rest is a museum where his crimes against humanity may be placed in proper historical context.
