NoShit....

[RVN VET71]

37. Thanks to Steve Schmidt, I read up on Lee's cruelty

Where before I thought him a traitor lured to betraying his country by a false sense of honor and loyalty to the State of Virginia, I now know he was a cruel son of a bitch, a sadist who thought so little of the people he “owned” that he tried to keep some of them enslaved when the law required him to free them and personally oversaw the torture of a brother and sister who sought to escape to the North -- even ordering the thug he hired to do the whipping, to lay it on hard and heavy -- presumably for his pleasure at their agony.

I had always regarded him as a traitor, but as a man who made the wrong choice because of a tortured conscience and a pained sense of divided loyalty. Now I know him as a beast, a terrible dishonorable man who betrayed his country because of slavery not despite it. And a man who felt sure enough of victory that he was comfortable participating in a war that killed almost as many Americans as covid-19. A man who hoped to destroy America to maintain a system of cruelty that embraced, even sanctified, the buying, selling, raping, and murdering of African Americans.