He believed slavery to be a “painful discipline”
Robert E. Lee believed that slavery, as practiced in the South, was an institutional evil which caused more harm to whites than it did the enslaved blacks, as he wrote to his wife in 1856. Lee referred to slavery in the same letter as a “painful discipline” which whites were duty-bound to follow as a means of both civilizing the black race and teaching them the precepts of Christianity.
To Lee, the outcries of the Northern abolitionists were both misinformed and wrongheaded, and the institution of slavery fostered good relations between the races which would vanish should slavery be abolished and there existed anything like equality. Lee based this view in part in the belief that blacks were disposed by nature to be indolent and must be forced to work for their sustenance or they would perish.
Lee often complained of the strain owning and maintaining slaves placed on his time. Lee was also in the habit of separating slave families. In some in, tances he sent slaves to work on projects far from Arlington and their families, in others he sold families piecemeal. Despite propaganda to the contrary from Northern abolitionists, neither of these was customary among Virginia planters at the time.
After the war efforts were made to present Lee as being in opposition to slavery. Recorded facts do not bear this out. Prior to the war, Lee wrote to his wife his opinion that the “…blacks are immeasurably better of here than in Africa…” and added that their enslaved status was “…necessary for their instruction as a race.”
Lee did free the slaves which were bequeathed to his wife by her father, but he was forced to do so by the dictates of his father-in-law’s will. During the war, Lee’s belief’s about race prevented him from accepting proposed prisoner of war exchanges because he would not allow them to include black troops.