SocraticGadfly: Bobby Lee hagiography in the NYT

April 19, 2011

Bobby Lee hagiography in the NYT

As part of the the New York Times' ongoing "Disunion" series about the Civil War in its Opinionator Op-Ed area, Elizabeth Brown Pryor writes about Robert E. Lee's decision to forgo high Union command offered to him by Winfield Scott, then resign his commission while awaiting political decisions in his native Virginia

But, we're getting a new round of sesquicentennial hagiography of Lee, perhaps.

At one point, Ms. Pryor says:
Nor was he against the pro-slavery policies of the secessionists, despite postwar portraits of the general as something of an abolitionist.
Pure hagiography.

Few people know that Robert E. Lee, NOT Nathan Bedford Forrest, was the first choice to head the Ku Klux Klan. But Lee, of a higher, more genteel class of slaveowner, one who had never been a slave trader, after all, declined.

Here's more of that hagiography:
The decision was made yet more difficult by Lee’s pacifism.
Really? The pacifism that made him glad to see John Brown hang? The pacifism that led him to lead the effort to capture Brown in 1859? I agree with another commenter to the blog that lifelong Army officers usually aren't noted for their pacifism.

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