Sacred Trust Talks 2016 - Did Robert E. Lee Commit Treason?

our next speaker dr. Allen gelles Oh we'll discuss the charges of treason against robert e lee and the circumstances surrounding the indictment dr. Gelles oh is the Henry are loose professor of the Civil War era and director of civil war-era studies at Gettysburg College he is an award-winning author and his book Gettysburg the last invasion was a New York Times bestseller in 2013 his articles and essays have appeared in scholarly journals and also in The Wall Street Journal the Christian Science Monitor the New York Times the Atlantic The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times he has been featured on NPR the Discovery Channel the National Geographic Channel and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart but there's more in 2005 dr. Geller was nominated by President George W Bush to the National Council on the humanities he has been a fellow of the American Council of learned societies the McNeil Center for early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania the Charles Warren Center for American Studies at Harvard University and the James Madison program in American ideals and institutions at Princeton University please join me in a warm welcome for dr. Alan gelles Oh thank you for that introduction Cindy I've discovered a few things found out a few things from that that's that's always an adventure well how nice to be here again at the sacred trust seminars and to look out and see all of you here you're all here because we are drawn by a common interest a common attraction in this event called the American Civil War and especially to Gettysburg and the figures that were involved in it I think we are drawn to it and rightly because we see in it the outlines of our national character and we want to learn more about that because as we do we learn more about ourselves we come finding stories of very ordinary people who behaved in very heroic ways and that gives us hope because a democracy is made from ordinary people we do not have aristocrats nobility we do not have anything like that we are all citizens the idea though that citizens could rise to the level of nobility to the heroic that was something that was scoffed at in the age of the American Civil War by observers from many other points of the globe Gettysburg stands as a refutation of every dictator every aristocrat every tyrant who has ever lived because it says that ordinary people ordinary citizens in a democracy a lawyer from an office a professor of rhetoric from a college can rise to the very apex of the heights of heroism and that means that that same rise is available to us all and that in times of great crisis we may look to each other and to our own ranks for a similar display of heroism so for all these reasons we have bound to our story of the Civil War and especially to this place Gettysburg where so much of that nobility and that heroism occurred I want to talk today about one of the figures who was involved in the story of Gettysburg I will not talk about Gettysburg itself but rather about this person and what happened to him once the firing stopped we the undersigned prisoners of war belonging to the Army of Northern Virginia having been this day surrendered by General Robert Ely CSA commanding said army to lieutenant general US Grant commanding armies of the United States to hereby give our solemn parole of honor that we will not hereafter serve in the armies of the Confederate States or in any military capacity whatever against the United States of America or render aid to the enemies of the latter until properly exchanged in such manner as shall be mutually approved by the respective authorities done at Appomattox Courthouse Virginia this 9th day of April 1865 there are six signatories to this Appomattox parole you can see them on the screen they begin at the top of the list with robert e lee himself and it includes his longtime staff officers Walter Taylor Charles Venable and Charles Marshall and it was formally count assigned on the other side by federal assistant provost marshal George H Sharpe who added the comment the above-named officers will not be disturbed by United States authorities so long as they observe their parole and the laws enforce where they may reside that promise of non disturbance is at the core of what robert e lee wanted as Mattox courthouse however much he and the rest of the Confederacy might have wanted to insist that their break for independence was the constitutionally justifiable act two sovereign states Abraham Lincoln and his administration had never regarded the Confederacy legally as anything except an insurrection nobody needed to tell Robert Ely that such an understanding covered him and all of his dueling band of scarecrow Confederates with the odium of treason given Ulysses Grant's reputation for demanding surrender without any offer of any mitigating circumstances Lee had every reason to worry that a surrender demand from Grant would be the prelude to a bloody purge which would make the Jacobins look spineless Lee had plainly dreaded the possibility that grant would demand unconditional surrender then sooner than that he warned I am resolved to die indeed we must all determined to die at our posts and not only was Lee afraid of this as a consequence we had felt it was not improbable wrote a soldier