Robert E. Lee was a well-born graduate of West Point Academy, a pragmatic and cunning military strategist, a political moderate, for his times and his region, and a Virginia slaveholder who saw slavery as a necessary evil that burdened the owners more than the people they enslaved. “The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically,” he once wrote. “The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by
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