When the statue of Robert E. Lee was removed in Louisiana, a state whose population is one-third African-American,  many cheered. There was also a rather predictable backlash. Mississippi state rep Karl Oliver, for example, revoltingly suggested on Facebook that those responsible should be “LYNCHED” (his all-caps, not mine). Others have had a less explosive reaction, arguing that this is an attempt to politicize or erase history, and that Lee wasn’t an advocate of slavery and may have held anti-slavery views, so therefore the removal of the monument is unjustified.

There is a profound difference between the eradication of history and the decision to not celebrate certain aspects of it. The rise and fall of the Third Reich is taught in German schools, but statues of Hitler are not proudly erected in Berlin.

That analogy is unfair, however, if Lee was as he is popularly held to have been: a loyal Virginian who personally did not agree with slavery.

That’s the popular revisionist narrative, but let’s be perfectly clear here: Robert E. Lee was not an abolitionist. It is a gross injustice and an insult to the memory and sacrifices of those who fought against the cruelty and immorality of forced servitude–or who suffered under it–to claim Lee was anti-slavery. He once remarked that the status quo of slavery  was “the best that can exist between the white and black races while intermingled as at present in this country,” and that he “would depreciate any sudden disturbance of that relation unless it be necessary to avert a greater calamity to both.”

In short, slave ownership was the best relationship whites could currently have with blacks, and unless it was a means to avert an even worse situation, it should continue. Let’s not overlook the irony that a four year war that resulted in the death of 620,000 soldiers was apparently not a great enough calamity to warrant a “disturbance” of the “relation” of slave and master.

In 1856, he wrote this in a letter: “There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil…”

That’s been often cited as evidence of Lee’s anti-slavery sentiments. It sounds great. But he follows it with:

“I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race…”

This is often misunderstood to mean that Lee saw it as an evil perpetuated by whites. It does not. He meant “slavery is more harmful to whites than blacks.” He saw the institution of slavery “burdensome” to whites. This, too, is often seized by Lee apologists as evidence of anti-slavery sentiments; after all, whether or not he opposed it for selfish reasons, he at least was not a fiery advocate of it, right?

Wrong. In that same letter, he goes on:

“The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence.”

Let’s unpack that into simple language: slavery is good for blacks because they’re inferior and need servitude to prepare them for equality. Only God knows how long it will be necessary, but it’s part of God’s plan for them.

He continues: “Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influences of Christianity than from the storm and tempest of fiery controversy. This influence, though slow, is sure. The doctrines and miracles of our Saviour have required nearly two thousand years to convert but a small portion of the human race, and even among Christian nations what gross errors still exist! While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is still onward, and give it the aid of our prayers, let us leave the progress as well as the results in the hands of Him who, chooses to work by slow influences, and with whom a thousand years are but as a single day. Although the abolitionist must know this, must know that he has neither the right not the power of operating, except by moral means; that to benefit the slave he must not excite angry feelings in the master; that, although he may not approve the mode by which Providence accomplishes its purpose, the results will be the same; and that the reason he gives for interference in matters he has no concern with, holds good for every kind of interference with our neighbor, -still, I fear he will persevere in his evil course…”

That’s rather wordy, so let’s break it down. God will one day see fit, when this inferior race has finally been oppressed enough and Christianized enough to become equal to their slave-owners, to emancipate the slaves. This is not for men to do. In fact, he claims that abolitionists therefore have “no right” to push for the end of slavery and even goes so far as to say that it is an “evil” endeavor to do so.

This is not the language of an anti-slavery mentality. This is a man who can find no moral justification for it other than the tired “it is as God wills it.”

He then gives this little jab to northern abolitionists: “Is it not strange that the descendants of those Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom have always proved the most intolerant of the spiritual liberty of others?”

Yes, you read that right. Lee found it anathema to the idea of freedom to push for the freedom of slaves, because to him, the freedom to OWN slaves was clearly the more pressing matter.

