The Myth of the Kindly General Lee

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of judging historical figures by their private opinions more than by their public actions. The fact of the matter is that, at the end of the day, Lincoln freed the slaves (you can argue about the why, but at the end of the day the result was the same) whereas Lee commanded an army whose stated goal was the preservation of chattel slavery in America. Their own moral rectitude is not really a relevant consideration, unless you're in the position of weighing souls, which a historian most certainly should not be. I will add, though, that there's a definite difference between believing blacks to be of an inferior race (which was a pretty standard view nationally in the 1850s) and believing that they were better off enslaved than free (which Lincoln, for all his hedging and evolutions on the issue, never contended).

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

There is no such thing as perfectionism in history, there is only the constant quest for betterment. I am so tired of these revisionists like that idiot in the NC legislature a few weeks back who attacked Lincoln. Lincoln is hero in our history because relative to the times, he moved the ball 20 yards, while Lee was playing defense. Did Lincoln violate civil liberties? Yes, but so did the damn South many times over. A slave society is by nature a totalitarian society because of the constant few of servile insurrection.

Exactly. This is one of the few points on which I actually agree with Marx : in order to achieve a perfect society, one must first create a less bad society. It's not a matter of 'excusing' the moral failings of past generations, but rather of acknowledging that the process has to start somewhere, and attempts to achieve instantaneous revolution usually end in disaster.