Anyway, yeah, yeah, RE Lee was a good guy. But he wasn’t a god, as he is so often deified in the south. The number of wild stories about him doing whatever anybody who wants to canonize him would like him to do make me question anything I hear about him. That story about the Episcopal church seems highly questionable to me. I don’t know that it didn’t happen, but I’d really like to see whatever source is being used. It sounds so cliche! Historians have to have a knack for spotting hagiography when they see it and this sure does look like it.

Besides, did he ever become a citizen again after the war? I don’t remember, as it’s been a long time since I was a CW nut, but it seems to me that he never did. So, it seems a little funny to me to say that after the war he saw himself as an American. Maybe a bit of wishful thinking.

Undoubtedly he was a product of his time, so I don’t hold his own slaveholding against him (it would be presentist to do so, on some level). However, I’d be a bit slower than this American Studies professor seems to be about putting him into too nice a cookie-cutter on these issues.