in the Rockbridge artillery but after an ordeal of mortifying exposure for the gratification of the military we would be paraded through northern cities for the benefit of jeering crowds great was the relief not all Confederate hands when grants terms turned out to be surprisingly mild the officers and men surrendered to be paroled and disqualified from taking up arms again until properly exchanged at all arms ammunition and supplies to be livid up delivered up as captured property that was all there would be no death march to a prisoner of war camps no retribution and above all no treason trials or that at least was how it seemed until the night of April 14th when Lincoln was assassinated in his box at Ford's Theater denunciations of Jefferson Davis and robert e lee as traitors and fit subjects for treason proceedings thereafter ascended like shell bursts among those baying for Confederate blood was John Curtis Underwood who would become robert e lee's particular bete noire Underwood was in New York born in 1808 and New York educated at Hamilton College but he married a Virginian in fact Maria Underwood was the first cousin of Stonewall Jackson and he set up a law practice in Clarke County which was sandwiched between the eastern wall of the Shenandoah Valley and Loudoun County in Northern Virginia his move to Virginia though had abated none of his northern antagonism to slavery to the contrary he joined the Liberty Party in 1840 the Free Soil party in 1848 and sat in the first Republican National Convention in 1856 that nominated John C Fremont none of this made Underwood particularly popular in Virginia even as far north as Clark County his participation in the Republican convention guaranteed as he said that my life to say the least would be exceedingly insecure in the event of an outbreak in my vicinity for it would be as easy in the mad whirlwind of passion and excitement to implicate me as it was the Salem victims in the charge of witchcraft and within a few months Underwood was exiled from the state for my opinions in favor of human equality he eventually emerged as a sort of Tribune for exiled southern unionists who had been victimized for their devotion to the Union and the institutions in defiance of threats and persecution of the slaveholding aristocracy with Lincoln's election Underwood was rewarded with a patronage appointment in the Treasury Department and then a recess appointment as the Federal District Judge for the Eastern District of Virginia which Congress then reorganized in 1864 as the Federal District of Virginia Underwood took his task as a unionist Avenger with deadly seriousness we know he said that we cannot go home in safety while traitors whose hands are still dripping with the warm blood of our martyred brothers remain defiant and unpunished it is folly to give sugar plums to tigers and hyenas it is more than folly to talk of clemency and mercy to these worse than cattle inés for clemency and mercy to them is cruelty and murder to the innocent and unborn if the guilty leaders of this rebellion shall be properly punished our children's children will not be compelled to look upon another like it for generations of course there was the little matter of those Appomattox paroles but on April 26th the Attorney General oh no I'm supposed to point it this way but don't worry I'm not going to vaporize anybody the Attorney General James speed gave the paroles a very different twist than Lee and his soldiers might have at first thought we must consider in what capacity General Grant was speaking speed wrote in reply to a query from Secretary of War Stanton it must be presumed that he had no authority from the president except such as the commander-in-chief could give to a military officer presidents only grant pardons hence grants paroles could not have been drawing a blanket of immunity over the rebels surrender well that was all the encouragement that John Underwood needed if there was any question he said whether the terms of parole agreed upon with General Lee were any protection to those taking the parole the answer is that it was a mere military arrangement and can have no influence upon the civil rights or the status of the persons interested as the sole functioning Federal District Judge operating in Virginia bringing the penalties of treason down on the head of robert e lee would belong to under woods jurisdiction and hunter would was determined to prove that robert e lee had committed exactly what the Constitution described as treason in article 3 section 3 of the Constitution treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them or in adhering to their enemies giving them aid and comfort on Friday June 2nd 1865 Underwood impaneled and charged a grand jury in Norfolk Virginia which returned an indictment of treason for robert e lee and 36 other high-ranking Confederates who read like a who's who of Virginia's Confederate leadership Richard you will Jubal Early Wade Hampton William Mahone adjutant general Samuel Cooper James seden the Confederate Secretary of War William extra Billy Smith and Henry a wise both governors of Virginia and not only robert e lee but his two sons Custis Andrew Neely and his nephew Fitzhugh Lee solemnly the indictment stated that not having the fear of God before their eyes Norway the duty of allegiance but being moved and seduced by the inspiration