Robert E. Lee has filled the news headlines lately. Lee is a controversial figure due to his service to the pro-slavery Confederacy, viewed as treason by many, and for the heroic status, he maintains to this day. His defenders call him a great soldier while detractors believe him to be a white supremacist. Both of these views are correct. He is remembered as a man with an admirable sense of honor yet he violated his oath to defend the Constitution and vigorously prosecuted a war against his native country.
He denounced secession yet fought to maintain it, leading hundreds of thousands to death or dismemberment. After the war, he announced that he regretted having chosen the military as a career, but his leadership and battlefield tactics are still studied by career officers today, in many nations.
Despite the crushing defeats and severe casualties he inflicted on Union armies, he became a hero in the North in the decades following the Civil War. The US Army named Fort Lee in Virginia for their defeated adversary, the US Navy christened their third ballistic missile submarine USS Robert E. Lee. Hundreds of roads, parks, memorials, monuments, and schools bear his name, and there are statues to his memory all across the country. But in life, Lee supported denying newly emancipated slaves the right to vote, believed that they should be deported from the United States, and believed that freeing the slaves had led to hostility between the races which had previously been absent.
