I’ve spent some time ragging on neo-Confederate mythistory here before; today I’d like to take a bit of time to talk about another of the idiot notions popular with the Stars-and-Bars crowd: the idea that Robert E. Lee opposed slavery, or that he didn’t own any slaves. No he didn’t, and yes he did. Robert E. Lee defended the institution of slavery and personally owned slaves.

Lee cheerleaders love to point out that Lee wrote to his wife, in 1856, that In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil He did write that, but the use of the quotation is dishonest. The quote is cherry-picked from a letter that Lee wrote to his wife on December 27, 1856; the passage from which it was taken actually reads:

In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.

—Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife on slavery (December 27, 1856)

Lee, in other words, regarded slavery as an evil–but a necessary evil ordained by God as the white man’s burden. Far from expressing opposition to the institution of slavery, the purpose of his letter was actually to condemn abolitionists; the letter was an approving note on a speech by then-President Franklin Pierce, which praised Pierce’s opposition to interference with Southern slavery, and declared that the time of slavery’s demise must not be sped by political agitation, but rather left to God, with whom two thousand years are but as a Single day. After that reassuring note, Lee goes on to offer an impassioned plea for toleration of the Spiritual liberty to enslave an entire race:

Although the Abolitionist must know this, & must See that he has neither the right or power of operating except by moral means & suasion, & if he means well to the slave, he must not Create angry feelings in the Master; that although he may not approve the mode which it pleases Providence to accomplish its purposes, the result will nevertheless be the same; that the reasons he gives for interference in what he has no Concern, holds good for every kind of interference with our neighbors when we disapprove their Conduct; Still I fear he will persevere in his evil Course. Is it not strange that the descendants of those pilgrim fathers who Crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom of opinion, have always proved themselves intolerant of the Spiritual liberty of others?

And what did the painful discipline … necessary for their instruction mean? One of the sixty-three slaves that Lee inherited from his father-in-law explains:

My name is Wesley Norris; I was born a slave on the plantation of George Parke Custis; after the death of Mr. Custis, Gen. Lee, who had been made executor of the estate, assumed control of the slaves, in number about seventy; it was the general impression among the slaves of Mr. Custis that on his death they should be forever free; in fact this statement had been made to them by Mr. C. years before; at his death we were informed by Gen. Lee that by the conditions of the will we must remain slaves for five years; I remained with Gen. Lee for about seventeen months, when my sister Mary, a cousin of ours, and I determined to run away, which we did in the year 1859; we had already reached Westminster, in Maryland, on our way to the North, when we were apprehended and thrown into prison, and Gen. Lee notified of our arrest; we remained in prison fifteen days, when we were sent back to Arlington; we were immediately taken before Gen. Lee, who demanded the reason why we ran away; we frankly told him that we considered ourselves free; he then told us he would teach us a lesson we never would forget; he then ordered us to the barn, where, in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty; we were accordingly stripped to the skin by the overseer, who, however, had sufficient humanity to decline whipping us; accordingly Dick Williams, a county constable, was called in, who gave us the number of lashes ordered; Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to lay it on well, an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done. After this my cousin and myself were sent to Hanover Court-House jail, my sister being sent to Richmond to an agent to be hired; we remained in jail about a week, when we were sent to Nelson county, where we were hired out by Gen. Lee’s agent to work on the Orange and Alexander railroad; we remained thus employed for about seven months, and were then sent to Alabama, and put to work on what is known as the Northeastern railroad; in January, 1863, we were sent to Richmond, from which place I finally made my escape through the rebel lines to freedom; I have nothing further to say; what I have stated is true in every particular, and I can at any time bring at least a dozen witnesses, both white and black, to substantiate my statements: I am at present employed by the Government; and am at work in the National Cemetary on Arlington Heights, where I can be found by those who desire further particulars; my sister referred to is at present employed by the French Minister at Washington, and will confirm my statement.

—Testimony of Wesley Norris (1866); reprinted in John W. Blassingame (ed.): Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, and Interviews, and Autobiographies Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press (ISBN 0-8071-0273-3). 467-468.