of the devil did maliciously and traitorously ordain and carry on war against the United States of America against the Constitution government peace and dignity against the form and statute in such case made and provided we may have had some suspicion from the first that Ulysses grants generosity at Appomattox was going to be challenged he had determined to keep as low a political profile as he could and as Lee said to procure some humble home for my family until I can devise some means of providing it with subsistence all to no avail the news of the indictment reached the 58 year old Lee when he returned to his borrowed quarters in Richmond from a family visit to his cousin Thomas Carter and he squared off at once to fight back On June 13th he wrote directly to Grant demanding to know on what grounds he could be indicted for treason by the grand jury at Norfolk politely but firmly he reminded grant that the officers and men of the Army of Northern Virginia wore by the terms of their surrender protected by the United States government from Marla stationed as long as they conform to its condition grant had actually heard about the indictments before Lee's letter reached him and he immediately forwarded Lee's letter to Secretary of War Stanton with his own endorsement confirming that in my opinion the officers and men paroled at Appomattox Courthouse cannot be tried for treason so long as they observe the terms of their parole for grant this was as much a personal as a legal issue good faith as well as true policy dictates that should observe the conditions of that convention but neither Stanton nor the new President Andrew Johnson were moved by grants protest and so grant confronted President Johnson directly in a cabinet meeting mr. Johnson spoke of Lee and wanted to know why any military commander had a right to protect an arch traitor from the laws grant who as he said was angry at this heatedly explained to Johnson that he as president might do as he pleased about civil rights confiscation of property and so on but a general commanding troops has certain responsibilities and duties and powers which are supreme that included a parole carrying immunity from prosecution besides if he had not given such a parole grant argued Lee would never have surrendered and we should have lost many lives in destroying him and then grant provided the stinger I should have resigned the command of the army rather than have carried out any order directing me to arrest Lee or any of his commanders who obeyed the laws still robert e lee who was never an instinctive optimist was not an optimist now it's old Walter Taylor that he had made up my mind to let the authorities take their course I have no wish to avoid any trial the government may order Lee was showered with suggestions indirect and direct that he should save himself by flight either to Mexico with other Confederate exiles we're entering the military service of Mexico and the French backed Mexican Emperor Maximilian was always a possibility or to England where rumors in New York hinted that a member of the English Parliament has offered general thé a splendid residence in London and a sum of money the interest of which would support himself and his family for life but Lee's wife Mary Custis Lee was disabled by rheumatoid arthritis and he could not countenance leaving her or two of his sons to face any legal music that he would have avoided to his brother Charles Carter Lee he wrote resignedly all about the indictments On June 21st 1865 the papers are arguing the subject pro and con and I presume the government will decide in favor of the stronger party I am here to answer any accusations against me and cannot flee and yet whether General Lee and judge Underwood realized it there were serious constitutional legal and practical obstacles in the path of a conviction or even a trial for treason of the Confederacy's most famous soldier now if I take aim first of all the Constitution's definition of treason is a very narrow one and is based on English treason laws dating back to the 1350 s which limited treason to attacks on the king's person on household levying war against the king or giving the king's enemies aid and comfort if anything the constitutional provision and its statutory accompaniment the Crimes Act of 1790 made it nearly impossible to obtain convictions for treason something which was dramatically exposed in the celebrated trial of Aaron Burr in 1807 by the time of the Civil War only five convictions for treason had ever emerged from the federal courts and all of those had occurred in the administrations of Washington and John Adams both of whom then pardoned the ones convicted so was there really enough civilian legal traction to convict robert e lee in a federal court another problem lee would have to be tried in the jurisdiction where the treason occurred the constitution preface 'as the section on treason with a section requiring that the trial of all crimes except in cases of impeachment shall be by jury and such trial shall be held in the state where the said crimes shall have been committed in fact the sixth amendment adds that such a trial would have to take place in the district not just the state but the district wherein the crimes shall have been committed that meant at the least that a trial of robert e lee would have to take place in virginia and