Monday, April 5, 2004

Confederate "Heritage" Month: April 6

The source page I've been using for this series of posts has been transferred to the Edward Sebesta's Temple of Democracy Web site: Confederate Heritage Month. It also allows links to individuals days' material. Which for April 6, is more on Robert E. Lee and African-Americans postwar.

What is provided there is a bit of testimony of Lee's before Congress in 1866, in which he endorses the notion that he would like to see Virginia get rid of its black citizens. But the idea of mass expulsion of black Americans (it's only the last decade or so we've started calling it "ethnic cleansing") was always unrealistic. Prior to the Civil War, many Northerners endorsed the idea of voluntary colonization of free blacks "back" to Africa, which was the origin of the nation of Liberia.

But few actually went. And the notion that colonization was a solution for more than a small minority of African-Americans was one that generally rejected by black Abolitionists.  Lee's postwar advocacy of the idea really was little more than an expression of racial hostility and contempt. Alan Nolan in Lee Considered (1991) described Lee's postwar position this way:

In regard to blacks, Lee's public and private assertions were also in conflict. Publicly, he was protective and benign. Everything would be all right if the North did not "stir up" the blacks. Dependent on their labor, the South would, of course, employ them. Privately, he was bitter toward the freedmen and intervened personally to their detriment. In truth, Lee and his fellow Southerners were groping for a new method of white supremacy and exploitation of the blacks. With Northern complicity, the Southern effort was eventually to succeed; the outcome was a hundred years of near-slavery: disenfrachisement, Black Codes, Jim Crow, and suppression.

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