Last edited Wed Aug 23, 2017, 05:09 AM - Edit history (2)
Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and (from 1865) the general-in-chief of Confederate forces, neither owned slaves nor inherited any, thus it is not correct to assert that he “freed his slaves” (in 1862 or at any other time).
As in the case of Ulysses S. Grant, the slaves that Lee supposedly owned actually belonged to his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, and lived and worked on the three estates owned by Custis (Arlington, White House, and Romancoke). Upon Custis’ death in 1857, Lee did not “inherit” those slaves; rather, he carried out the directions expressed in Custis’ will regarding those slaves (and other property) according to his position as executor of Custis’ estate.
Custis’ will stipulated that all of his slaves were to be freed within five years: “… upon the legacies to my four granddaughters being paid, then I give freedom to my slaves, the said slaves to be emancipated by my executor in such manner as he deems expedient and proper, the said emancipation to be accomplished in not exceeding five years from the time of my decease.” So while Lee did technically free those slaves at the end of 1862, it was not his choice to do so; he was required to emancipate them by the conditions of his father-in-law’s will.
http://www.snopes.com/2015/06/30/confederate-history-slave-ownership/
Edited to add:
Oh, my!
Is it possible Snopes is wrong? I mean: Take a gander at this --->
"Lee first came to slave ownership in 1829 when, newly out of West Point, he inherited several slaves from his mother's estate. Lee quickly discovered, Pryor writes, that for him slaveholding represented "an uncomfortable stewardship." He found supervision of the their work to be distracting from his own career, and disliked the daily details of managing and providing for them. He found slaves to be, in Pryor's words, "more trouble than they were worth." To relieve himself of the day-to-day responsibility for them, and to provide additional cash for his household, Lee soon took to hiring out his bondsmen and -women. This practice, common among slaveholders in Lee's circle, makes it difficult to track his ownership of slaves in detail over the next three decades. Freeman believed that Lee had divested himself of slaves by 1847, based on Freeman's failure to find any relevant tax records, and Lee's own son, Robert Jr., claimed that his father had manumitted all his slaves "a long time before the war." Pryor counters that Lee definitely owned slaves as late as 1852, considered buying more shortly before the war began, and throughout the war itself used slaves as personal servants. Whether Lee directly and personally owned slaves at a given point before or during the war, Pryor would argue, is almost immaterial, for presence of slaves and the benefit of their labor was an intimate and familiar part of Lee's daily life until the end of the Civil War."
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/arlington-bobby-lee-and-the-peculiar-institution/61428/
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