He was not the idol he became by any means. He seemed to be mildly anti-slavery, but more for how it coarsened white society. There is little evidence to suggest he was in any way an abolitionist. It is a clear fact that he left the US Army to fight for Virginia, knowing full well that the "peculiar institution" was one of the reasons for secession and that it underlay most of the OTHER reasons claimed for secession. He took up arms against the nation of his birth and lost.
He can be credited with keeping it a more or less conventional war and with rarely allowing his troops to indulge in rapine and murder. I shudder to think what our history would have been like with a South filled with Mosby and Quantrill units for decades. Ghastly thought that.
Lee was a man and a product of his times. He was neither unusually cruel or evil, nor was he saintly.
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