Matt Atkinson: Robert E. Lee The Antebellum Years. 2023 Gettysburg Winter Lecture Series 

Very cool , wish I could have had the honor to apply for membership with these gentlemen.

Glad it was helpful!

Read James Robertson

Sit out the war? Doing what? Where? He knew that the Administration was preparing for war and his home was right across the river. He was honor bound to take a stand, own way or another.

Lee was not fighting for slavery. Not to deny that the economic principle uniting the Confederacy was black slavery, but Lee himself had no love for the institution. Further his whole life was wrapped up in Virginia. Grant’s life had taken a different course. He his family was anti-slavery. His father disapproved of his marrying into a slavery owning family. He lived in a slave state but had no real roots there. He did not take to farming any more than Lee did to being a plantation owner. But he could have gone either way. I have sometimes wondered what Scott would have done if he had been Lee’s age and at Lee’s rank?

The point he was making is that they both broke oaths. One was successful and is lauded a hero, the other wasn’t and has become a villain. If the results of the respective wars had been reversed, Washington would have gone down as the traitorous leader of a failed rebellion, and Lee would mean to the southern states what Washington means to the United States today. Fate was not to have that, however neither of those men knew what fate had in store, and they both committed treason believing it was the right thing to do. Is one morally superior to the other?

@@cjp8u2 Lee was given a choice, I don't believe Washington had a choice

@@OldHickoryAndyJackson Washington absolutely had a choice. Stay loyal to the powers that be, maintain the status quo, pay the taxes being levied and don’t break the oath you swore as a military officer. He chose not to do that. I’m not at all condemning the American Revolution, but the Canadian colonies, for example, stayed loyal. Combine that with the 50% of the population of the 13 colonies who were either loyal or neutral, and it shows resorting to treason in response to the situation at the time was not at all a forgone conclusion. He was very much making a conscious, pro-active decision when he decided to commit treason. He may have personally felt as if though he didn’t have a choice, but after weighing up the situation, so did Robert E Lee. In both cases Virginia was being told what to do by an external power it did not recognise as having the authority to do so. That external power then resorted to military means to enforce its will on Virginia, and as Virginians they both chose to take up arms against it. On the occasion when Robert E Lee accepted command of Virginias state forces, the government of Virgina actually presented him with George Washingtons sword. Such were the parallels between the two in the minds of the people at that time.

Yes. Clown show.