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).
Weighing past figures against the modern standard, will distort the vantage point and the most important takeaway.
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.
The South didn't become more extreme because of Northern pressure. The south led most every argument, every demand, demanded the breaking of every past agreement, because they concentration of slaves in growing numbers posed a severe threat to public safety and the constant fear, that motivated the increasing extremism, was that worry that tomorrow the South will look like something out of the movie Spartacus (and these people knew classical history).
As this become a more pressing fear, more repressive laws were passed making it illegal to teach blacks to read, making it illegal to espouse religious beliefs that opposed slavery and made it illegal to campaign against it or organize against it. And if a slave runs a away you could be compelled to join a posse to track them down. That is violations of freedom of speech, religion, association and press.
Along with this heightened fear of the concentration of slavery in the slave states, came increasing demands for lands. Suddenly the Missouri Compromise is anti-Southern and has to be repealed. Suddenly you have to force Northerners to help catch runaway slaves (Fugitive Slave Act) and trample all over Northern State's rights, in order for the South's state's rights to be preserved. Finally, the courts start throwing out decades of precedence, to make rulings favorable to South and finally the Supreme Court has to violate all sorts of precedent, norms and the constitution to rule that it is unconstitutional to deny anyone's right to own slaves. It took the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision to unify the North behind a Slavery Restrictionist like Lincoln.
The south didn't become more extreme because they annoyed by a few posters sent south from New England. The South became more extreme because they were scared crapless that they would wake up to find their throats being cut by machetes. The south literally wanted "breathing space" or if you prefer "lebensraum" to spread the slaves out and reduce the risk of servile insurrection, them constantly demanding more and more, and getting it at many stages, pushed the North to unify behind a single party and candidate opposed to the expansion of Slavery. Lincoln would not have won in 1856 or any prior election.
Its hilarious when you consider the parallel that Kalwejt made, because the political evolution of the south is fairly similar (Though much elongated over time) to the ever increasing demands by Hitler in order for him to to be "satisfied".
