The item for April 3 from the Okaloosa NAACP's site focus on Robert E. Lee's post-Civil War attitudes toward the newly liberated slaves. They feature a quote from Recollections and Letters of General Lee (1904) by his son Robert E. Lee, Jr. The incident described by the younger Lee here (in Chapter 8) is apparently in 1865 after the war, when Lee was dining at the house of a formerly prosperous Southern family (the Okaloosa page's emphases shown here):
So we sat down to a repast composed of all the good things for which that country was famous. John and I did not seem to think there was too much in sight-- at any rate, it did not daunt us, and we did our best to lessen the quantity, consuming, I think, our share and more! We had been for so many years in the habit of being hungry that it was not strange we continued to be so awhile yet. But my father took a different view of the abundance displayed, and, during his drive back, said to Colonel Carter:
"Thomas, there was enough dinner to-day for twenty people. All this will now have to be changed; you cannot afford it; we shall have to practise economy."
In talking with Colonel Carter about the situation of farmers at that time in the South, and of their prospects for the future, he urged him to get rid of the negroes left on the farm--some ninety-odd in number, principally women and children, with a few old men--saying the government would provide for them, and advised him to secure white labour. The Colonel told him he had to use, for immediate needs, such force as he had, being unable at that time to get whites. Whereupon General Lee remarked:
"I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving."
2 comments:
Pretty much sums up the mindset of the 1870's American southerner. 130 years later, too many people still think this way. ¤Holly
And the real goal of most of today Confederate "heritage" groups, like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the League of the South, is really to promote that kind of racial attitude among whites in the present day. Not to "honor" their 19th-century ancestors. - Bruce
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