Many say Lee’s statements here are merely a reflection of the times, or that this was more a public sentiment, but that he privately held more abolitionist views. To support this, they acknowledge that while Lee owned slaves, he freed them, so clearly he was against slavery.

This is an intentional obfuscation of reality. In 2002, a trunk full of Lee’s private letters that Lee’s daughter put into storage at a bank was found. Historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor went through them and wrote Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters. Here’s what she said in a 2007 interview with US News:

“These papers are filled with information about slavery. This is not something you have to read between the lines; Lee really tells us how he feels. He saw slaves as property, that he owned them and their labor.” She then explained the “Lee freed his slaves” incident that is so often held up as evidence against this notion. “Lee’s wife inherited 196 slaves upon her father’s death in 1857. The will stated that the slaves were to be freed within five years, and at the same time large legacies—raised from selling property—should be given to the Lee children. But as the executor of the will, Lee decided that instead of freeing the slaves right away—as they expected—he could continue to own and work them for five years in an effort to make the estates profitable and not have to sell the property… Lee was considered a hard taskmaster. He also started hiring slaves to other families, sending them away, and breaking up families that had been together on the estate for generations.”

The Atlantic, quoting Pryor’s work, wrote of Lee, “‘…by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.’ The separation of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as ‘the worst man I ever see.'” The Atlantic went on with a description of his cruelty: “When two of his slaves escaped and were recaptured, Lee either beat them himself or ordered the overseer to ‘lay it on well.’ Wesley Norris, one of the slaves who was whipped, recalled that ‘not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.’”

“The slaves resented him,” Pryor told US News, “were terrified they would never be freed, and they lost all respect for him. There were many runaways, and at one point several slaves jumped him, claiming they were as free as he. Lee ordered these men to be severely whipped. He also petitioned the court to extend their servitude, but the court ruled against him and Lee did grant them their freedom on Jan. 1, 1863—ironically, the same day that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.”

Yes, Lee eventually freed his slaves, but only because he was ordered to by the courts because those were the terms in the will of his father-in-law. He didn’t want to at all.

What he did do is lead an army against his own country because he was loyal to a state that seceded so that they could continue to own people like cattle. When confederates under Lee’s command invaded union territory, they enslaved free blacks. When black union soldiers surrendered, Lee’s soldiers butchered them instead.

Lee once proposed a prisoner exchange with General Grant. According to Adam Serwer, quoting from historian James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, “Grant agreed, on condition that blacks be exchanged ‘the same as white soldiers.’ Lee’s response was that ‘negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.’ Because slavery was the cause for which Lee fought, he could hardly be expected to easily concede, even at the cost of the freedom of his own men, that blacks could be treated as soldiers and not things.”

Despite all this, people perpetuate this myth of Lee as this man who was quietly anti-slavery but fought for the South because he was a loyal Virginian. It’s clear Lee’s decision to lead an army in a treasonous war against his own county was primarily due his greater allegiance to the state than to the federal government, but let’s not distort that into the view that he was an abolitionist.

Lee died in 1870. Following the war, he’d had his citizenship revoked for his treason (it would be restored posthumously by President Ford a century later), but was otherwise treated with dignity and respect. He became a college president, where he was notoriously lax in punishing racial crimes and misdeeds of students, and continued to express racist sentiments, such as encouraging whites to hire whites because “wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving,” and arguing against sufferige of blacks because they couldn’t “vote intelligently.”

Upon his death, a wave of admiration for Lee sprang up which sickened Frederick Douglass, who wrote, “We can scarcely take up a newspaper . . . that is not filled with nauseating flatteries” of General Robert E. Lee. Those flatteries blossomed over the next century and a half so that today, Lee enjoys a reputation not as a “hard taskmaster” slave-owner who believed human beings he owned as property were divinely placed in servitude to prepare them for equality, but as a misunderstood gentleman who did not exemplify the underlying mentality that perpetuated the repugnant institutions he fought to defend.

The removal of his statue is not the erasure of history, nor is it the politicizing of it. It is a rejection of a myth and a refusal to celebrate a man whose morals deserve no celebration.