Fact check: NC lawmaker says Lincoln was a ‘traitor’ and Robert E. Lee ‘hated slavery’
By Will Doran
February 03, 2020 11:59 AM
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The issue: What was Robert E. Lee’s stance on slavery? Rep. Larry Pittman, a North Carolina state lawmaker who once compared Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler, is again receiving attention for his pro-Confederate views, including claims that Lee was anti-slavery, Lincoln was a “traitor” and the Civil War was a “a completely unjustified invasion.”
Why we’re checking this: Statues of Lee and other Confederate leaders are increasingly under fire from people who want to bring them down, saying they glorify white supremacy. In 2018, protesters tore down the Silent Sam statue that had stood for a century on the campus of the state’s flagship university at UNC-Chapel Hill.
In an email to the News & Observer, Pittman weighed in on that, too. “The people who did this dastardly deed are no better than ISIS tearing down monuments overseas,” Pittman told the N&O.
Pittman, however, also criticized the deal struck between UNC System leaders and the Sons of Confederate Veterans group, to whom the state gave Silent Sam and access to a $2.5 million trust. “The only acceptable outcome would have been to have Silent Sam restored to its rightful place and protected, and to punish those responsible for its desecration,” he said.
What you need to know: Pittman, a Republican from the Charlotte suburb of Cabarrus County who’s also a Presbyterian pastor, made headlines in 2017 when he wrote that “Lincoln was the same sort (of) tyrant” as Hitler. To commemorate the birthday of Confederate general Lee last month, Pittman wrote a Facebook tribute to Lee and renewed his attacks on Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant — another president associated with the fight against slavery.
“Praise God for such a great patriot and Christian gentleman as Robert E. Lee,” Pittman wrote. He added: “This great man hated slavery, and freed the slaves he inherited well before Lincoln’s War Against Statehood.”
Pittman’s comments went mostly unnoticed until a screenshot was posted last week on Reddit. Critics found Pittman’s Facebook post and started responding.
“You are ignorant of true history,” Pittman wrote in response to the criticism. “Secession was not unconstitutional. Seeking to subjugate free and independent States was. Lincoln was the traitor who repeatedly violated the Constitution.”
Such arguments have no basis in fact, numerous historians and legal experts told The N&O for a fact-check when Pittman made similar claims in 2017.
Pittman defended his views in an email Monday, saying he thinks history textbooks get the issues all wrong.
“It was primarily a political and economic war,” Pittman said. “The issue of slavery was, of course, involved, after abolitionists convinced Lincoln that such a move would gain him more support for the war than he had before, but was not the primary impetus for the invasion.”
However, that’s not how Confederate leaders interpreted matters at the time.
Slavery is mentioned in the very first sentence of the declaration of secession by South Carolina, which was the first state to secede. That document, written a few months before the war began at Fort Sumter, also specifically mentioned Lincoln’s abolitionist views and cited a prescient fear that Lincoln and his supporters would wage a war “against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.”
And once the Confederate States had seceded and formed a new government, they took away their own states’ rights in one key aspect: “In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected,” the Confederate Constitution said.
Robert E. Lee’s NC prominence Lee’s memory has been honored throughout North Carolina.
Lee County in North Carolina was named for him, after its founding in 1907 at the start of the Jim Crow era. There are also monuments to Lee throughout the state. Most remain standing, although a statue of Lee at Duke University was taken down in 2018 after it was vandalized.
To supporters of the Confederacy, Lee is the quintessential Southern gentleman. A wealthy landowner who also was a U.S. Army officer before switching sides for the Civil War, Lee was the son of a Revolutionary War commander and was married to George Washington’s great-granddaughter.
And Pittman is far from the only person to claim that Lee fought for the Confederacy only out of dedication to his home state of Virginia, and not for any white supremacist goals.
Ulysses S. Grant and slavery Pittman’s post about Lee also made the false claim that Union general and future President Grant owned multiple slaves who he refused to free until after the war ended. In reality Grant owned one slave, William Jones, whom he freed two years before the Civil War started.
Pittman said he believes Grant’s wife also owned slaves whom Grant could have freed if he wanted to. However, according to the National Park Service’s Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site at White Haven, those slaves were actually owned by Grant’s father-in-law, not his wife. So while Grant did certainly benefit from slave labor, he did free the only slave he owned.
According to the American Civil War Museum, it’s a common trope for Confederate supporters to bring up the false claims about Grant and also claim that Lee didn’t own slaves.
“Both claims serve to distance the Confederacy from its core justification and suggest United States hypocrisy on the matter of race,” the museum states on its website, in a post by Sean Kane. “Both claims are false.”
Lee and slavery Historians have long debated what Lee’s true opinion on slavery was, according to a 2017 New York Times article examining his legacy.
Lee was a slaveholder before the war, and while he wrote a letter to his wife calling slavery “a moral and political evil,” Lee clarified in the same letter that he believed slavery was actually “a greater evil to the white man than to the black race.”
And as for slaves themselves, Lee wrote, the “painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction.”
Lee eventually freed his slaves, as Pittman said. He had inherited them from his father-in-law, who wrote in his will that the slaves should all be freed within five years of his death. Lee complied with the will’s instructions — notably, in 1862 in the middle of the Civil War.
According to the Civil War museum, in another post by Kane, Lee tried on two separate occasions to keep his slaves in bondage, but state courts “forced him to comply with the conditions of the will.”
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