Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Robert E. Lee: A Lifetime of Failure

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

Robert and Prop discuss Robert E. Lee's career in the army, and his horrific violence towards the enslaved workers on his father-in-laws plantation.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This that's not a great, not a great intro. But anyway, Harry Prop. Welcome back. How are we feeling? Feeling good, man. Third cup of coffee. We're back in the game Yeah, ready to ride got some banana chips. Yeah little plantain That'll make everybody forget my dog shit introduction for this speaking of dog shit You know what college is dog shit prop? What college is dog shit West Point man?

Just a whole pile of perro caca. I mean, I don't know. I don't know much about the actual objective. I'm sure it's. Yeah, I think I know about West Point is like what's in the movies. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. An army college.

It's a it's important to note like the reputation it has today is largely formed by they call it the class the stars fell on. It was the West Point graduating class that had like Patton and Omar Bradley the presentation it has today is largely formed by, they call it the class the stars fell on. It was the West Point graduating class that had like Patton and Omar Bradley and I think Eisenhower. Like all these guys who were like real big, we're dub dub dose fell us like we're in the same class.

Now, it's one of those things where like West Point today, it's the place where the US military trains its most promising or if you talk to enlisted men, it's most frustrating officers, right? Yeah. In the early 1800s, when young Bobby Lee became a cadet, West Point was a lot smaller and like the country's not very old. So it doesn't have a huge proud history and it is extremely focused on one narrow sort

of education, engineering, right? It is probably the best engineering school in the country. So when you think about West Point of Robert E. Lee's day, it's closer to MIT than the way we think about West Point now. Right? And this makes a lot of sense if you understand 19th century warfare. Today, a huge amount of modern war fighting

is like small unit tactics, right? How infantry clears buildings and like engages in firefights does all this stuff because with modern equipment and weaponry all the different the wide variety everything from drones and rocket launchers to like standard small arms there's a lot for small units to do and a lot of shit revolves around that so that's gonna be a significant amount of training for any Army officer. Back in this day especially especially when Lee's in it, it's pretty much all smoothbores, right? So it's these muskets that they only really are very effective when you have a bunch of people all like marching and firing and unison. So there's not a lot for you to

teach someone about like, other than how to reload quickly about like how to be a trooper in a formation beyond like marching and stuff. So if you want to point it that way, point it that way. Yeah. If you're teaching people to be an officer, though, you want to teach them a lot about engineering and mathematics about like the way in which things move about physics, you want to be so that they can both know how artillery would work, where to position them, how to fire them, how to how to wield these blocks of men and have them like fire in ways that's going to be effective. Like that's all engineering is kind of the US makes this decision pretty early on that like engineering is what's going to make our officers

effective. And this is actually historically a good bet. You know, people the Roman Empire, people talk a lot about, you know, every aspect but this, but like the reason the Rome became an Empire was not because its soldiers were like great individual fighters. It's because every soldier in the Roman legions was a combat engineer. Yeah. And like, that's fucking useful, you know? Yeah, they made roads and bridges. The scrub way to fight a war is stabbing another dude. The smart way to fight a war is building a wall around him and starving him to death. Yeah. A dude that gets to like a lake or river

and thinks, man, how are we going to get across that? And then the dude is like, we're going to build a bridge. You're going to build a fucking bridge across that. Yeah, you just build a bridge? Like, yeah. Not just knocking down a tree and walking over the place. No, we're going to build a bridge. Yeah. And the US at this point is an infant empire and it sees itself very much cut in the image of the old Roman Republic, which is another reason why all of these guys are engineers, right? Yeah. So yeah, that's that's going to be the shit that like Lee does. He's going to Army Nerd School and he does really well there. He's a great student. He's not the best in his

class, but he's very close to it. He's also the most boring boy in the whole school. He didn't drink, he didn't gamble, he didn't like have fun. He graduates second from his class and he's one of only six students in his graduating class that never receives a demerit. He gets the nickname the Marble Model as a result of this.

Mr. Perfect Attendance. Exactly, exactly. He gets an attendance award. And he gets called Marble Model as a result of this. Mr. Perfect Attendance. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. He gets an attendance award. And he gets called Marble model a lot. And what they're saying there is that like, this is both like, yeah, it's kind of, he's kind of like exhausting and boring, but also like he is a good soldier. He's a reliable guy. So like people find him like make fun of him a little bit, but he also is generally liked

because you can trust Lee to do his job. Yeah, he's he's he's he's definitely a hall monitor Yeah, yeah, we were stuck outside you want him with him because Nicky can follow directions and we'd be all right Yes, and he's he's competent. He knows like how to do shit, right? Yeah The mother of one of his peers found herself surprised that after meeting him He was very human is what she describes. So that should give you some insight into how his classmates wrote home about him to their family. That is so funny.

Yeah. Your homies mama thought that. I didn't think he would breathe. Wow. Oh my gosh. How much shade is it when your, the homies mama like is like, I don't know, I thought you were a little weird though. Turns out like you're a regular kid.

Like okay. He's a nice enough guy, I didn't expect that. That's so funny. Damn, your mom throwing shade. Later in life, one friend of the Lee family would state that she knew Robert's brother Smithly well, but she writes, quote, can anybody say they know his brother?

I doubt it. He looks so cold and quiet and grand. And that's very common from people talking about Bobby Lee, right? He is perfectly polite. He has impeccable manners. He is the studious embodiment of Southern gentility. And he plays his emotions so close to the chest that nobody, people don't really, everyone's kind of confused as like, is he just hiding his true self for politess or is there nothing inside of him really? Yeah. Right?

I know some street dudes like that. Yeah. Like I have a friend who, even his closest friends, like we've sat down like at a bar or something and been like, yeah, I don't actually know him. And they're like, we met in middle school. And they're like, I honestly, I'm like, I'm not sure I know him.

Like they just keep, they play their cards close. You know? I've known this man 20 years and I can't say anything, but that he's always on time. Like, yeah. That's kind of how people talk about Robert E. Lee. Now, they also very frequently will call him hot. He is repeatedly described as being good looking. One family friend called him

on the whole the handsomest young man I ever saw. He probably like, you know, he ain't like road worn cause he don't drink. So he probably got that baby skin, you know what I'm saying? He not doing drugs or he ain't got no wrinkles. You feel me? He had all his stress when he was a child. He was like, I'm done with this stress.

Yeah. He's the only man in the 1800s who ages like someone from the 21st century. Yeah. But it is noted that like he doesn't go gray until the civil war. Wow. Now he got some stress.

Now he's got some stress, yeah. So when you read through different bits of the multiple books about Lee as I have, you encounter repeatedly people talking about how hot he was. And it's sort of like how Kissinger's a sex symbol and that's well known at the time. Yeah.

But then in modern days, because he's like this old goblin of a man, like you don't really real, it's surprising when you read it. And this paragraph from Smithsonian magazine summarizes the phenomenon of hot Lee Well. His hair was ebb and abundant as his doting biographer Douglas Freeman puts it, with a wave that a woman might have envied, a robust black mustache, a strong full mouth and chin, unabscured by any beard, and dark mercurial brows. He was not one to hide his looks under a bushel.

His heart on the other hand, the heart he kept locked away, as Steven Vincent Benet proclaimed in John Brown's body from all the pick locks of biographers. Yes. Such a horny way to describe this man. Yes, he was just so hot and mysterious. He was so mysterious. You don't know what's going on.

Putting it on a little strong. And a boy got a baby face. Like I said, it wasn't hidden by a beard and that helps. You know what I'm saying? Why are you looking around? Everybody else look like silver back gorillas. You know, he out here with a baby face, you know? Yeah.

