Hacker News Reader

Comment by starbase | Hacker News Reader

History is quite a subject. Lincoln and Lee on slavery and the war:

Lincoln: My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it.

Lee: I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I would cheerfully have lost all I have lost by the war, and suffered all I have suffered, to have this objective obtained. Slavery is a moral and political evil.

View on HN

Context is quite a subject.

Lincoln, elsewhere on slavery[0]:

    This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it. I think Slavery is wrong, morally, and politically.

And Lee, further on in the quote you provided (from a New York Times article[1]):

    (But he (Lee) added that slavery was) “a greater evil to the white man than to the black race” in the United States, and that the “painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction.”

And also on the subject of monuments:

    The general did, however, object to the idea of raising Confederate monuments, writing in 1869[2] that it would be wiser “not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife.”

The narrative you appear to be trying to paint here, that Lincoln was the real racist between the two, presumably in service of implying that there is some hypocrisy in tearing down Lee's monuments but not Lincoln's, isn't historically accurate. Both saw slavery as a moral evil. But Lee was a slave owner and traitor fighting for a government dedicated to the preservation of slavery, despite having some vague hope that maybe eventually the whole unfortunate business might end somehow, and Lincoln, who never owned slaves, actually did something about it.

Which is why Lincoln, for all of his faults, gets his face on Mount Rushmore and the penny and his own monument and the other guy gets melted into slag, and there is no moral paradox in doing so.

[0]https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/slavery.htm

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/us/robert-e-lee-slaves.ht...

[2]http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/saxon/servlet/SaxonServlet?sou...

The takeaway, at least for me, is that both men were not that far apart on the topic of slavery, even though that's the primary lens through which Americans now view the conflict. Seems fair to assume the Confederacy would have abolished slavery on its own before long, as most of the world (excluding Africa and Mideast) did.

Which leaves us with this question: Is membership in the Union voluntary, or compulsory? I'm not sure the answer provided by the civil war is morally correct. No state (no matter how virtuous or contemptible) lasts forever, and it sure would be nice if people could walk away without being shot.

> The takeaway, at least for me, is that both men were not that far apart on the topic of slavery

No, this is complete nonsense. They both opposed slavery on a surface level due to beliefs that differed in deep and profound ways.

But didn’t the Confederate army start the actual fighting of the civil war by firing upon Fort Sumter?

> Is membership in the Union voluntary, or compulsory? I'm not sure the answer provided by the civil war is morally correct...it sure would be nice if people could walk away without being shot.

Wait…are you saying the confederacy should have the right to secede peacefully?

Do their slaves get that same right to walk away from their plantation peacefully?

You see the irony here right?

>But didn’t the Confederate army start the actual fighting of the civil war by firing upon Fort Sumter?

It did. There was a lot of political tension before that point, but the Confederacy was the one that started the actual violence.

>Wait…are you saying the confederacy should have the right to secede peacefully?

See, that's the problem with this question: the issues of self-determination are tied together with huge human-rights abuses here.

What if, in the year 2025, the state of Maine wants to secede? Should they have that right? There's no slavery in Maine. If they don't have that right, why not? What philosophical principle does your argument rest on?

>The takeaway, at least for me, is that both men were not that far apart on the topic of slavery, even though that's the primary lens through which Americans now view the conflict.

Hindsight is 20/20: the conflict was primarily about slavery. The Confederates said so themselves, and they even wrote it explicitly into their constitution. The northern states were pushing to ban slavery, and were refusing to honor the southern states' laws regarding escaped slaves, and the south could see that they were going to be forced to abolish slavery before long. So they rebelled. They've tried ever since to frame it as the more vague "states' rights" issue, but the real issue was slavery; it's the whole reason they wanted to secede.

>Which leaves us with this question: Is membership in the Union voluntary, or compulsory? I'm not sure the answer provided by the civil war is morally correct.

You make a good point here, one that I've wondered about for ages. I agree, political units should be able to voluntarily leave unions if they want, due to the principle of self-determination. Should Ukraine be forced back into a union with Russia? I don't think so. Similarly, if Kaliningrad wanted to secede and form a new country and then join the EU, they should have that right. So why shouldn't the southern US states be allowed to secede? At the time, the slavery issue dominated, as it was an obvious human rights issue. But suppose Florida in 2025 wants to secede and become a theocratic apartheid state with slavery legalized; should that be allowed? It seems like many would say no, because this would lead to human rights abuses and by keeping them in the union, that can be avoided. Or suppose California, Oregon, and Washington decide to all secede because they don't want to be in a union with the crazies in Florida and are sick of having the world's 5th-6th largest economy but not having universal healthcare or high-speed rail because the other states are dragging them down and taking their tax money; should they be allowed to leave and form a new country? In practice, it seems that political units only succeed in seceding when 1) they have a violent conflict and win (e.g. American revolution), or 2) the larger entity either agrees (e.g. Czechoslovakia, Brexit) or just doesn't have the power or political will to stop it (e.g. USSR, British Empire).

Lincoln has his face on Mount Rushmore because he was on the winning side. Contrary to what Obama liked to say, history has no sides. It just happens.

There is a parallel universe with statues of Hitler all over Europe.

Snopes has an article on this topic, at https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lincoln-and-lees-views-on-... .

> Claim: A meme accurately reflects Abraham Lincoln's and Robert E. Lee's views on slavery.

> Rating: False

Concerning the quote by Lincoln, in the full letter:

"Lincoln drew a clear distinction between what he felt his political duty required of him (i.e., preservation of the Union and not a forced, unilateral abolition of slavery) and what his personal viewpoint on the slavery issue was (i.e., a "wish that all men every where could be free").

Concerning the supposed quote by Lee (which you have modified!) it was recounted by the Rev. Dr. Leyburn:

"Even this passage, which does not match the quote attributed to Lee above, is problematic in several ways: primarily that the purported conversation was witnessed by no one other than the person who reported it, that it was not disclosed until some sixteen years after the fact, and that Lee was long dead by the time it emerged and thus could not confirm or deny it. Moreover, even if it were correctly reported, we can't determine at this remove whether it truly reflected Lee's beliefs at the time, or whether it was part a post-war effort by Lee to resurrect his reputation in the North."

Further, "“[Lee] was not a pro-slavery ideologue,” Eric Foner, a Civil War historian, author and professor of history at Columbia University, said of Lee. “But I think equally important is that, unlike some white southerners, he never spoke out against slavery.”"

That viewpoint is quite different from Lincoln's, who was publicly anti-slavery: "I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free."

EDIT: Leyburn's letter is at https://archive.org/details/sim_century-illustrated-monthly-... . You can see he's already pushing the false revisionist narrative that the Civil war was not about slavery:

> After dwelling with emphasis and with feeling on this point, the General then introduced another topic which also moved him deeply, viz., the persistent manner in which the leading Northern journals, and the Northern people generally, insisted that the object of the war had been to secure the perpetuation of slavery. On this point he seemed not only indignant, but hurt. He said it was not true.

I would not trust that letter any more than I trust the claim Darwin renounced evolution on his deathbed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com