while it had not been difficult to create a cooperative grand jury for an indictment in Norfolk because Norfolk had been under Union occupation since May of 1862 the the sixth amendment seemed to require that such a trial take place in Richmond just as it had done with the borough trial it would be a monumental task to find a civilian Pettit jury in Richmond if not all of Virginia which would vote to convict robert e lee judge underwood certainly understood that this would be one of his most formidable obstacles he told members of congress unless it is what might be called a packed jury ten or eleven out of the twelve on any jury I think would say that Lee was almost equal to Washington and was the noblest man in the state a third complication arrived courtesy of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Salman P Chase who would not cooperate Abraham Lincoln had installed Salman Chase as chief justice after the death of Roger Toney partly to kick the ambitious chase upstairs and remove him as a rival for the presidency and partly to ensure that the administration's emancipation policies during the war would get a friendly hearing from a devout anti-slavery man like chase well chase had agendas of his own if he could not from his position on the high court usurp Lincoln as president he could certainly magnify his office as chief justice ever since Roger tourneys unavailing effort to bind Lincoln's war policies with civil chains in ex parte Merriman the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary as a whole had played a muted role in the conduct of the war but as soon as the shooting was stopped chase and the High Court once again moved to reassert themselves as the judiciary over against the executive and legislative branches of the government and the most dramatic example of that would come in the case of parte Milligan which struck down the legitimacy of military tribunals not that this persuaded Andrew Johnson or Congress to suspend the use of military tribunals but it meant that Salman Chase would refuse to participate in his auxiliary role as a Federal Circuit Judge so long as military tribunals were operating anywhere within a given district while military authority was supreme in the south chase explained no Justice of the Supreme Court could properly hold a court there and by tradition chases particular circuit responsibilities as Chief Justice embraced Virginia and North Carolina without chases participation in a capital case judge Underwood would have to try Lee's treason case by himself and that would produce a verdict of at best challengeable legality as it was chase did not have a particularly high opinion of judge Underwood as a judge the anxious man chase remarked dryly can have a trial before Judge Underwood any time that he wants but the court will be a quasi military court and chase would have nothing to do with it and then factoring into all of these obstacles in the path of a trial for treason was Lee's own self-defense two weeks after Judge Underwood's grand jury indicted him Lee shrugged off his pessimism and began asserting a more defiant tone to his cousin Marquis Williams Lee declared that he was aware of having done nothing wrong that sense of nothing wrong grew out of a theory of citizenship which in turn was based in a fundamental ambiguity in the Federal Constitution nowhere in the Constitution as it was written in 1787 is the concept of citizenship actually defined in the five places where the Constitution refers to citizenship it speaks of citizens of the states and citizens of the United States but the Constitution made no effort to sort out the relationship between the two leaving the strange sense that Americans possessed a kind of dual citizenship in their native state as Lee called it and in the Union this played directly into the larger pre-war argument that the Constitution had neatly divided sovereignty between the states and the federal union Lee therefore had no trouble arguing that Virginia and the other rebel States were merely using the reserved right of state sovereignty when they seceded and in my view Lee reasoned that meant that the action of the state in withdrawing itself from the government of the United States required its citizens to act with it the Act of Virginia the act of Virginia in withdrawing herself in the United States carried me along as a citizen of Virginia because her laws and acts were binding on me in the event of course the Civil War had exploded that question that theory of matters the war he explained to his nephew Edward child originated from a doubtful question of construction of the Constitution about which our forefathers differed at the time of framing it now it had been settled by the arbitrament of arms but in 1861 Lee argued neither Lee nor any other individual Confederate could be called a traitor for having done what they did the state li argued the state was responsible for the act not the individual Lee's citizenship argument was an ingenious one and it would become a standard opening for other high Confederate officers but there was a little-known flaw in the application of this reasoning to robert e lee and that flaw ran back to his resignation from the US Army at the opening of the war on April 20th 1861 few people knew in 1865 that after the attack on Fort Sumter Lee had been personally approached by