So when he finally does marry, and he doesn't like flirt or pursue anybody, at least not on record, he is very chased. He marries right after graduation, a woman named Mary Custis. They had been sweetheart, not even sweethearts, they had known each other basically their whole life since childhood. I don't know if he was really in love with her the whole time, or if it was more that he was in love with her family legacy,

because she is the great-grand daughter of Martha Washington. So she's descended from or related to George Washington, right? And Lee, again, George Washington is like the guy he idealizes, particularly compared to his shameful father, right? His father is like the warning sign. Washington is the model he wants to follow. And so you get the feeling part of why he marries Mary Custis is like he wants that Washington legacy to be a part of him, right? Maybe to wipe away some of his father's shame. In the 1969 Lost Cause History book, meet Robert E. Lee.

It rather humorously stated, Robert E. Lee was the last great man of old Virginia. In many ways, he was closer to his hero, George Washington, than he was to the men of his own time. In literal, because he basically wants to fuck George Washington, right? Like that's what's going on here. Yeah, like I'm gonna change my legacy.

Like I don't want the legacy to be all, uh, all no money. You know, broke ass Lee. Exactly. I'm with this Nick. Yeah. Exactly. So they had known each other since they, yeah, since they were kids. They, one thing I'll say for him, they're like the same age. They're born the same year, which is pretty good for high society marriages of this period. So congratulations, Robert E. Lee. You get the coveted behind the bastards, not a pedophile award.

Let's go! Yeah, yeah, that's a proud honor, very rarely handed out. We are mailing your last descendant, a gold medallion with the words, I don't, little kid's written on it. So, congratulations. Congratulations, that's a real honor for the family. Yeah. Yeah. So. That's big. That's a real honor for the family. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's big. That's big. It's huge. That's really big, man, because there's a lot of, listen, there's a lot of things we can say about you and we will, but you do like them your own age. Yeah, not a child bluster. So good for you, Robert. Yes.

So the Custis family were significantly wealthier than the Lees. And Mary's father is understandably, he never really trusts Robert E. Lee and his whole life, not because Lee does anything wrong, but because of how bad his father was, which not necessarily an irresponsible decision. Right. No, I get it. Now that said, George Washington Park Custis, Mary's dad, is also a huge piece of shit.

For one thing, he owns some 200 enslaved people and he's like Thomas Jefferson. He's one of these guys who is vocally anti-slavery while owning a bunch of people. And like Thomas Jefferson, he has children with a lot of his slave people, right? Yeah, this is rape, right? Like, that's the only way to look at this.

Yeah, that's what it is. Alan Guelzo writes, the elder Custis burdened with his own private guilt over slavery had been, quote, an easygoing master requiring little of his slaves, especially because it was rumored that over the years he had fathered 15 of them. Good God. Here's the thing, man. Look, I don't know if there's anything I hate more besides just the institution of slavery,

but the defense that like, but he was like a nice one though. Yeah. He was kind of nice to his like, I don't know if anything makes me want to like flip a table more than that answer. Yeah, I think it's worth understanding the difference between quote unquote nice and mean slave owners

for understanding the lives of slaves, but not for making a moral decision about those slave owners. It's actually very similar to like, when you read Holocaust memoirs from survivors of Auschwitz, they will talk about like, well, these guys, these, this particular member of the SS was polite to us. He treated me relatively and I was able to get stuff out of him to help. I was able to get food or whatnot out of him.

That doesn't mean that guy was, he was still a concentration camp guard. I don't understand. That's like, yeah. Okay. You know, I appreciate you pulling the fly out of the rat poison you're about to feed me. I appreciate it. Yeah.

It's worth understanding because again, if you want to understand the lives of these enslaved people, sure, if you're with a guy like this who is like less like violent and shitty than like you can maybe work a better, get more freedom, get more personal liberty. But like that does not reflect morally on the slave order. Yeah, it's still very much. I might've got a little hit, but I wasn't cheating. You know, which is like in one of the upcoming hood politics episodes, like we're talking about

the international court for justice. And like that's like BB Netanyahu's like argument to where it's like, well, I don't know if it's like genocide, genocide, you know, or it's like, maybe it's not like air quotes, genocide, like, you know, it's just a little bit of hate. You know, I wouldn't really cheat and it's like, fam. It's only genocide if it comes from the genocide region of France. Otherwise it's just a sparkling massacre. Right.

Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, it was like, well, you know what though sparkling massacre. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah. So I was like, well, you know what, though, but we didn't really like be our slaves. Yeah. So it's a little different. Yeah. No, I'm good. Yeah. These people. Yeah.

So he is eventually kind of is won over by Robert E. Lee, although never entirely. Lee takes an absence, a brief absence from his his time as a lieutenant to have his honeymoon. And then he sent to Hampton Roads, which is a port on the Virginia coast. And they had had a bunch of fortifications, but they, they looked like shit. And he's going to like renovate the fortifications on his honeymoon. No, right after, right? I was like, I was, I was hoping that this train of thought wasn't going to lead to his sexual prowess. No, no.

Nothing about that, I assume he was bad at sex. Hallelujah. Yeah. Thank you, Jesus. He spends the first four years of his career like reinforcing these fortifications at Hampton Roads. And the only interesting thing that happens in that period is that there's an insurrection

by enslaved Americans in South Hampton. This is the Nat Turner rebellion, right? Let's go. He was over there, did? No, he's not involved in it, but it happens near enough. And it's relevant, because he again, doesn't do anything in this, but he writes about it to his mother-in-law.

And the single paragraph we get of him writing about Nat Turner's rebellion is one of the bleakest and most infuriating things I've ever read. And I'm gonna read this to you now, prop. It is ascertained that they use their religious assemblies, which ought to have been devoted to better purposes for forming and maturing their plans and that their preachers were the leading men. And first off, I'll say, I don't know, just remembering the Old Testament.

I feel like slaves using their religious services to plan rebellion is actually very biblical. I was like, I don't know to plan rebellion is actually very biblical. I was like, I don't know man, like if you're actually reading the book, that's pretty on par. That's kind of what you post to do. I feel like that happens a couple times. He continues, A man belonging to a Mrs. Whitehead and one of their preachers was the chief under the title of Major Nelson and his first act was to kill his mistress, five children and one grandchild.

However, there are many instances of their defending their masters Major Nelson, and his first act was to kill his mistress, five children, and one grandchild. However, there are many instances of their defending their masters, and one poor fellow from the inconsiderate and almost unwarrantable haste of the Whites was sadly rewarded. He belonged to a Mr. Blunt, and himself and two others, assisted by his master and his son, nobly fought with him against twenty of the blacks. After beating them off and running in great haste after horses for them to escape on, a party of Whites suddenly came up up and thinking the horses were for other purposes shot him dead.

So he's talking about here that some of the enslaved black people fought alongside their white masters against this slave uprising and he's like and then they got killed by white people who just like shot first and asked questions later because they were spooked and killing every black person they saw, which you would think might cause a man to consider like the overall evil of the system that he live. But lead is not. Lead is not. Yeah, no, it's just because gravity works the way gravity works. So like, I get it. I, as a funny side note, in junior high, at left LA went to a middle school

in the suburbs in the Inland Empire. And then my parents split and I went back to LA. But anyway, but in middle school, I was in the burbs. Like, and it was probably the most like concentrated amount of white people I've ever seen in my life. And I'm saying this strictly from a anthropological perspective, not even a statement on its culture,

because I just wasn't familiar with white culture at the time, you know what I'm saying? Like I just didn't, it just wasn't my world. I just knew I went to this middle school and we had to do a historical persons report. I did it on Nat Turner. Oh, shit. And at no point did it cross my mind

that this world of white people would have an issue of that. Like, I just, I never thought about it. Now as an adult, I'm like, dude, I can imagine like, I'm putting myself in like poor old, you know, Miss Dorst, my seventh grade history teacher. I walk in with this book report on Nat Turner. And she looking at me at like one of seven black people in a 50 mile radius.

