Lee was indeed a great general. But so what?

For more than 100 years, Lee, and other generals of the Confederacy, have been invoked to justify the cause of segregation and Jim Crow bigotry. Their statues — including the one of Lee in Charlottesville — were erected in the South when the federal government abandoned Reconstruction and allowed Southern whites to disenfranchise, and then terrorize, the newly-freed African Americans living among them. Those statues, and the romanticized memory of the Confederate cause that they are intended to evoke, serve a bad cause. Today, Trump again identified himself with that bad cause.

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We already have a better way to look at Robert E. Lee. Not an angry way, but a just one.

In his memoir, Ulysses S. Grant, a general greater than Lee, described his feelings upon meeting Lee in April 1865 at Appomattox, as Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia. Grant wrote, “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

In one sentence, Grant manages to distinguish between Lee’s qualities as a general and the terrible cause — the destruction of the United States for the benefit of slavery — to which Lee put his talents.

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The true cause of the Civil War was slavery, as President Abraham Lincoln pointed out in his second inaugural address. At the beginning of the war, the Union’s aims were no more than restoration of the country, with slavery recognized in the South, where it already existed.

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But the Union’s war aims grew with the body count, as though Lincoln knew that such a terrible war had to bring a result commensurate with the suffering and sacrifice necessary to win it. Lincoln redefined the Union’s war aims. The Union would fight to make our country a free nation for all who lived there. Lincoln recalled for Americans our founding principles, and not the compromises we made alongside them.

Grant was not an abolitionist. Like Lincoln, he carried the prejudices common to almost all white men of his time.

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But in the course of winning the Civil War, Grant came to understand the American creed as Lincoln famously put it: America is no ethno-state, and no White Man’s Republic. It is, rather, “a new nation, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” With that knowledge, Grant, as president, crushed the first Ku Klux Klan and supported the Reconstruction amendments — the 13th, 14th, and 15th — which sought to consolidate the victory of freedom over Lee’s cause of a slave republic, founded on the principle of white supremacy.

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Reconstruction was an early high point of the American story: we took our worst war and tried to emerge from it by making ourselves a whole country, for all who lived here. But we failed on our promise and sank back into the depths of what was called “Redemption,” the restoration of white-only rule in the South, accompanied by bigotry and, yes, by lots of statues of Confederate generals.

There is a lot wrong with what Trump said about Charlottesville and Robert E. Lee. But the worst is that he put himself on the side of America’s worst tradition (our “national birth defect,” as my former boss Condoleezza Rice used to say): slavery and the legacy of slavery, through sympathy for a movement intended to perpetuate that legacy.

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Americans — and our current president, first of all — ought to show real respect for our history, which means respect for the better angels of the American nature. Grant gave us a good way to regard Lee. Lincoln gave us a way to regard our country’s founding principle. That ought to suffice for the man who now holds their office.