Historical Highlight: Abolitionists Vouch for President Lee

Sponsored by The Generals’ Redoubt

[This highlight features excerpts from an 1868 pamphlet fundraising for Washington College under President Robert E. Lee. What makes the pamphlet unusual is that the speakers are prominent abolitionists who had strongly opposed the Confederacy just a few years before. If you would like a copy of the full pamphlet, please contact kamron@thegeneralsredoubt.us.]

The following is an extract from Mr. [Horace] Greeley’s letter: 

“But the South has other wants than that of the Blacks; other classes whose need of education is as real if not so absolute as theirs. Education for new duties, new relations, new responsibilities, is to-day the most pervading, if not the most urgent want of Whites also. Let us try to help these too, and thus demonstrate that what we have done for the Black has not been prompted by hatred of the White.

Let us help each class according to its needs, and without dictating in what manner these needs can best be supplied. A generous subscription from the North toward the extension of educational facilities from that College in Virginia which bears the name of Washington, will be regarded as a manifestation of good-will toward the dominant caste throughout the South. I trust that the proverbial liberality of our city will thus be signally illustrated.”

…Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, on being introduced, was received with applause.

The war is over, said he; the country is united; and the question now is, what shall we do with it? Shall the Union foment discord within itself? Is it a statesmanlike and Christian policy to introduce and to maintain repellent influences ? And if so, may not one go to the very verge of imprudence in encouraging centripetal influences?

We have been driving asunder fifty years, and maintaining influences that separated the South from the North. At last the explosion came; it came as the earthquake or the volcano, and the whole country was convulsed.

Where now are the causes of disturbance? Gone, like the decayed matter that the husbandman turns up and buries with his plowshare. God has plowed up this nation as with a red-hot share, and it has turned things the other side up. Everything is new. Old things have passed away. We must therefore lay aside the prejudices of the olden time.

…He appealed in [sic] behalf of that College, because in doing this for Virginia they reached her sister States. All Virginia was sacred so long as it held the ashes of the Father of his country. He would stand on Mount Vernon and say, “ Washington sleeps here; let us adorn, and arrange, and beautify the place.”

[Beecher] also pleaded for that College because Gen. Lee was its President. They might as well face the music. No one regretted the course which Gen. Lee had chosen in former days more than he [Beecher] did.

…How was it now? Gen. Lee stood there pleading for mental bread for his scholars. Whatever had been his error in war, now he had devoted himself to the sacred cause of education—to the elevation of his fellow-citizens and ours. In the war, every man who fought bravely was his fellow-citizen, and now every man who gave himself for the recuperation of his country was his brother.

But some might say, would not Lee pervert the minds of the students? He would say, no. Water might cease to run with the current—human nature might cease to be what it had been in the past, before Gen. Lee would fail to instill patriotic lessons and love of country in the minds of all his students.

…In the future, the minds nurtured at the feet of Gen. Lee, in that College, would remember, with feelings of gratitude, reading the books and enjoying the privileges provided for them by their fellow citizens a little further North.