And I walk in with this report on a slave rebellion. How she, I just wonder what was going through her head at the time that everybody else is doing book reports on normal stuff, but I did it on Nat Turner. And now as an adult, I'm like, I would have loved that. If I went to this suburban school and this little boy walking in with a port on that turner. And I just know concept that anyone else would view this

as any different than I and my family view it. I'm like, what are you talking about? It's a guy's hero. You know, like, I just, yeah. It's one of those things, obviously, like, you know, what Lee says there is not wrong, like the, like children were killed during the uprising and my stance on this I'm it's it's similar to how I feel about the killing of the czar in his family

Yeah, children never deserve to be murdered. That is not their fault the children of slave owners and czars are not Guilty, but I put the blame for their deaths on the the adult slave owners and the adult czar and his wife Not on the enslaved people who felt like they had no other option. Yes. Right. Yeah. You have institutionally put your children in danger by allowing and upholding this institution that will invariably like you said, cause a person to respond the way they have. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, we can talk more like the czar situation is obviously more complicated.

There is some blame you can give to some of the other people in that, but like in the case of Nat Turner, what else was he to do? Well, I mean, what was the option? Yeah. Yeah, anyway. So after this, Leah is sent to work in DC,

which enables him to live in Arlington for the first time. This is basically the first time in his pre-war adult life that he spends any time at this Arlington, this like plantation that he gets, you know, with his wife is like, this is a huge part of the Lee myth that this was this was what in his bones, this was his home, like this he had such a deep connection. He barely spends any fucking time there. In Arlington, right? Yeah, in Arlington. Like basically this period of time where he's working in DC is one of the only times in his adult life where he spends significant periods of

time at Arlington. Now, this is handy. He spends some time like commuting to work in DC by carriage. It's helpful because he's close while his mom is sick. She probably has tuberculosis because that's what kills everybody in the olden days. Lee reverts to being her caretaker. He mixes her medicine. He's a dedicated good boy, right? Yeah. The story is somewhat less heartwarming when you learn that Anne spends her last days revising her will in which she gives away several human beings, including children. Her daughter, also named Anne, inherited, quote, my maid servant Charlotte and her child, along with Kasiah, William, and Betsy, along with my set of

white tea china, my wardrobe, two of my best tablecloths, and one half of my family napkins and wearing apparel. So again, the same sentence. Yeah, yeah, children, adults and a China set, all the same type of thing to them. On the same level. Yeah. Also, I think Virginia as a West Coaster, you know, and my mom's from D.C. So like I viewed like Virginia is like, it honestly feels like two different states. And I'm not meaning like Virginia, West Virginia, I mean Virginia itself, because there's the Virginia that's basically just Southern Washington DC. And then there's the Virginia that had plantations. Like, and it's, it's still like shakes my brain because I'm like, I still see Virginia as East Coast, rather than southern. Because yeah, when you say like Alexandria, Richmond, I'm like the Ronald Reagan's airport is in Virginia.

It's it's interesting because like you get a lot of there's people will argue very strenuously that like Virginia is part of the South, but Texas really isn't, you know, it's it's something or it's part of the West. And like there's actually some validity behind that like culturally historically but like I Think they are both part of the South Virginia is Now like certainly like has like elements of I don't know. It's it's weird like that. It's not worth getting into right now

but yeah, I guess I guess my question would be like Because it was I was leading to a question. I but like, so obviously if he works in DC, he's in the more, and we're still talking about a slave state, but he's in one that's more closer to city life rather than agricultural now, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's kind of commuting from this semi, this agricultural

plantation into DC because Arlington is kind of in the heights above DC. Like one of the reasons that like the Union will go after it early in the Civil War is you can shell DC from Arlington. So he's not far away. No, it's pretty close. Yeah. Now, the Lee boys aren't named as being given any enslaved people. It's not in the will, but they actually seem to have inherited some. It's just not, I guess for whatever reason, she didn't think it was worth writing in the will.

Biographer Alan Guelzo has noted that the Lee Boys definitely inherited who he describes as quote, one un-itemized slave family. I don't know if they were like kind of cheating so that they didn't have to pay as much inheritance tax. It's weird. Like I don't know why they were like kind of cheating so that they didn't have to pay as much inheritance tax It's it's weird like I don't know why they wouldn't have been listed But in 1835 Robert E. Lee wrote that he owned Mrs. Sally digs

Mrs. Nancy Ruffin and her three illegitimate pledges No men are named which is undoubtedly evidence that a family was forcibly broken up I guess possible the men died early right right? That's not given the time, not impossible, but it seems likely that families were broken up as a result of this inheritance, which happens a lot. In 1835, Lee is sent to St. Louis on a mission to literally defy God. For years, it had been clear

that the Mississippi River was shifting. And so there's all this like port infrastructure in St. Louis that will be useless if the river shifts to be over in Illinois. So Lee has to do basically the equivalent of spritzing the Mississippi's nose with water until it learns not to like risk the future economic viability of Missouri. Yeah, it's that's funny. Really thumbing your nose in God's eye. Mr. Southern Gentile.

Yeah. Episcopal. I Mr. Southern Gentile. Yeah. Yeah. Pist the bull. Yeah. So I have mentioned that one of my sources for these episodes is General Lee, a biography by Fitzhugh Lee. Now, this is not a good source in that it is not a reputable unbiased historic account of Lee, but it is a good source in that it was written in like 1896 by his family. And because of the area it it's in it includes some fucked up shit that I think would have been edited out by like a lost cause pop historian today, but that you do get when you read through this draft and while churning through much of this otherwise Interminable book I found another letter Lee sent back to one of his cousins where he comments on a local rumor by using a casual racial slur

where he comments on a local rumor by using a casual racial slur. We live in a credulous country where people stick it nothing from a seaward story to a sea serpent. And, you know, the seaward is like, it's a slang term for black people using like talking about like raccoons, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm bringing this up because this is like the use of a slur in a letter considering Robert E. Lee's actual crimes on the lower list of the horrible things he did. But I'm bringing this up because casual and lost cause histories of the man love to emphasize how much he hated slavery, called it a moral evil, and would have been willing to free his own slaves to keep the union together.

He did express variants of those sentiments, but he also regularly expressed very casual, hateful racism like this, right? It is all over his letters. It is undeniable. And I think that ugliness is important to get out. It's not just that he was willing to fight for slavery. He fully bought into the racial hierarchy and the casual distaste and hatred even for black people that was. Yeah, the reality of like it, to put yourself in the time to understand that like, they saw this as like, this is settled science in the same way that we understand

that the earth revolves around the sun. That is settled science. That is how it works. So race science for them is like, no, this is, it's settled. This is the science. We are biologically superior. So like, what are you, it's settled. Like, what are we arguing about?

You know what I'm saying? I think that that element, when you're talking about this, like, okay, so I remember in like some of my formal, like theological training, they talked about like this, this dude, Jonathan Edwards, like Jonathan Edwards, the guy, Jonathan Edwards, like the sinners in the hands of angry God, like this, you know, big, hugely influential American.

Hugely influential, like, you know, Protestant preacher. And during this time of the institution of slavery, like he was quoted to saying like, you know, Protestant preacher. And during this time of the institution of slavery, like he was quoted to saying like, if the savages and the Africans, knowing exactly what I mean by that, are in fact made in the image of God, like image bearers as in that's what we believe humans are, you're made in the image of God,

then we should be giving them the gospel Yeah, and then but then he says I'm just not sure they're humans But and then you don't say like this is all preacher this is y'all this is y'all dude That's what I'm trying to say like a person who is in that yeah Pat like a leader a pillar of the faith And that, yeah. Pat, like a leader, a pillar of the faith. It is like, it is, he's, because his brain is challenging science. I think they're humans.

And I think this is where we get into when we talk about the morality of like, well, you can't judge people from the past by modern standards. You can't judge people from the past for being raised with racist beliefs. You can judge them for how they act on them. I think that's useful because you cannot blame a man for being raised in a bigoted

society and keeping a hold of some degree of those beliefs, but you can judge him on the degree to which he changes and overcomes some of it. I have older relatives who will never be comfortable with homosexuality because of the time they were raised in, but came under the belief that, yes, they should be allowed to marry, there shouldn't be legal prescriptions against them. That's wrong.

