Ask why in public school history courses we were both taught inverted narrative about Lee and Grant? It was part of the Lost Cause narrative that seeped into teaching of the Civil War even in my NY high school. Lee the noble, good slaveowner who was really against slavery and the kindly general who sided with the Confederacy only to defend Virginia is part of the states' rights idiocy the Lost Cause bill of goods neoconfederate America has foisted on the rest of us. This is the nonsense that the Texas legislature is now trying ban the quesitioning of. The truth is that Lee was a slaveowner who separated families, regularly beat slaves himself or ordered beatings, had his army kidnap free blacks and escaped slaves from Pennsylvania and Maryland, refused to free his slaves in his will, saw his students at Washington & Lee College form a KKK chapter and rape and murder local black girls.

"Lee’s cruelty as a slave master was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his writings, Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”

Read the rest of the truth about Lee here: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/ .

Defending a statue of this man is equivalent to defending a statue of Rommel, Guderian or von Runstedt in Berlin or Hamburg or a statue of Yamamoto in Tokyo. Oh, right, Japanese leaders regularly bow to the memories of class A war criminals at Yasukuni. This is who the defenders of confederate statues are really equivalent to. Tell them.