Francis Preston Blair senior acting as an emissary from Lincoln with the proposal that Lee assumed command of the Union armies Lee refused and instead submitted his resignation an Act which Lee believed released him from his personal oath as a soldier and returned him to the simple status of civilian two days later on April 22nd he was in Richmond and the next day April 23rd Lee assumed command of all the military forces of Virginia so it came as an unwelcome surprise to learn through his son Custis that the war departments acceptance of his resignation had not taken place until April 25th by which time robert e lee was already in active command of the virginia forces I resigned on the 20th Lee wrote and wished it to take effect on that day he fumed I cannot consent to it's running on farther because that would put him in the position of taking up arms against the United States while still technically an officer of its armies if that did not make him a traitor it certainly made him a deserter and either way the penalty was liable be stark the secret of the meeting Lee had had with Francis Preston Blair did not remain a secret for long in fact it was spilled in passing and a letter written to the National Intelligencer on August 9th 1866 by Montgomery Blair who alluded briefly to how my father sounded Lee at the request of President Lincoln about taking command of our army against the rebellion the spill widened in February of 1868 when during a rancorous debate on the floor of the Senate Simon Cameron who had been Lincoln's Secretary of War in April 1861 insisted that Lee had himself on his own initiative called on a gentleman who had my entire confidence and intimated that he Lee would like to command would like to have command of the army Cameron said that he authorised general-in-chief Winfield Scott to make the offer and it was accepted by him by Lee verbally with the promise that he would go back into Virginia and settle his business and then come back to take command this was Cameron added false pretenses for Lee then deserted from that description Lee had not only not been released from his status as a US soldier but had used his resignation as a means for dodging responsibility for suppressing the rebellion which he was in the actual process of joining Lee indignantly wrote to reberty Johnson with whom Cameron had been contending on the floor of the Senate to insist that he had never intimated to anyone that I desired the command of the United States Army that he had frankly told Francis Preston Blair that I could take no part in an invasion of the southern states and afterwards forwarded my resignation to general Scott by that point however other factors had intervened to render Lee's treason indictment a nearly dead letter for one thing grants threat to resign if the Appomattox paroles were set aside was nothing for Andrew Johnson to trifle with and on June 11th 1865 judge Underwood was called to Washington for consultations with attorney general speed consultations which effectively sent the Lee indictment to the backburner for another thing Underwood and Johnson had a bigger fish to fry in the person of Jefferson Davis who had been imprisoned in Fortress Monroe since May 1865 and whom Underwood's grand jury indicted for treason on may 8th 1866 but Davis's prosecution wet a ground repeatedly on Chief Justice chases refusal to participate until the grip of military rule in the defeated Confederacy had been released a trial date was set for November 1867 but postponed again and again especially as Andrew Johnson's impeachment trial embroiled both Chase and Johnson in that fiasco Johnson barely survived his impeachment and in a gesture of contempt for the Radical Republicans who had nearly destroyed him Johnson issued a full pardon and amnesty for the offense of treason to all and every person who directly or indirectly participated in the late insurrection or rebellion this on Christmas Day 1868 what a Christmas present the sword dangling over the heads of Davis and Lee and the others was now withdrawn nevertheless Underwood's indictment remained only nearly dead for three years and Lee anxiously eyed any moment when it might bark back into life I am considered such a reprobate he half joke that I hesitate to darken the doors of those whom I regard lest I should bring upon them some disaster he kept close tabs on the progress of Jefferson Davis's indictment and he rejoiced in May of 1867 when Davis was released on bail one great and impending evil has lately been relieved the prosecution of mr. Davis Lee wrote to former South Carolina Senator James chestnut and I have not words to tell the load that it is lifted from my heart or to express my gratitude to the giver of all good for this manifestation of his kindness but he was jolted back into anxiety when the November 1867 trial date was set and he received a subpoena from the US District Court in Richmond to appear as a witness in the case of mr. Davis Robert Ely could never breathe entirely free until Johnson's Christmas amnesty guaranteed the quashing of all prosecution against mr. Davis and others against whom proceedings had been instituted and the restoration of those who had been obliged to leave the country but none of this quite answers the original question did Robert Ely commit treason four years after his death unreconciled northerners continued