And like, yeah, you were born in the 30s, right? That's about as much as I can hope for, right? And I think that that's kind of how you have to judge people. Like, yes, you inherit some bad stuff, but what do you actually do when you have the ability to make decisions? And where do you go in your life? And like, Lee never questions any of this. And he never changes, you know? He is a marble man and marble does not grow. You know? Good one. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of growing, you know, who does grow and change over time?

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I like it. Let's go with it. Bazam! Bazam works, bro. Bazam is like really like it fits you. Very soothing. Yeah. thank you. So Lee is gonna complain constantly about money throughout his life. You don't make good money as an officer. He's always like, should I retire my commission

and try to make a living some other way? I don't think he would have been good at that, but he thinks about it a lot. He's not ever really happy, right? And in any of his situations, his ambitions kind of outweigh most of what he's able to accomplish. And, you know, he's away from home all the time.

He does not seem to have a strong desire to be around his family or to help him, like his wife raise their children. So he is like an absent dad, you know? Most of his letters are him like giving Mary advice on raising children based on probably not much actual knowledge about how to raise kids. Well, you weren't raised.

Because he is not there. Yeah. Yeah. Number one, you weren't raised. And then number two, you're not raising your own kids. Yeah. Yeah. And this is not, you know, military families today, you're going to deal with like your

parent who's in the military potentially being away for long periods of time on deployment. That is a reality still. But usually if they're not in a combat posting, families move around with their family members. That's less of a thing here in part because of like, it's just not practical, you know, with travel and the dangers of it being what they are at this time.

In 1846, the Mexican-American war breaks out. And this is gonna be Lee's big defining moment as a man. This is the conflict where most of the major military leaders in the US Civil War will get their first combat experience. Lee at this point is an artillery officer, and he becomes a part of General Winfield Scott's inner circle. Winfield Scott is the commander of US forces in this war. Lee is really good at this job. And it's important to note, he is really good at being an officer in charge of artillery. He is not commanding armies.

That is not everything he's going to be great at. He is managing sections of guns and the men who fire them. And a big part of his job is the armies marching, they're like, okay, we're gonna try to bring them into battle here. And his job is analyzing the maps, scouting on horseback and whatnot, figuring out where is the best place to put our cannons so that they'll have good fields of fire to hit the enemy, you know? And he's really

good at this job. One of his first moments in the sun comes during the battle of Cerro Gordo, where he leads a detachment of cannons through thick brush, bushwhacking their way into a position where they can fire down on the Mexican left flank and surprise the enemy. This gets him promoted to major, and his further exploits in the war earn him significant press attention. He becomes a war hero back home, not the biggest of the war, but one of the larger U.S. war heroes to like the U.S. population. The most spectacular moment of his career comes when he crosses with just a handful of men, a lava field at night to get reinforcements for an upcoming action. General Scott describes this as the greatest feat of physical and moral courage performed by any individual in my knowledge, pending the campaign.

A lava field? Yeah, like dried lava, I think. Oh, I was like, where? No, not hot lava. Also, I don like, where? No, not hot lava, yeah. Also, I don't see where there's moral courage involved in that. But certainly physical courage. He's, it's, yeah. Unless it's lava.

Yeah, unless it's lava. I will say this earn's Lee are slightly less coveted, pretty good at the Mexican-American war metal, which due to a printing error is also a gold medal that reads, I don't dittle kids. Okay, got it. Sorry about that, guys. Both of them wound up being the same metal.

But yeah. But you know what, though? Like, he's in rarefied air here for bastards, man. Yeah, that's right. Two medals. Two medals. So, Lee ends the war as a brevet colonel and is one of the most widely praised officers in the U. the US Army.

After this point, there's Buzz around the man, which does him less good than you might guess, because he's going to spend the next stage of his career furious that he's not moving up faster to new ranks and better commands. Part of the reason for this is that the US, we don't really have a military in the modern sense. We have a tiny regular military. We have a lot of state militias, which are pretty useless. And we have a very small regular military. So there's not a lot of spots for officers. And you can't move up until someone above you

like quits or dies, right? So he's kind of frustrated that he's not really like getting, he feels like he's stuck in place, right? He's constantly wondering about quitting. In 1852, he gets a promotion. He's made Commandant of West Point, which he's not really excited about. He describes it as a snake pit,

I think due to its internal politics. His son, Custis, attends while he runs West Point and graduates first in his class. I'm sure there's no... Oh, he ran West Point for a while. Yeah, he runs it. He's the command on a West Point for three years. Oh, that's what command on means. Sorry, I was... Yeah, he's the boss. He's the boss.

You know what that meant. Yeah. It's like being the dean, I think. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a fun, maybe you could do like a... an Animal House style movie about like... whatever the bad fraternity is. An old dean, Robert E. Lee Lee getting angry at him for drinking. Yeah, we could make that work.

So on the whole, his tenure there is as boring as most of the man's life. And is primarily of interest because his long association with the Academy is going to cause a lot of shit today, right? Like there's a bunch of debate over, and actually this is interesting, one of the books that is a source for this is me and Robert E. Lee,

and it's written by a former US Army officer who taught at West Point and who they were trying to decide, should we have a memorial for Confederate troops? And specifically, they wanted to put it in a building that's named after a Union officer whose personal stance was like, these people should never be part of the country again. Fuck them, they're traitors, right? So this guy, the guy who writes the book is like, arguing basically to his colleagues,

we should not honor Confederate veterans at West Point. They were traitors, they killed US soldiers. Why are we honoring them? And he, like these men are fucking traitors. And he loses the fight. They decide to move ahead with the memorial until a, I'm not sure who it is, but it is a high ranking black officer

who's a graduate of West Point. I don't actually know, it might've been Powell. I don't know, but someone leaks it to this high ranking black officer who's an alumni of West Point that like they're about to put in a Confederate memorial and he is like, the fuck you are. The fuck you are. I love it.

Absolutely not. And they have to like scrap the idea, which is good. Yeah. Because he's like, absolutely not. No, what are you talking about? Yeah. So, by the late 1850s, Lee is stationed in Texas, but he's back in Arlington with some regularity. He gets to see his family from time to time. And this accelerates after his father-in-law

dies in 1857. Now, the Custis family at this point, somewhere between, I've heard 42 adults, I think is what Guelso's biography says. Most sources will say there were almost 200 of them. I don't, a lot. He's got a lot of people that he's holding on Arlington, right, when he dies. Most of them are doing some amount of farming, right? But according to white people who were friends and relatives of the Custis family at the time,

the enslaved people there didn't work hard enough, right? They're all bitching about that. Yeah. Now, old George Washington Park, who is Robert E. Lee's wife's father, allegedly tells one friend in 1853 of his enslaved people, they have their comfortable homes, their families around them, and nothing to do but consult their own pleasure. Run of Robert's cousins complained to him that the enslaved people on Arlington were quote, Fonder of play than work, which like you people are landed gentry. You don't do shit but play.

Don't give me that. Like I don't. What are you talking about? Yeah. You can't say anything about my work ethic. Yeah. You ever pulled something out of the ground, man? I'm going to guess not.

Yeah. Yeah. You catch the vapors. Yeah. Now we shouldn't obviously, as we've said, we shouldn't take that seriously that these guys were not working hard. Yeah, you catch the vapors. Yeah. Now, we shouldn't obviously, as we've said, we shouldn't take that seriously that these guys were not working hard. But it is true that the Custis properties are not profitable, right? By the time he dies and Mary inherits them, they are not making money. And this is a problem because like Mary's dad somewhat

hilariously decides that the last thing he's going to in life is gonna be to fuck Robert E. Lee over. And this kind, he's a bad person, but I like this. What's, he really hates Lee's dad for like being so irresponsible. And then when he dies, they found out he's been just as bad. There are in horrible death, the property's not making any money. He like completely shat the bed on his finances.

And in his will, he gives Arlington the property to his oldest grandson, right? Which is Mary's, Mary and Robert's one of their kids. Mary gets rights to reside at Arlington until she dies, but it is no longer their property. His other valuable properties go to their other kids. And Robert E. Lee gets basically nothing. Like he gets cut out of the will.

