Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

Wow. They're taking down statues now of Robert E. Lee. Before the war, he owned one slave, a black man who served as his butler, you might say. And Lee freed him before the war and gave him a hefty stipend. So, at the time the Civil War broke out, Robert E. Lee owned no slaves. But, his wife, Mary Anna Custis Lee, came from a wealthy family that was related through marriage to George Washington. And she inherited a plantation in Virginia that had hundreds of slaves. Robert E. Lee told her that she needed to free those slaves, that they should not be owning human beings. And she did.

So, why did Robert E. Lee fight for the South? First, you have to understand that they're lying to us. Lincoln was a racist. He offered to pass a Constitutional amendment that would have forever forbade the federal government from interfering with slavery in the South. And he had a plan to get all free blacks out of the United States, permanently, to either banish them back to Africa or send them to the Caribbean. And Lincoln never freed any slaves, not a one. If you read the Emancipation Proclamation, it only applied to the slaves in the states that were in rebellion. And even in those states, it didn't apply in areas that were already under Union control. The result was that not a single slave got freed. Robert E. Lee freed more slaves than Abraham Lincoln did.

And think about what happened after the war. There were many Confederates who wanted to keep it going by fighting an underground guerrilla war. But, they looked to Robert E. Lee for guidance. He was the most respected man in the South. And he told them, no, that the war was over, that we were one country again, and we needed to make peace with the North and unite again. He, Robert E. Lee, facilitated national healing and reconciliation more than any other person that you can name.

In contrast, Ulysses S. Grant owned 13 slaves, and he REFUSED to free them until he was forced to do so by the 13th Amendment- and he did so resentfully.

So, they want to remove statues of Robert E.Lee, do they? OK, fine. Then it's time to rename the Washington Monument. Or just knock the fucking thing down.