Some Lee hagiographers seem to be completely unaware that Lee ever owned slaves, much less treated them like this. Part of that’s just the warping of tidbits they heard elsewhere–it’s true that Lee did not own any slaves during most of the Civil War–and part of it is, frankly, dishonest fudging–Lee’s sixty-three slaves were, in spite of being legally under his control and forced to work on his plantation, not held under his own name, but rather temporarily under his control as an inheritance from his father-in-law, G.W.P. Custis. Other Lee cheerleaders recognize that Lee did own slaves, but give him props for manumitting them. What they leave out of the record is that Custis’s will legally required Lee to emancipate the slaves that passed into his control within five years of Custis’s death. Custis died October 10, 1857 and his will was probated December 7, 1857 (about a year after Lee wrote his letter on slavery); Lee kept the slaves as long as he could, and finally filed the deed of manumission with Court of the City of Richmond on December 29, 1862–five years, two months, and nineteen days after Custis’s death.

Custis actually gave freedom to his slaves without qualification in his will; the matter of the five years was supposed to be time for Custis’s executors to do the legal paperwork for emancipation in such manner as may to [them] seem most expedient and proper. There’s good reason to read the clause as intending for the five years to serve as an upper bound on settling the legal details, not as five more years for driving the slaves for whatever last bits of forced labor could be gotten. Lee, however, did not see it that way, and set the slaves to for his own profit for as long as he could. We have already seen that some of the slaves disagreed with Lee on this point of legal interpretation, and how he treated those who acted on their legal theory by seceding from his plantation.

Of course, Lee never was very big on secession at all. Those who love to haul out the Confederacy — Lee included — as heros for secessionist self-determination tend to neglect comments such as this one:

Secession is nothing but revolution. The framers of our constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will. It was intended for perpetual union so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government, not a compact, which can only be dissolved by revolution, or the consent of all the people in convention assembled. It is idle to talk of secession. Anarchy would have been established, and not a government, by Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and the other patriots of the Revolution.

–Robert E. Lee, letter, 23 January 1861

Secession allowed; anarchy established, and not a government; one sighs–if only.

Robert E. Lee is no hero. He was a defender of slavery and a harsh critic of abolitionism; he was also a slaver who brutally punished those who sought their rightful freedom. There are many reasons to damn the Federal government’s role in the Civil War, but none of them offer any excuse for celebrating vicious men such as Lee.

See also:

• Comment (2005-10-07): Two more letters on the Norrises, and Lee’s letters denying wrongdoing [added 2010-02-02]
• GT 2006-02-24: Michael Fellman’s discussion of Lee’s experience with slavery [added 2010-02-02]
• GT 2006-05-28: Over My Shoulder #25: Lee's views on Reconstruction and civil rights, from Michael Fellman (2000), The Making of Robert E. Lee [added 2010-02-02]
• GT 2006-05-25: How Robert E. Lee’s army treated black soldiers [added 2010-02-02]
• GT 2006-03-24: Michael Fellman (2002), The Making of Robert E. Lee, on the Lee’s views on colonizationism [added 2010-02-02]
• Comment (2007-11-05): Some documentary notes on the 1850 and 1860 census [added 2010-02-02]
• GT 2005-06-26: Lost Causes

It’s been less than a week since the cataclysm in South Asia, and already the institutionalized economists have started to circle the scene like vultures. Roderick’s mostly-cheerful greeting to the New Year puts it in context:

On July 25, 1993, Lloyd Bentsen, President Clinton’s first Secretary of the Treasury, argued on Meet the Press that recent destructive flooding in the Midwest would stimulate the economy, because lots of concrete will be poured …. You have to look at all the jobs that will be created to repair the damage.

On September 14, 2001, three days after the destruction of the World Trade Towers, economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times that the terror attack could even do some economic good. Now, all of a sudden, we need some new office buildings. … Rebuilding will generate at least some increase in business spending.

And now — on December 29, 2004 — C. Fred Bergsten of the Institute for Ienternational Economics has opined on NPR’s Morning Edition that the recent catastrophic tsunami in South Asia — which by the latest estimates has killed fifty times as many people as the 9/11 attacks — will bring economic benefits to the countries affected:

Like any disaster, you get negative effects through destroying existing property and people’s health, but you do get a burst of new economic activity to replace them, and on balance, that generally turns out to be quite positive.