But old Custis still makes him the executor of the will. So his job is to hand out money to Custis' grandkids. Now that's petty. That is petty. I love it. Oh, he's such a bitch. Hey man, hey man, I just want to say, man, look, thank you for taking care of my daughter. You've given me the most beautiful grandchildren. So here's what I'm gonna do for you. I want you to be the one, because this is how much you mean to me. I want you to be the one to tell everybody

what they're getting. Here's the paper. And it's more fucked up than that. He flipped it through the shit. He flipped it through the shit like, where my name at? Yeah. Each of the grandkids is supposed to get $10,000, right? But he doesn't have any money.

And so in his will, he's like, here's some properties. Sell these, I'm not willing these properties to anyone. Robert, sell them and use that to pay my grandkids 10 grand each. But Custis is bad at everything. So he doesn't actually know he like wildly overvalues these properties. He doesn't get nearly enough money. So Robert E. Lee because he's this like big honor guy is like, well, I can't just tell his grandkids that their grandfather was was dog shit with money and is fucking them,

I have to find a way to get them each $10,000. And the only way to do that is to force enslaved people to work for money, right? Because obviously Robert E. Lee doesn't know how to make money, you know? He doesn't have any skills, I mean army shit, yeah. So Lee had spent his whole life,

part of why he is so obsessed with like paying, you know, executing this will that should not be his responsibility, is that he is still smarting about his deadbeat dad. And the fact that his father-in-law is proven in death to have been another richocratic fail son doesn't diminish Lee's personal obsession with executing the will

and returning the Custis family plantation to profitability. This becomes his obsession and the problem comes in that we just noted Custis, you know, his father-in-law is kind of soft-hearted. That's what people say at the time towards the slaves. So he tells them all when I die, you're free, right? So that's a problem because Lee has no ability to make up this money without the family slaves, right? So that's a problem because Lee has no ability to make up this money without the family slaves, right? And this is again, goes back to Custis being such a piece of shit. He is a deadbeat. So he promises, I think in part because like, a lot of these are his kids or his people that he's, he considers his lovers, obviously that's not what's going on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he

just feels bad. So we used to tell him like, when I die, you'll be free. You'll keep living this sweet life and then you'll be free when I do. It's fine. Don't worry about it. I'm really a good guy. You can trust me. But he's a liar, right? He does not say you are all free as soon as I die. He directs that they be freed within five years of his death, right? But he tells them, you're free when I die. Yeah, which is so true. Kinda. But what this means is that Lee is going to be like, all right, well, I've got five years to make as much money out of these people as I can

before they're before they're free. Right. Yeah. This causes a conflict because they were expecting to be free wide right away and they considered themselves free. Moreover, part of the issue here is, again, their life at Arlington is more comfortable than most enslaved people's lives, right? They are not being like worked as hard or as brutally as is common in the area, right? Again, I don't give any sort of credit to

Custis for this, but this is going to be relevant because Lee decides we don't need all of these people at Arlington to get it profitable. So I'm going to hire them out to other owners, right? Contract them out to make money to pay Custis' grandkids. I'm going to force them to labor. I'm going to break up their families,

force them to live away from their children and wives for five years so that I can give our shiftless grandkids some money. Right? Wow. That is fucked up. Yeah. It's yeah. You sell the you sell the brand for parts. Yeah. And it's like it's it's it's you can make more money if I sell you for parts rather than try to work. It's still. Yeah. And this is how he writes about them. Among them is Ruben a great rogue and rascal And it's like, you can make more money if I sell you for parts rather than try to work. It's still. Yeah.

And this is how he writes about them. Among them is Ruben, a great rogue and rascal who I must get rid of some way. Right? Like these guys are just such a problem. They don't want to work. I'm just going to have to sell them to somebody who'll beat the hell out of them, you know, for five years so that I can, you know, make up the cash. So one of the things that's really horrible about this

is Custis had let families stay together in Arlington. So after years of being used to, well, at least we have our families, right? Lee just, he doesn't give a fuck, right? Now several of these people, when he hires them off, flee their new positions and return to Alexandria, it causes this whole, because he's gotta discipline them now. It's this whole thing. And it causes a stir even

within Virginia, because within the gentry, their understanding too is that like, yeah, Custis wanted these people freed on his deathbed and Lee is still working them. So even a lot of white people are kind of disapproving of this, right? Like this is kind of a violation of a promise that had been made. And the soft disapproving of this, right? Like this is kind of a violation of a promise that had been made. And the soft disapproval of his fellow citizens was met with a burning rage by the enslaved workers at Arlington.

And I'm gonna quote from an article on the website American Heritage here. Believing they were entitled to their freedom and alarmed at the way Lee was breaking up their families by hiring the able-bodied far from Arlington, the slaves banded together and tried to overpower him physically, shouting that they were as free as he was, angered by the slave's defiance, Lee resorted to increasingly harsh measures

to maintain control. And the first harsh measure he resorts to is forcing the men who'd attacked him into what are described as slave pens in the city of Arlington. He locks them up and in the city away from their families. And then he leases them off again. And this takes us to the reality of the marble man beneath his layers of polatess and this genteel southern social obligation. He is as brutal a slave master as any as soon as his financial goals are threatened. Right. Mm hmm.

That that's what it is to him. It's it's as simple as that. You started fucking with my money. Yeah, exactly. Now you really know what I think of you. Now the nice guy's gone. Yeah. Now, Alan Guelzo, who knows Lee better than me, describes Lee's reaction based on years of letters to family and friends as one of confusion, as to why these people are angry that he's forcing them to work and be away from their families. Quote, Leigh could not comprehend why the demands he was making did not earn the understanding,

even the cooperation of the Arlington slaves. But they didn't, and his frustration at their obstinacy boiled over in the spring of 1859, when three of the Arlington slaves, Wesley Norris, his sister Mary Norris, and their cousin George Parks, determined to run away. They made it as far as Westminster, Maryland, only a few miles from the Free State border of Pennsylvania when they were stopped and imprisoned. Two weeks later, they were shipped back to Arlington, where Lee had to pay the costs for their rendition. His fabled self-control, titling unsteadily, Lee demanded of the three why they ran away. Because they replied, frankly frankly we considered ourselves free

now that's a baller response yeah like because it's like the that there's such an insidiousness in the sense that like like the fam this ain't your plantation number one and number two This ain't your plantation, number one. And number two, who you married in. That's not even your father. Like, and the dude that we, who actually owned us, which we gonna set aside for a second, that that's a sentence that just came out of my mouth, has already freed us.

What is you, like, you're not in charge. Who are you, bro? Who is this? Like, that would be even more insidious of like, you have no authority here. Yeah. What are you talking about? What are you doing?

Yes. You are ruining our lives. Yes. So an old man who was a piece of shit will seem better to his grandkids who are also shiftless lazy pieces of shit. It's such an unfair situation. I can't, I have, I understand so much more now that like, like privilege just makes you

brittle. Like I feel like that's just the best, because I'm like, what a brittle soul. That like, why is this in fear? They're not yours. Yeah. They're not yours. Yeah. And it gets worse because and this is really what reveals the actual man behind the marble, right? One of these fugitive enslaved people later recalled, quote, he then told us he would teach us a lesson we would never forget. And he has all both men stripped to the waist and he orders his overseer to lash them each 50 times. Mary Norris, the only woman of the group, he orders to be lashed 20 times. Now, that's horrible without context,

right? Yes. But I want to lend some. Whipping is a obviously very common punishment on many plantations somewhere between 30 and 40 was normal foreign infraction, right? Yeah, so 50 is a big punishment and you can tell how big it is by so Lee There's a white overseer whose job is to manage the enslaved people at Arlington, right? And Lee says I want you to whip these men 50 times each I want you to whip Mary 20 times and the overseer says no He's like I can't do it. Like that's fucked up, man. I'm not going to do it.

Um, so again, and this guy's part of his job is whipping enslaved people. And he's like, no, this is fucked up. Like that's bad. That guy won't do it. Right. That's bad. So Lee has to hire a, find a local cop. The guy who would capture the escapees and is like will you beat them for me?

