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The outbreak of violence at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 led to renewed debate in the United States about the appropriateness and meaning of public monuments to Confederate figures. Was removing statues, memorials, and other commemorations of those who fought on the Southern side in the Civil War a form of political correctness tantamount to changing history, or was it a justified end to displaying explicit symbols of white supremacy in America's public spaces? That debate included, typically, the circulation via social media of memes attempting to foster skewed historical perspectives on the Civil War and slavery, including this one which juxtaposed purported quotes from President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate General Robert E. Lee on those subjects: The quote attributed to Lincoln in that meme was but an incomplete reproduction of a single sentence that was plucked from a longer piece of correspondence and offered without a shred of context, a misleading technique used to create the false impression that Lincoln said the exact opposite of what he actually meant. The line If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it ... comes from an open letter Lincoln wrote in August 1862 to New-York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, who had recently published an editorial criticizing Lincoln for being strangely and disastrously remiss in efforts to emancipate slaves. In his response, Lincoln made it clear that his single, paramount goal in waging war was to restore the Union as quickly as possible and not [to] either to save or to destroy slavery, and that he disagreed with those who asserted that his goal should necessarily encompass either the abolition or the preservation of slavery: It's also important to note that in his closing, 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). As for the quote attributed to General Lee, about his supposed wish (expressed on eve of the Civil War) that he wished he owned every slave in the South so that he could head off the conflict by free[ing] them all, there is no record of Lee's having expressed any such sentiment. The closest one can come to finding any documentation of Lee's having said anything similar is a reminiscence published by Presbyterian pastor John Leyburn in Century Magazine in 1885, some fourteen years after Lee's death. In that reminiscence, the Rev. Dr. Leyburn (who, like Lee, was a Virginian but relocated to Baltimore after the conclusion of the Civil War) stated that he had engaged Lee in conversation in 1869 while the latter was in Baltimore in connection with a railroad project. According to Leyburn, during that conversation the former Confederate general averred that he had not waged war over the issue of slavery, that he was rejoiced that slavery had been abolished, and that he would cheerfully have lost all I have lost by the war in order to see the end of slavery: 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. Much could be written about Lee's attitude towards slavery, but perhaps the best single example of it (and one of the few expressed in his own words) is a letter he penned to his wife in 1856, in which he described slavery as a moral and political evil and anticipated its eventual abolition, but in which he also maintained that slavery was a greater evil to white people than to black people, and that black people were better off living enslaved in America than living free in Africa: Or, as Civil War historian Eric Foner described Lee's mixed viewpoint on slavery more succinctly in the New York Times:
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