Over time, properties that have been destroyed will be fully replaced, and probably by better and newer substitutes, so at the end of the reconstruction process, the countries will probably be wealthier.

The jaw simply drops.

Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t intended as a jeremiad against the construction industry or others who will be profiting from the rebuilding effort. Nor am I about to launch into calls for ill-conceived government price controls or anything of the sort. Whatever their motives, people involved in rebuilding (through charity and through business) are making an effort to help people get back homes and livelihoods after an unspeakable horror. Vultures play an important and health role in the ecosystem; what I object to is the Vulture Economists who fabricate reasons to claim that rebuilding somehow, inexplicably, makes for a net gain or a silver lining to this catastrophe. It’s not just that this looks like a lack of decent respect for the dead–although it is that, and especially when we are talking about the catastrophic loss of over 100,000 people. It’s also that it’s just a lie–a particularly atrocious example of the Broken Window Fallacy, uttered by comfortable professional economists who make it very clear what is seen and what is not seen from their comfortable leather chairs.

Roderick finds the spectacle of distinguished experts happily swallow[ing] [The Broken Window Fallacy] in the blatant and naked form of that very absurdum to which Bastiat and Hazlitt sought to reduce the subtler versions appalling; I agree, but I can only add that we have all too much reason to have seen this coming. There’s good reason to think that there’s no catastrophe so hideous that someone won’t try to declare it a net economic good. After all, part of the historical education that we all seem to get–and I don’t doubt this includes the Krugmans and Bergstens of the world–routinely indulges in this sort of sophistry. As the Black Death of 1347 swept across Europe, about one third of the people on the continent died; in the countries worst affected (such as England) the death toll rose to as much as one half of the population. The nearness of death pervaded all life in the second half of the 14th century; entire towns were wiped out in weeks, processions of flagellants wandered from town to town crying out to God to forgive them their sins, and (as one German witness tells us) men and women wandered around as if mad and let their cattle stray because no one had any inclination to concern themselves about the future. Yet how many of us have had Western Civ textbooks confidently and drily report something like this on the alleged macroeconomic effects of the Death:

The declining population at the end of the 14th century had a number of important effects. Many people touched by the plague moved away from medieval cities and towns to unaffected areas. This was the negative impact. On the positive side, some landlords began to concentrate on improving the fertility of the soil. And back in the cities, the declining population of workers meant that masters sought out new ways to produce which required less manpower. That is, they began to construct labor saving machinery. In other words, an act of God produced a greater need for technological innovation.

— The History Guide: In The Wake of the Black Death

Or:

The Black Death greatly helped accelerat social and economic change during the 14th and 15th centuries …. the great population reduction due to the plague brought cheaper land prices, more food for the average peasant, and a relatively large increase in per capita income among the peasantry.

— WikiPedia: Black Death

Or:

The demand for people to work the land was so high that it threatened the manorial holdings. Serfs were no longer tied to one master; if one left the land, another lord would instantly hire them. The lords had to make changes in order to make the situation more profitable for the peasants and so keep them on their land. In general, wages outpaced prices and the standard of living was subsequently raised.

— Decameron Web: Social and Economic Effects of the Plague

Or:

The plagues also brought economic changes. The death of so many people concentrated wealth in the hands of survivors. In many cases those workers who remained alive could earn up to five times what they had earned before the plague. In the towns, plague had the effect of consolidating wealth somewhat, especially among the middle class. As plague destroyed people and not possessions, the drop in population was accompanied by a corresponding rise in per capita wealth. Large increases in spending in the towns at this time are well documented.

— Encarta: Black Death

Parallel remarks could be made, for example, on the (apparently ineradicable) textbook tale of wartime prosperity during the cataclysm of World War II. This is what happens when positivist pseudo-economists run the show: empty manipulation of econometric numbers takes the place of humane concern for the suffering and material conditions that real people face, and since economics is a science about human conditions, the result is not only ethically bankrupt but also bad economics. Écrasez la niaserie.