Right that is how Lee claims this goes now that may not have been exactly how it could be a lot worse than that More recent lost cause books love to emphasize Lee's distaste for slavery And he says a lot of stuff about how he doesn't like slavery for slavery and he says a lot of stuff about how he doesn't like slavery. But older texts from the middle of last century, including stuff written by his family, makes it clear that his dislike of slavery was what it revealed about his own inherent cruelty and moral cowardice. The 1969 book Meet Robert E. Lee stated, Lee knew slavery was wrong.

He said it was bad for the slave and worse for the man who owned him. And that's not true. But also, I don't want to I don't want to disregard one of the meanings of that, right? I disregard like, obviously, it's worse for the slave. Yeah. But what he's saying there when he says it's worse for the man who owns him, he is thinking about the evil in himself that he had to see because of what he does to these people. Right? The New York Tribune publishes an article about Lee's battery of his enslaved people. Right?

It is so bad that it makes the fucking news. And that article claims that Lee himself stripped Mary Norris and lashed her 39 times in a fit of rage. And crucially, Lee writes about this news article. He is aware of it. He never denies the allegation or lodges any protest against the paper. Never.

So it does kind of seem like what happens and why he's like, it's so bad for the slave owner is he loses his control, this like this granite reserve that he is so proud of and he strips and beats a woman bloody and He lives with that. That's the only thing really inside of him this man who is such a mystery everybody That venal cruelty the same kind of cruelty that existed his father. That's the core of Robert E.D. You get to see it here. Yeah, you're titling on something that I feel like

Obviously doing you know post-mortem psychology is never good. Mm-hmm. However that point of like That type of hate and prejudice how it destroys the person inside of them is one of those grotesque things that like is not talked about enough in discussing the pretzel that these people had to put themselves in to know that if you are calling yourself the civilized one to know what you're doing to yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna stoop down to say in your brain you still don't you're still saying these people are subhuman Yeah, but still even if they're subhuman the things you are doing to this creature. That's alive, you know is

You there's no way like the again the mental gymnastics you have to do to be able to look yourself in the face and and Justify that has got to be haunting. Yeah. Because newsflash, you just as human as I am, you know what I'm saying? And so I think that that that statement is not acknowledged enough. And rather than face what you think is unthinkable and preposterous and accept the fact that like I am participating in a deep evil and do the work to change

You double down. Yeah. I also wonder if part of what's happening here is that You know, there's this always these claims that like well This is in a divine racial hierarchy and really black people don't even want to be free They're happier this way and you can't keep telling yourself that lie. When you see someone in a very intelligent and dignified way say, I am a free man. And as a result, you like, when that kind of shatters that myth in your head, all that's left is violence, right? That's it. Which puts a lie to the fact that this is a divinely ordained system. I do think that's part of like, part of why there's this rage and shame over it for him.

And I want to- And I want to- Yeah, I'm sorry, one more thing. I do think, like you said, like that lie that you're telling yourself, part of me is like, why I again rarely give, like I give historical context, I understand that humans in a time, but I rarely give any quarters to the argument that, well, this is just what we did at the time. I'm like, nah, you knew. Y'all know what y'all're doing.

Yeah. Yeah. This is that moment for me. Yes. And the moment that it is for all of us is ads. John Stuart is back in the host chair at the Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on the Daily Show, Ears Edition podcast. Join late night legend, John Stuart,

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because this is a moment that the people who want to paint a picture of Lee as a moral paragon have to grapple with and they they usually have to find some way to like Minimize it right. Yeah, and this this goes on to this day. I want to read you a quote from an absolutely shameful Dallas Morning News article and part of why this is fucking shameful by the way the Dallas Morning News has a proud pedigree. One of the things they did during the second Ku Klux Klan was like, have journalists basically tail people to Klan members, take down like license plates and shit like that and publish

lists of the members of town who were in the KKK. Like that was some based shit. And this is the crap they're doing now. This is from a 2017 article entitled, Robert E. Lee is the uniter America has been looking for. Okay. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Yeah. 2017. 17.

2017. Okay. This makes me wish this was like a visual podcast. So you could have seen my face just then. But yeah, we'll refer back to this article a couple of times later. But it is shameful shit. And I want to read a quote from it now. This is published in the wake of Charlottesville, right?

So they're like, how do we get Americans back together? OK, in the wake of Charlottesville. OK, yeah, yeah, yeah, city of hate. Yeah, okay. In Dallas. Yeah, in Dallas. City of Hate. Yeah. Yes. Lee himself, Virginia aristocrat as he was, was no slave taskmaster. He was a soldier of the United States.

Just before the war, he received in trust from his late father-in-law's estate 196 slaves designated under terms of the will for emancipation. Which objective, despite the distractions of command, Lee faithfully achieved at the end of 1862, a New York newspaper report from the same time period, accusing Lee of stripping and personally beating a woman runaway slave, deserved the same credence as might a tale of Barack Obama's endowing the Richard B. Spencer chair of Confederate history

at Yale, fake news. Like, what? Why are you calling it fake news? Is there any evidence that it's fake? Oh no, there's not. He was aware of it and didn't argue against it, didn't say shit against it, and in fact ordered those slaves objectively. We know this. No doubt about it. Ordered them beaten brutally in order to make money for his grandkids. Not a slave taskmaster, my fucking ass. Like the amount of things that were within the first two

sentences that were factually verifiably false, the first two things out your mouth. Yeah. It's a vile thing to say. Again, maybe we should consider bringing back stoning for certain things, you know? Come on, fam, thank you. Yeah.

And what's the basis? Like, this deserves us all. Like, what's the, why bring this up? Yeah, because he's like- Like, how is this helping Charlottesville? Like, tell me your math. What's the calculus? His argument-

Why do you think this will help? Is that in the wake of the Civil War, Lee was a really big uniter. He wanted everyone to move on, to get past this ugly chapter and that we shouldn't tear down his statue we should celebrate him as a guy who preached unity oh tell you what else did he fucking do yeah and I like where your editor that when your first sentence says he was a soldier of the

United States mm-hmm he was not no no was a traitor. He was on the other side. I don't understand. What like what? Yeah. There's this meme that goes around and it's like anarchists in every other period of American history and they're like burning an American flag and it's anarchists from 1861 to 65. You're like, you've got like the union flag. You're doing in a blue uniform saluting like Like that is, I do not consider Lee's fucking,

like he is not a uniter of the America I want to be a part of. I want to be a part of the America that fucking lit the south on fire to end that system. Right? Yes, that's where I want to be. That was like, all right, this is some bullshit. We're done. We're done. Yeah, we're done Okay, yeah

So the next chapter of Lee's career and life was to involve a man who was his opposite in every way and whose very Existence was dedicated towards dissolving the foundations of Robert E. Lee's existence His name was John Brown and I think we are all broadly aware of what he did. Yeah. To provide a quick summary, John Brown was a professional militant abolitionist. He had fought bloody battles in Kansas to free enslaved people, and he was basically a living bogeyman to pro-slavery types. From October 16th to 18th, 1859, he and a band of hand-picked guerrillas launched a raid on Harper's Ferry to try and secure weapons from the garrison there that they could use to arm enslaved people and launch a rebellion that would carve out an independent fortress of freedom

lodged right in the heart of the Old South. It did not work. Not a successful operation, unfortunately, but a noble attempt. I mean, in the long run, it helps start the war that in slavery. So it, I will call it a failure. It's just like not immediately tactically successful, right? Yeah. And Robert E. Lee is the man who commands the US military forces sent in to quell the uprising and kill or capture John Brown. This they did. And while the job is odious, Lee is like, he handles this in like a competent way, right? He's not particularly brutal. He does the job, you know, that's the kind of guy he is. Brown is wounded when the army storms his position. And this excerpt from the book, Clouds of Glory by Michael Corda describes the first interaction between Lee and Brown. Lee had him carried to the office of the paymaster of the Armory, where Brown soon recovered enough strength

to hold what would be now be called a celebrity press conference, combined with some of the attributes of a royal audience. Lee courteously offered to clear the room of visitors if their presence annoyed or pained Brown, who, though in considerable pain, replied that he was glad to make himself and his motives clearly understood.

