In a penetrating essay in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, the distinguished Columbia professor, Eric Foner, weighed in on the Robert E. Lee question. The question, of course, is whether the many statues of Lee throughout the South should be ripped down and destroyed or perhaps consigned to a few out-of-the-way museums. That was the question that led to violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, a few weeks ago and which surely will agitate American politics in coming months and years.
Foner gives the South’s greatest Civil War general his due in terms of character and personal rectitude. He reports that the young Lee, at West Point, never got any disciplinary demerits, “an almost impossible feat.” The general, writes Foner, “always prided himself on following the strict moral code of a gentleman.” He notes that Lee biographer Douglas Southall Freeman warned against looking for ambiguity or complexity in the Lee persona, for his virtue was simply too simple.
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