Brutal. I am deeply ashamed of correctly interpreting Rasta's post while you struggled with comprehension.
He wrote those awful words, I did not.
There is no way to interpret what I wrote in any way other than that creating the country with slavery was one of the most regrettable compromises in the history of government.
It absolutely was a compromise, the means to entice the southern states to join the union in the first place.
I'll proudly stand behind my statements.
I also am amazed at the intellectual laziness behind the movement to remove the statues. It's a complex issue in many cases, and each should be looked at by the local people with the help of honest historical scholars.
Lee, for example, wasn't all that pro slavery. Maybe he does deserve statues, maybe not.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/us/robert-e-lee-slaves.html
He wrote that the people enslaved on his family’s property, in what was then known as Alexandria County, were not “being sold South,” as had been reported. And he implied that he would free them within five years.
The letter is one of many written by Lee that sheds slivers of light on his thoughts about slavery.
Historians have clashed — and are clashing still — over the strength of his support for the system of forced labor that kept millions of people in bondage for generations.
...
In 1862, in accordance with Mr. Custis’s will, Lee filed a deed of manumission to free the slaves at Arlington House and at two more plantations Mr. Custis had owned, individually naming more than 150 of them. And in January 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all people held as slaves in the rebelling states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”
1862 was before the emancipation proclamation, and in the heat of the Civil War.
Of all the letters by Lee that have been collected by archivists and historians over the years, one of the most famous was written to his wife in 1856. “In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country,” he wrote.