Now, one of the funnest sides of the John Brown story is that all of the men involved in capturing him are like, can't help how impressed they are with it. They're like, yeah, I was gonna say they're like, Disney is hard. Like, they really like him. They all think he's insane, but they're like, this man is incredibly physically courageous. He is well spoken. He knows exactly what he's doing, right? He gives a three hour press conference after being stabbed through the kidney. The governor of Virginia who's there in the aftermath

calls John Brown the gamest man I ever saw. Like, mother fuckers down, you know? Like you gotta give him credit, yeah. Like, yeah, he's staying on business over there, dog. I think you have to, because like he is, he doesn't even break composure when his son is killed in the fight. And I think it's because Brown,

there's not a doubt in his mind that God is real. There's not a doubt in his mind that heaven is real. And there's not a doubt in his mind that the only thing that matters is fighting to end slavery. And if his son died to do that, my kid's gonna be fine and so am I, right? Like we're going to paradise. We did what we were supposed to do.

When you know you're right. Yeah. Like, and it's very rare in the world, in the, in Time Amorium, can someone definitively be like, no, we're right. Yeah, absolute moral clarity., we're right. Yeah, absolute. You know, we are absolutely right. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Lee is present for the whole conversation that ensued between Brown,

Senator Mason, Lee's man Jeb Stewart and the governor, quote, when Senator Mason asked him how he could justify his acts, Brown replied, I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity. I say it without wishing to be offensive, and it would be perfectly right in anyone to interfere with you so far as to free those you willfully and wickedly hold this in bondage. I do not say this insultingly. Like no offense, but like you are you are willingly participating in the greatest evil of our time. Respectfully. Anything anyone does to stop you is justified. Yes.

Look, respectfully, like respectfully, no shade, like respectfully, you're the fucking devil and you're doing the work of Satan. Yeah. Respectfully. Yeah. I mean nothing impolite here, but God will damn you for your actions. No disrespect, but you work for Satan. Yeah, it's cool.

When Mason, because Mason's like, did you pay these men who fought with you? Did you have to like, are they mercenaries? Brown replies, no, like fuck that. And Jeb Stewart remarks on this, the wages of sin is death. And Brown turns to him and says, I would not have made such a remark to you

if you had been a prisoner and wounded in my hands. Like such a such a G. For his part, Lee, again, he has this kind of basic respect for Brown's personal courage, but he thinks he's insane. He thinks because the plot was so doomed to failure, it means the abolitionist was either a fanatic or a madman. And, you know, Brown is both a fanatic. And if if being a madman means acting in ways that are completely inconsistent with logic of your culture, he is crazy. Yeah. But I think he's the kind of crazy that was necessary, right? Good crazy. Yes. The abolitionists who weren't madmen lived comfortably in the North and would like tut tut to their friends when they read

Articles about Lee stripping and whipping young enslaved women, right? Yeah, John Brown picked up a rifle Yeah, yeah, they shake your head. Just like I saw yeah what they doing over there. Yeah, like is it? Yeah, but we on our way and that that's why you get from Harriet Tubman and like being like yeah, he's the fucking best He was the coolest dude. Yeah, everybody co-signed him. Everybody co-signed him like, nah, he's a writer. Yeah, yeah, one of my favorites. I think it was Huey P. Newton who was like,

the only white man we might have led into the Black Panties was John Brown. Yes. Like, yeah. Maybe him. He's like, nah, fuck all y'all. But that means dope. I kinda like that dude.

Yeah, man. Obviously, adult part of the history is just like these rays of light in the middle of just chaos. But I think situated culturally, it's like anytime I'm ever talking about this time in the world, obviously, because it's so personal to me, but I always want to, like remind people that we are still talking about the enslavement,

a chattel, a type of scourge that hadn't been seen before on the planet, like how remarkably evil this is. And at the same time, that those that were disgusted by it are just as normal as we are now about the things that we're disgusted by that will, if there was a social media, they would tweet about it. They would follow hashtags. They would do all those things too.

But, and then be looking to the government to be like, why aren't y'all doing something about it? So it reminds me, I think of like, I, my brain goes to like the Dred Scott case, where like, I don't need to teach you of this, but like the, for the, for the listener, who clearly is the other 80,000 people that are, we're talking to right now,

is this idea of like, you have the Missouri Compromise, which was like, for every free free state there's a slave state. If we're gonna get a new one in the union, you gotta get a new one on this side too. Like there was, this was their way of trying to like play cake before we actually went to war. So a dude, so a dude gets free. He like escapes his plantation, goes north, you know,

signs up to be a citizen in a Northern state and is living his life, right? And now he's like, I'm in a free state. This is, that's what y'all said. This is what y'all said y'all was gonna do. I'm a free man And now he's like, I'm in a free state. This is that's what y'all said. This is what y'all said y'all was going to do. I'm a free man. I got up here. I'm good.

And then the slave hunter goes and finds him, bring and attempts to bring him back to his plantation to enslave him again. And he's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold up. Like looking at this, all y'all state's rights people looking at the state, like, fam, you're, why are you letting this other state, the other state is usurping your authority. You're saying that I'm a free man, like I'm a citizen here.

Why are you letting them do that? Goes all the way to Supreme Court. Supreme Court's like, ah, yeah, you're right. Like, you still kind of belong to your plantation. And it's like, yeah. So at this point, you're like, well, so at this point you're like, well, I can't trust the Supreme Court to do anything about this shit.

You know what I'm saying? Because clearly when it was a choice between two states, right, you chose the rights of the slave state. So to me, I'm like, you could be nice, like you said, you could be nice and like, tis tis, like, you know, what's going on? Or you could be like, John Brown is like, fuck this, I can't trust y'all to do any of this shit.

So we just, it's getting down. Yeah, yeah. And it's, I wanna, you know, when we talk about like the particular evil of slavery in the Americas, I think a really good point to look back on is slavery in the Roman Empire. Rome was a slave empire. Yeah, they heavily were. Slave ass slavers.

And they worked generations to death in mines. Yeah. And yet, if you get freed, there was no lingering shame, there was no caste system, your kid, you got most of the rights of a citizen and your kids were just normal citizens. And that is why, despite you might have generations of specific people get enslaved, once they got free, there was no lingering stigma. There was no lingering apartheid. Yeah, you were like, the Romans were just like,

no, slavery is a political condition. We beat you in a war, we get to enslave a bunch of you. But once you're, you're still people. We don't think you're less human. We just won, you know? I don't own your kids. Yeah, you often did own their kids, but like what your kid, if your kids get free, they're not lower quality people.

Yeah, we don't we don't think there's a racial hierarchy. We just won a war and so we're going to be shit to you. Right. Yeah, which is like that's still a bad thing. But it is so different from how it worked here. Yeah. So Lee had been sent on special duty to crush John Brown's uprising. And after it gets done, he goes back home to keep

unfucking his father in law's finances. But he gets sent back to Harper's Ferry a few days later to defend it from. There's this like it's kind of like these fears you had in 2020 that like Antifa starting fires like he's got hundreds of allies, they're hiding in the woods, they're gonna come free him. Lee is not a dummy, he knows that, nah, that's probably not gonna happen. But he does his job, he manages the defense.

They execute John Brown and Lee soon returns to his command down in Texas. He does not seem to have considered the incident to have been hugely significant at the time, but of course it would have an enormous impact on the rest of his life. In the days and weeks after the execution, Brown became a hero to abolitionists across the North, and a demon, the physical embodiment with growing Southern unease at the political fight over slavery.

Guelzo's book contains a good summary of headlines in the wake of the raid. The southern people of Higiford disregarded the ravings of northern fanatics because they believed that such madness to be merely a pecuniary speculation wailed the Richmond Enquirer. But Harper's Ferry shows that the northern people mean more than words. How long will it be? The Enquirer asked. Before the abolition fanatics of Cincinnati may seize Newport in Kentucky.