to denounce Lee as the arch traitor of the rebellion I think it's safe to say declared Vermont's US Senator George F Edmunds and no one no one has committed the truck-- the crime of treason against more light against better opportunities of knowing he was committing it than Robert Ely but in the end everything dangled on own carefully honed distinction that until the Civil War settled matters there was a plausible vagueness in the Constitution about the loyalty owed by citizens of States and the Union and so long as it could be argued that Lee was simply functioning within the latitude of that vagueness by following his Virginia citizenship it would be extraordinarily difficult to persuade a civilian jury that he had knowingly committed treason in the end one has to say purely on the merits that robert e lee did indeed commit treason as defined by the constitution levying war and there's no way to ease your way around that because the prevailing legal authorities of the day William Rahl in his view of the Constitution justice Joseph story in his charge to the grand jury concerning the door' rebels of 1842 all of that made clear that levying war included insurrection but the plausibility of Lee's defense introduces hesitations and mitigations which no jury in 1865 even Underwood's packed jury could rush by easily that fact combined with Ulysses Grant and Salman Chase to countenance their refusal to countenance a treason trial for Lee makes it extremely unlikely that a guilty verdict would ever have been reached the jury which might have tried him was never called into being and without a trial by a jury of his peers not even the most acute of historical observers is really free to pass judgment on the crime of robert e lee as a nation we have always been reluctant to pull out treason as a weapon since 1917 most cases approaching treason had actually been prosecuted under the Espionage Act but we have heard the word treason more and more since the beginning of the war on terror especially as applied in absentia to Edward Snowden we are likely to hear more about it in the future thank you very much I believe we're gonna do some Q&A for a few minutes and anyone who does not have a question about this subject has been asleep for the last 40 minutes question the individuals were released from responsibility did the states that were formerly be released from their treasonous acts well there was a fundamental question whether states had the authority to hand down indictments for treason and try people as traitors against state authority now a number of states had such a statute on their books a state statute Virginia for instance did and it was on the authority of that state statute that Virginia prosecuted and convicted John Brown in 1859 but to read the legal commentaries of the day made it very dubious that states really had that authority justice story made it very clear that rebellion against the authority of a state was taken up into the idea of treason against the United States as a whole so you cannot plead exactly saying while there was this great division between state definitions of treason or federal definitions of treason that was playing into the hands of people who were themselves not speaking with a whole lot of authority and fundamentally it has to be said that the reason why the state of Virginia the Commonwealth of Virginia prosecutes John Brown rather than leaving that prosecution to the federal government was because the Virginia treason statute was much more specific in what amounted to treason and the feeling in the Buchanan administration was they were more likely to get Brown convicted and hanged in a Virginia Court than in a federal one which itself underscores just exactly the difficulties of applying the constitutional definition of treason in the Norfolk indictment who else was on the on the list people that I come up to minor like James Longstreet or J Johnston Nathan Nathan Bedford Forrest Longstreet wasn't because he was not a Virginian the indictment would only reach to talk about people who could be indicted for a crime who were Virginians committed in Virginia Underwood was trying to be very safe and very specific so the people who are indicted are only people who are clearly in demonstrably residents of Virginia who can be tried in that district now what was interesting was at the time that the indictment was handed down there was a suggestion and this was very clever there was a suggestion that the district the federal district in which Pennsylvania was included and the terms district and circuit are very fluid I could probably stand here and take a whole half-hour explaining the difference between district and circuit before 1866 and the Everett's Act but I'm not gonna do that because it's hot enough but but suffice it to say the suggestion was made that Pennsylvania which was part of a different district because Pennsylvania had played home to the Battle of Gettysburg and because Lee had commanded the Army of Northern Virginia at the Battle of Gettysburg no question about that then the district attorney and the district judge for this district in Pennsylvania they should bring in an indictment of treason against robert e lee and then that would get away from the difficulties posed by calling a jury of Virginians to pass judgment on robert e lee no get some really vengeful