Scott goes South

TFSmith121

Banned
Seriously?

You say that as if that has any relevance to the question....

The fact you "don't know if he (Lee) owned slaves" raises a real question of the depth of your knowledge of this period, but just to make certain:

Owning slaves, in your opinion, doesn't have any relevancy to whether serving US officers remained loyal in 1861?

Overall, I would suggest you may wish to read a little deeper into the cause of the American Civil War, and the events of the "secession winter" of 1860-61, and thereafter into 1861.

I would suggest starting with Apostles of Disunion by Charles Dew, U. Press of Virginia. It is about 80 pages of text; not difficult to get through at all.

Asa far as Scott, I have already suggested Eisenhower's biography; a recent and solid choice on Lee is Elizabeth Pryor's Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters; a worthwhile analysis of Lee historiography is Alan Nolan's Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History, which is well worth reading along withThomas Connelly’s The Marble Man.

After that, you can get into DS Freeman and the rest.

But just to make it clear, as far as Lee and slavery goes, his life is easily summed up as follows:

  • Lee was born into a family of slaveowners, going back for generations, who owed his wealth and position to the enslavement of men, women, and children;
  • As an adult, Lee married into direct ownership of nearly 200 slaves at Arlington and adjoining properties, and embraced mastery and white supremacy;
  • Although Lee wrote he "disliked slavery and found it a burden," he was no "good" master, communicated badly with his slaves, and considered them naturally indolent and incapable of freedom.
  • He confronted an "epidemic of runaways" in the late 1850s and oversaw at least one brutal beating of a returned fugitive, including brine sewn into the wounds.
  • Lee broke up families and without a doubt, denied his slaves’ humanity;
  • During the Antietam and Gettysburg campaigns, forces under his command took civilians in northern territory as prisoners and sent them into slavery in CSA-controlled territory, which is, undoubtedly, a war crime;
To ignore any of the above is - undoubtedly - intellectually dishonest.

Whether that is ASB, is, I suppose, in the eye of the beholder.

Best,
 
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The fact you "don't know if he (Lee) owned slaves" raises a real question of the depth of your knowledge of this period, but just to make certain:

Owning slaves, in your opinion, doesn't have any relevancy to whether serving US officers remained loyal in 1861?

I apologize if I was unclear, but I was referring to whether or not Anderson owned slaves being something I am unclear on.

Lee's life is just a bit better documented than Anderson's, after all.

Overall, I would suggest may wish to read a little deeper into the cause of the American Civil War, and the events of the "secession winter" of 1860-61, and thereafter into 1861.

I would suggest starting with Apostles of Disunion by Charles Dew, U. Press of Virginia. It is about 80 pages of text; not difficult to get through at all.
I would suggest making sure you understand what someone is referring to before assuming their ignorance on something.

And that the Civil War was started by proslavery men over their fears about slavery does not make it a conflict where all slave owners fought for the Confederacy.

But just to make it clear, as far as Lee and slavery goes, his life is easily summed it up as follows:

  • Lee was born into a family of slaveowners, going back for generations, who owed his wealth and position to the enslavement of men, women, and children;
  • As an adult, Lee married into direct ownership of nearly 200 slaves at Arlington and adjoining properties, and embraced mastery and white supremacy;
  • Although Lee wrote he "disliked slavery and found it a burden," he was no "good" master, communicated badly with his slaves, and considered them naturally indolent and incapable of freedom.
  • He confronted an "epidemic of runaways" in the late 1850s and oversaw at least one brutal beating of a returned fugitive, including brine sewn into the wounds.
  • Lee broke up families and without a doubt, denied his slaves’ humanity;
  • During the Antietam and Gettysburg campaigns, forces under his command took civilians in northern territory as prisoners and sent them into slavery in CSA-controlled territory, which is, undoubtedly, a war crime;

To ignore any of the above is - undoubtedly - intellectually dishonest.

Whether that is ASB, is, I suppose, in the eye of the beholder.

Best,
I don't see anyone ignoring anything about Lee in this discussion. I'm not sure where you got the impression anyone was.

But not all Unionists were antislavery or even nonslavery owners - whether talking about members of the pre-war army or not.

So I repeat: What is the relevance of Lee owning slaves to whether or not he would become a Confederate general?
 
You say that as if that has any relevance to the question.

Lee was a slaveowner from a dynasty of slaveowners. All of his relatives were dynastic slaveowners. His wife's family were dynastic slaveowners. His sons all inherited slave-worked plantations from his father-in-law.

None of this, AFAIK, is true of Scott.

There were slaveowners who didn't "go South". There were very few non-slaveowners that did. (That is, men who neither owned slaves themselves nor were the immediate kindred of slaveowners.)

Scott "going south" is like Eleanor Roosevelt endorsing Dewey in 1948 because they are both New Yorkers.
 
Why do you think that Scott was incapable of being a different person (while still serving in the US army as long and as well as he did OTL) or reacting to events differently?

Scott had a decades long track record of being pro-Union. For Scott to become pro-Confederacy in 1861 is about as likely as Nixon or JFK joining the Communist Party in 1961. To get Scott to the position where he would "go south" is going to take a POD well before the Civil War, and any such POD may be radical enough the Civil War does not happen.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
You really have to ask this quuestion?

So I repeat: What is the relevance of Lee owning slaves to whether or not he would become a Confederate general?

Seriously?

You do realize that every prominent white southerner's wealth and social position, either directly or otherwise, depended on slavery, right?

That's why its called a "slave society"... and none of this is debated today.

Maybe back in the day of William A. Dunning and John W. Burgess, but not today.

Okay, here are two other works you should read:

Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation by Lorri Glover, and
What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe.

Best,
 
Scott had a decades long track record of being pro-Union. For Scott to become pro-Confederacy in 1861 is about as likely as Nixon or JFK joining the Communist Party in 1961. To get Scott to the position where he would "go south" is going to take a POD well before the Civil War, and any such POD may be radical enough the Civil War does not happen.

While I agree that it would take a POD well before the ACW in all likelihood, I do not agree that it would necessarily be so radical as to change things outside Scott.

Scott has never had the issue of choosing between Virginia and the preferences involved in Virginia leaving the Union and the US before 1861. While I confess to knowing little of his political expressions in that period (and thus find the biography mentioned earlier in this thread interesting), I think simply having been in the US army for decades is not a particularly clear answer. Samuel Cooper had served since 1815, was born and raised in New York, and yet he managed to develop an identification with Virginia "And with the Southern cause" at some point between 1815 and 1852 (which did not keep him from serving until 1861).

Obviously Scott was not Cooper, but sheer longevity of service somehow failed to deter things from developing in his heart.

So I find that argument ("he'd served since the War of 1812") less than persuasive.

Seriously?

You do realize that every prominent white southerner's wealth and social position, either directly or otherwise, depended on slavery, right?

That's why its called a "slave society"... and none of this is debated today.

Yes, I do realize that. I also realize that doesn't determine one's loyalties in the ACW.

Do you realize that that not every Unionist was a nonslave owner or antislavery?
 
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