“I think Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously. It is always the good men who do the most harm in the world.” — Henry Adams
I am not the sort of person to pay tribute to traitors. I will, for example, give Benedict Arnold great credit for being instrumental to our Revolutionary victory. But I agree whole-heartedly with the Continental who, when asked by Arnold what he’d do with General Arnold if he ever got hold of him after the treason replied, “We would cut your leg off and bury it with full military honors for your work at Quebec and Saratoga. The rest of you we would hang.”
It came as a surprise to find out that today is Robert E. Lee’s two-hundredth birthday. I have mixed emotions on this day. I do not think his achievements in our Civil War are to be celebrated. I think too, that while I wish I could offer some acknowledgment of his great strength of character – a character sorely lacking in modern man – it was that same strength of character and of misplaced belief that led him to abandon his country for more provincial loyalties and to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of American men in a wholly useless war over indefensible principles. The fault, at beginning, may lie with Jefferson, Washington, Madison and Adams, but Lee, for all his greatness, chose to pursue the error. Someone like George Thomas should be lauded to the heavens for his strength of character – he gave up his family to fight for his country – but Lee continues to receive the accolades.
I would like to see the elevation of Lee serve as an object lesson on the fall of a good man. But I don’t think his errors are what people have in mind on his birthday.