Pennsylvanians in there Pennsylvania's really know how to do a job on treason look at George Meade look at us look at all the names on the pennsylvania monument that they just did not mess around how did the question about treason for robert e lee and the others tie in with the reintegration of the states as states and not as territories it won't surprise you if I tell you that judge Underwood was one of those Virginia unionists who was most active first of all in calling for Virginia to be reduced to a territory nor is abolishing the whole notion that Virginia retained any shreds of its original status as a state and that of course was part of a great argument that had been raging all through the war what was the status of the Confederacy was the Confederacy of withdrawal from the Union well if it was withdrawal from the Union then they were no longer states of the union and since they were now conquered they could be treated and governed directly by Congress as though they were territories Underwood advocated that now the difficulty with that line of reasoning legally and constitutionally is that that was virtually granting the legitimacy of secession and Lincoln had never wanted to do that and the prevailing opinion in Washington was we don't want to go there so Underwood never saw Virginia reduced that way but that larger argument was connected because the question really becomes and this is articulated in another case in 1863 and the tenth circuit which again I'm not going to spend a half an hour on a warm afternoon trying to explain but what it boils down to is this if the Confederacy was only a rebellion if the Confederacy did not actually secede but was only a regime temporarily an insurrection Airi rebellious regime and the states never left the Union then could those who fought for the Confederacy actually be defined as levying war against the United States war is a state between two sovereign belligerent powers but if the Confederacy was only a figment of the legal imagination southern legal imagination in this case then it wasn't a sovereign belligerent and its soldiers couldn't be waging war now that sounds to you like the kind of argument that lawyers would invent well who else do you think was responsible for all this so yes those those law those arguments tie together between the Lee case about Lee's indictment for treason and the question about territorial ization Lea stripped of his citizenship is that correct under whose authority and how does that play into this that opens up yet another half hour's discussion because although Lee is given and and many other Confederates like that are granted amnesty and pardon for what they did that did not automatically restore them to civil status in other words they were going to be treated as though they were felons now I'm weren't going to be hanged which is what you would do to someone convicted of treason but they still were to be treated this felon so now that meant that those who had been high Confederate officials like Lee like Joe Johnston like Jefferson Davis they were not going to be allowed to be elected to Congress and in fact when Custis Lee in the 1890s is elected to Congress he has to get special enabling legislation from Congress to suspend that and declare him eligible to sit in Congress as a citizen of the United States Lee does not get his civil status back until 1975 when President Ford in a special ceremony restores Lee's status after the fact not that it did him a lot of good of course the irony is that looking at Lee's career since he was a professional soldier all of his adult life it is entirely possible that Lee never voted I mean for one thing he spent most of his army career at places away from his home second there was a real bias in the public mind before the civil war against soldiers not only being politically active but actually voting now the person who violates that the most dramatically is Winfield Scott but then again he lost didn't he in 1852 no wonder so there was a real hesitancy on that part and Lee seems to have participated in it in fact to read Lee's letters which are voluminous the man was an OCD letter writer all the way from his first the first letter of his that we have his his appointment his response to his appointment letter from West Point all the way up until 1860 there's scarcely a word about politics so the civil rights that he got restored in 1975 while they didn't do him much good in 1975 don't seem to have really been an issue for him before that he just did not have a great interest in political debate and when after the war it was suggested to him at one point that he run for governor of Virginia and of course there would be no civil prevention of him running for a state office like governor Virginia he just rejected that out of hand it just politics was was not his long suit well I think that I've been told that if I keep on going like this I will either a be hanged or be sent to law school and I would I would really prefer if I have to choose the first so thank you all for coming out in a wonderful second

Channel: Gettysburg Foundation

Views: 4,947

Rating: 4.0588236 out of 5

Keywords: Gettysburg, Battle of Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Allen C. Guelzo, American Civil War

Id: ISWXy_u3Sa8

Length: 52min 17sec (3137 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 04 2016