For the moment, the aid of the federal government was near Harper's Ferry and was in hands faithful to the Constitution, but another year may place that in the hands of our assailants and urge on and strengthen the hands that murder our families and pillage our property." So, they start freaking out about this. But at least for a while, life goes on. One of the last duties Lee is going to execute for the U.S. Army before the Civil War starts is a very mild insurgency against a Mexican man named Juan Cortina. Juan was a former Mexican Army officer who owned a ranch near Brownsville.

He had properties on both sides of the Rio Grande, and as settlers are coming in and displacing Mexicans, who would live there often for generations, a lot of these settlers are like conmen, right? They're basically cooking up fake legal documents to claim they own this property and like forcing families off. It's really fucked up. Cortina calls these guys flocks of vampires and he is entirely accurate in that. In July 1859, Cortina acts to stop an American police officer from arresting a Mexican man. He winds up shooting the sheriff,

evading a posse, and then forming his own band of insurgents and returning to Brownsville with a list of white lawyers to kill. And he gets five of them. He's fucking cool. This guy's dope. He then flees back to Mexico. And this blows up into a series of raids, right? And Lee is sent to stop him. And they kind of have a back and forth because every time he'll cross the Rio Grande, Lee is not allowed to follow across the Rio Grande

in the Mexican territory. And Cortina winds up like, eventually, Lee never catches him. Cortina winds up like, France tries to take over Mexico and they install a Habsburg Emperor. So he has to deal with that, right? It doesn't end well, but it ends the Cortina problem for the US.

And for his part, Lee writes to his family about Cortina and says, you know I am a great advocate of people staying at home and minding their own affairs. Were you? Were you Robert E. Lee? Really? Yeah, I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true. I think that that man just outsmarted you. Yeah, absolutely.

That is hilarious. Yeah. That dude was like running up in the slug. He ran up in America and was like, oh, can't catch me. Can't catch me. Fun guy. So back in Texas, Lee encountered a rising tide

of secessionist sentiment from the Texans around him. Their hostility to the federal government and even to US Army troops was palpable. The situation grew worse by the day, and Lee found himself sort of in a peculiar and alienated mindset. If you want to imagine what the kind of man Lee was would be doing today in 2024, it's helpful to know that he was his era's equivalent of a centrist, at least in terms of how he expressed his beliefs.

I don't think he was in his heart really a centrist. He was much more, he was a dedicated slave owner, but in terms of how he talked about things, that is how he liked to portray himself. Michael Cordo describes this well. He was appalled at Southerners talk about the renewal of the slave trade, to which he was opposed on every ground. And his experience of dealing with his father-in-law slaves had further soured his view of slavery as an institution. He regarded secession as revolution, dismissedcession as revolution, dismissed it as silly, and could anticipate no greater calamity for our country than a dissolution of our union. Now, it's tempting to look at the decisions he makes later and just say, well,

he was lying about that. He was pretending he didn't care about secession and slavery, but we know that he really did care about slavery enough to fight for it. I think that that's not entirely the right way to look at it, right? You have to understand, counter to a lot of casual history you hear, that Robert E. Lee did not particularly identify as a southerner, right? Part of why he doesn't want a civil war is that he doesn't really consider himself, he considers himself, he's a cosmopolitan guy, he's an American American in general and this goes totally against the lost cause stuff, right? The popular narrative is he hates the idea of Secession, but he loves Virginia's too much. He just can't he just can't fight against it. It's it's his heart It's the entirety of his being it's not Lee spins very little of his adult life in Virginia

Let alone Arlington he lives in the north for considerable periods of time and then out in the West, in Mexico and in Texas. He is a citizen of the United States and throughout most of his life, his letters give very little sign of a man who holds specific affection for Virginia. In fact, he puts a lot of time and effort into avoiding being at home. This is in spite of the fact that his army career seems to have petered out, right? He's like, I'm not going to get promoted as much as I want. I should quit. I'm old enough to retire. I should do something else with my life." And he refuses to do so,

despite complaining about it. He refuses to go and enjoy life back in his supposedly beloved Arlington. And I'm going to read a really telling quote from Robert E. Lea Life here. He could have taken the course of resignation from the army, but that would only land him back at Arlington. And even as he received letters from Annie extolling the trees and hills at Arlington, he gently pushed away at any suggestion that he might return there for good. I do not think my presence would add anything to their appearance, he replied, in a peculiar mix of pity and self-regret. It is better that I am away. When Annie pressed the suggestion again in August, he calmly but firmly told her that it would be far easier if you will come out here.

I will endeavor to make you as comfortable as possible. I have a nice little pony on which you can accompany me in my evening rides, and a commodious traveling wagon that can carry you wherever I go. I have a nice little pony. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. Yeah, he sounds like a dude that like,

he just wants to go back to brunch. Yeah. He's just like, can we just brunch? But not to Arlington. Yeah, and he like in Virginia get on my nerves. He was like, yeah. Y'all just get on my nerves. He's like, he's literally like, I'll send you an Uber comfort.

Yeah, why don't you come here, I'll send you an Uber. I'll pay for it, I'll send you an Uber. I think, but I wanna use that line, cause that was some high level shade. She's talking about how beautiful the trees are. And he's like, well, I ain't gonna make a mini Moe beautiful. Yeah, that's hilarious.

Yeah, I wanna continue the last bit of that quote. There was no point in his returning to Arlington. He wasn't always would be a stranger there. You know I am much in the way of everybody and my taste and pursuits did not coincide with the rest of the household and certainly not with the Arlington slaves. Now I hope everybody is happier.

Now, that doesn't strike me as a man who loves his home so much he'd break his oath and turn traitor to defend it in a cause he otherwise abhorred, right? Yeah, no, so... Exactly, he's like, really, y'all get on my nerves. That's the... Yeah. Like, that is...

People truly contain multitudes. And... But the idea that he was just like, really, I don't even... I'm not even from Virginia. I don't like y'all. Uh, I just got stationed here. Texas got better weather, you know what I'm saying? I can get a taco down here.

Why don't you just come down here? Why? Like we chillin' man. Like that's hilarious to me. I ain't gonna make the trees no more beautiful if they already be on need me to make a beautiful. You just said that's hilarious. Arlington's not really my place. Yeah. And that is. Anyway,

we're going to talk more about why Lee decides to fight for the Confederacy and how he makes that decision. That's going to be a big part of part three. And then we will deal with the myth and the fact of Bobby Lee as a great general. But prop for right now, we're going to deal with the myth and the fact of Bobby Lee as a great general. But Prop for right now, we're going to deal with the myth and the fact of you as a podcaster and musician. Where can people find you? Man, PropItProp.com is my everything. It's music. I got some new music out. We got music going along with the podcast.

Last song was called Let Me Highlight Your Player. And yeah, Hood Politics will prop season three up and running. There's so much going down. We've really like, like I said last time, kicked it into like fourth gear, you know, putting together like a bunch of different series. There's the You Wasn't Outside series that's following the Israel Gaza situation. Then we got series following the election. It's a good time, man, and then we got serious following the election. It's a good time, man, and as good as it can be. But yeah, little politics with Prop,

every Wednesday, get ready for the Wednesday drop, you know what I'm saying? And I got a book called Terraform, it's a poetry book. There's music to go along with that too. And I'm very happy to be here. Yeah, I also have a book. There's music to go along with that too. And I'm very happy to be here. Yeah, I also have a book. It's called After the Revolution. Check it out. You can order it wherever books are sold, or you can just Google A.K. Press after the revolution and buy it directly from Zippo Blasher.

That is the episode. Come back next week when we will conclude the exciting story of Bobby Lee. I like that you're calling him Bobby. Yeah, the rough draft title, the working title for this episode was Bobby Lee, The Guarantee, and then Prenjices of Failure. The greatest second place trophy of all time. Yeah. Yeah. All right, everybody. Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

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