Traitor.

Arlington Cemetary..while a nice Ironic punishment..didn't go nearly far enough.

Does he get any slack because at that period in our history people were more loyal to their states?

Naw.

He believed in a Gentry Class. He also swore an oath to the United States when he entered the Military.

I have a little more sympathy for the rubes that didn't have slaves, but thought they were defending their homes. Some Rebels couldn't give two shits about slaves.

Should he have been hung after the war?

Yep.

But honestly..it probably wasn't possible.

Unless you were going to get really punitive on the South in general..reconcilation dictated that kindness to be shown to adversaries.

In the long run..it really didn't matter. He died shortly after the war..a beaten and broken man.

Both

Legally he should have hung for treason as he swore an oath to uphold the Constitution.

Heroic b/c he stood up against what he thought was a tyrant in Lincoln.

Through 21st centurary eyes he was a ruthless fuck that wanted to keep people as property and killed his fellow man to do so.

Hell, even the History and Military channels shit on him now. His military and leadership skills seem to have been over rated by history.

Yep.

But honestly..it probably wasn't possible.

Unless you were going to get really punitive on the South in general..reconcilation dictated that kindness to be shown to adversaries.

In the long run..it really didn't matter. He died shortly after the war..a beaten and broken man.

It seems rencent history is more critical of him. But speaking of Licoln there is a good case (judging by today's standards) to make of him being a war criminal for what he and his generals did to the south.

Does he get any slack because at that period in our history people were more loyal to their states?

IMO he was a very good general.

IMO morally he was average for a southerner of the time.

In early 1861, President Abraham Lincoln invited Lee to take command of the entire Union Army. Lee declined because his home state of Virginia was, despite his wishes, seceding from the Union. When Virginia declared its secession from the Union in April 1861, Lee chose to follow his home state.........Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, marking the end of Confederate hopes; the remaining armies soon capitulated. Lee rejected as folly the starting of a guerrilla campaign against the Yankees and called for reconciliation between the North and South.

After the war, as a college president of what is now Washington and Lee University, Lee supported President Andrew Johnson's program of Reconstruction and intersectional friendship, while opposing the Radical Republican proposals to give freed slaves the vote and take the vote away from ex-Confederates. He urged them to rethink their position between the North and the South, and the reintegration of former Confederates into the nation's political life. Lee became the great Southern hero of the war, and his popularity grew in the North, as well, after his death in 1870. He remains an iconic figure[8] of American military leadership.