Regarding The Flap Over Confederate Statues

[Rev. Rye]

I suppose not entirely cottoning to the Nazi ideology helped with that; sort of why I think Robert E. Lee, who didn't particularly care for slavery, deserves a pass despite fighting for a nation whose sole raison d'etre was the preservation of slavery in its worst forms. I'm sure I've discussed to death the long-standing disconnect between why many Confederates fought for the South and why the South split in the first place.

As a slave-owner who doesn't particularly care for slavery, Lee is damned with faint praise.

As is Jefferson, evidently. The guy had a history of some very complex (if blatantly self-contradictory) views of slavery. He condemned slavery in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, and, by that time, he had over a hundred slaves, and was one of the biggest slaveowners (if not the biggest) in the state of Virginia (due partly to his debts making it hard for him to sell them).

He spent most of his political career, from his career in the House of Burgesses to his post-Presidential days advocating for gradual emancipation of the slaves (in hindsight, a gradual approach, focused on giving the former slaves the ability to transition and learn a trade, could very well have made race relations in America a lot less thorny than they needed to be; perhaps if the South didn't move from viewing slavery as a necessary evil to a positive good, and definitely if the plan didn't involve shipping the former slaves off to another land), and yet, he himself was pretty damn slow to free his own slaves; in his will, he freed only five slaves (not even all his kids with Sally Hemmings), and left 130 others to be auctioned off.

He considered black people inherently inferior to white people, but he still insisted  it didn't necessarily mean they didn't deserve rights. And he at least had the good sense to not conform to the worst excesses of American slavery (for instance, he instructed his overseers to not whip his slaves [not that they listened], went out of his way to procure certain desirable blankets for his slaves, tried to keep families together, and even had some of the slaves at Monticello taught to write, admittedly, before Virginia made it punishable by flogging to teach a slave to read)

We accept the paradox of Thomas Jefferson, still usually considered a great man, even though he owned slaves and helped, in his way, petpetuate a brutal system in spite of himself, and yet, for whatever reason the paradox of Robert E. Lee is too much for many people. I mean, I can understand ignoring Nathan Bedford Forrest's change of heart about race near the end of his life, but Lee?