R. David Cox

“Lee did not side with Virginia to perpetuate slavery. The accounts of Mary Custis Lee and William Allan reiterate the position he outlined in letters to his family. He considered slavery to be an evil, a curse on white and black alike, that God, in due course, would bring to an end. Precisely how slavery would cease was best left to God and not to human intervention, which would inevitably be plagued by sin—as, in his eyes, Northern abolitionists amply proved. Although he never shared the Custis family’s passion for colonizing freed slaves in Africa, he claimed, after the war, “always to have been in favor of emancipation—gradual emancipation.”24 However self-serving his perspective may have been, and however unrealistic it surely was, he nevertheless hoped for slavery to end.”
― R. David Cox, The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee (Library of Religious Biography

“Lee’s reference to Missouri as a “country” hints at another widely shared conception of his time. The United States was not yet a solidified nation. It lacked a truly national identity. Other than through its post offices, the federal government had little presence in the lives of most Americans. Rather, the state evoked a person’s primary loyalty. One was a Virginian or a Georgian or a Minnesotan before one was an American. Indeed, a common name for the country was plural—these United States—rather than singular—the United States. It took a civil war to forge the thirty-two states into one nation. As a former Union general reminisced, “We must emphasize this one statement which was ever on the lips of many good men in 1860 and ’61, to wit: ‘My first allegiance is due to my State!’” Only after the country added the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 did the Constitution affirm the preeminence of national over state citizenship.27”
― R. David Cox, The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee (Library of Religious Biography