Over My Shoulder #12: Michael Fellman (2002), The Making of Robert E. Lee posted by Rad Geek at Rad Geek People's Daily » Over My Shoulder 24 Feb 2006 3:16 am
You know the rules. Here’s the quote. This is from Chapter 4 (Race and Slavery
of Michael Fellman’s The Making of Robert E. Lee (2000). Of course I’ve written about this before, in GT 2005-01-03: Robert E. Lee owned slaves and defended slavery. I picked up Fellman’s book as another source to consult over the relevant sections of WikiPedia:Robert E. Lee. The passage contains some new material that I hadn’t been aware of before. It also contains a couple of minor factual errors; see below.
No historian has established how many slaves Lee actually owned before 1857, or how much income he derived from this source. The more general point is that to some extent he was personally involved in slave owning his whole adult life, as was the norm for better-off Southerners, even those who did not own plantations. Unlike many other slaveholders in Baltimore, for example, he did not manumit his personal slaves while he lived in that city and, indeed, recoiled at the thought of losing them. He carried them back with him when he returned to Virginia.
When his father-in-law died, late in 1857, Lee was left with the job of supervising Arlington and the various other Custis estates, perhaps as many as three others. Moreover, the Custis will specified that these slaves be freed by January 1, 1863 {sic—see below —RG}; therefore Lee had the dual tasks of managing these slaves in the interim and then freeing them, immersing him in the contradictions of owning, protecting, and exploiting people of a different and despised race. It was very likely that the Custis slaves knew that they were to be freed, which could have only made Lee’s efforts to succor, discipline, and extract labor from them in the meantime considerably more difficult.
Faced with this set of problems, Lee attempted to hire an overseer. He wrote to his cousin Edward C. Turner,
I am no farmer myself & do not expect to be always here. I wish to get an energetic honest farmer, who while he will be considerate & kind to the negroes, will be firm & make them do their duty.Such help was difficult to find or to retain, and despite himself Lee had to take a leave of absence from the army for two years to become a slave manager himself, one who doubtless tried to combine kindness with firmness but whose experience was altogether unhappy. Any illusions he may have had about becoming a great planter, which apparently were at least intermittent, dissipated dramatically as he wrestled with workers who were far less submissive to his authority than were enlisted men in the army. The coordination and discipline central to Lee’s role in the army proved less compatible with his role as manager of slaves than he must have expected.Sometimes, the carrot and the stick both worked ineffectively. On May 30, 1858, Lee wrote his son Rooney,
I have had some trouble with some of the people. Reuben, Parks & Edward, in the beginning of the previous week, rebelled against my authority—refused to obey my orders, & said they were as free as I was, etc., etc.—I succeeded in capturing them & lodged them in jail. They resisted till overpowered & called upon the other people to rescue them.Enlightened masters in the upper South often sent their rebellious slaves to jail, where the sheriff would whip them, presumably dispassionately, rather than apply whippings themselves. Whatever happened in the Alexandria jail after this event, less than two months later Lee sent these three men down under lock and key to the Richmond slave trader William Overton Winston, with instructions to keep them in jail until Winston could hire them out togood & responsiblemen in Virginia, for a term lasting until December 31, 1862, by which time the Custis will stipulated that they be freed. Lee also noted to Winston, in a rather unusual fashion,I do not wish these men returned here during the usual holy days, but to be retained until called for.He hoped to quarantine his remaining slaves against these three men, to whom the deprivation of the customary Christmas visits would be a rather cruel exile, though well short, of course, of being sold to the cotton fields of the Deep South. At the same time, Lee sent along three women house slaves to Winston, adding,I cannot recommend them for honesty.Lee was packing off the worst malcontents. More generally, as he wrote in exasperation to Rooney, who was managing one of the other Custis estates at the time, so few of the Custis slaves had been broken to hard work in their youth thatit would be accidental to fall in with a good one.This sort of snide commentary about inherent slave dishonesty and laziness was the language with which Lee expressed his racism; anything more vituperative and crudely expressed would have diminished his gentlemanliness. Well-bred men expressed caste superiority with detached irony, not with brutal oaths about
niggers.The following summer, Lee conducted another housecleaning of recalcitrant slaves, hiring out six more to lower Virginia. Two, George Wesley and Mary Norris {sic—see below —RG}, had absconded that spring but had been recaptured in Maryland as they tried to reach freedom in Pennsylvania.
As if this were not problem enough, on June 24, 1859, the New York Tribune published two letters that accused Lee—while calling him heir to the
Father of this free country—of cruelty to Wesley and Norris {sic—see below —RG}.They had not proceeded far [north] before their progress was intercepted by some brute in human form, who suspected them to be fugitives.They weretransported back, taken in a barn, stripped, and the men [sic] received thirty and nine lashes each [sic], from the hands of the slave-whipper … when he refused to whip the girl … Mr. Lee himself administered the thirty and nine lashes to her. They were then sent to the Richmond jail.Lee did not deign to respond to this public calumny. All he said at that time was to Rooney:The N.Y. Tribune has attacked me for the treatment of your grandfather’s slaves, but I shall not reply. He has left me an unpleasant legacy.Remaining in dignified silence then, Lee continued to be agonized by this accusation for the rest of his life. Indeed, in 1866, when the Baltimore American reprinted this old story, Lee replied in a letter that might have been intended for publication,the statement is not true; but I have not thought proper to publish a contradiction, being unwilling to be drawn into a newspaper discussion, believing that those who know me would not credit it; and those who do not, would care nothing about it.With somewhat less aristocratic detachment, Lee wrote privately to E. S. Quirk of San Fransisco aboutthis slander … There is not a word of truth in it. … No servant, soldier, or citizen that was ever employed by me can with truth charge me with bad treatment.That Lee personally beat Mary Norris seems extremely unlikely, and yet slavery was so violent that it cast all masters in the roles of potential brutes. Stories such as this had been popularized earlier in the 1850s by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and they stung even the most restrained of masters, who understood that kindness alone would have been too indulgent, and corporal punishment (for which Lee substituted the euphemism
firmness) was an intrinsic and necessary part of slave discipline. Although it was supposed to be applied only in a calm and rational manner, overtly physical domination of slaves, unchecked by law, was always brutal and potentially savage.— Michael Fellman (2000), The Making of Robert E. Lee. New York: Random House. 64–67
No servant, soldier, or citizen that was ever employed by Robert E. Lee could with truth charge him with bad treatment. Except for having enslaved them.
The letters to the Trib are online at Letter from A Citizen
(dated June 21, 1859) and Some Facts That Should Come to Light (dated June 19, 1859). Wesley Norris told his own story in 1866 after the war; it was printed in the National Anti-Slavery Standard on April 14, 1866.
Although Lee acted as if the will provided for him to keep the slaves until the last day of 1862, what Custis’s will actually said was And upon the legacies to my four granddaughters being paid, and my estates that are required to pay the said legacies, being clear of debts, then I give freedom to my slaves, the said slaves to be emancipated by my executors in such manner as to my executors may seem most expedient and proper, the said emancipation to be accomplished in not exceeding five years from the time of my decease.
(Meaning that at the very latest the slaves should have been manumitted by October 10, 1862, the fifth anniversary of Custis’s death.) Fellman also seems to have misread the primary sources, which state that three slaves tried to leave in 1859 — Wesley Norris, Mary Norris, and a cousin whose name I haven’t yet been able to find. Mary and Wesley were the children of Sally Norris. It’s possible that Fellman misread a reference to a George,
on the one hand, and Wesley and Mary Norris,
on the other; in which case the third might have been George Clarke or George Parks. I’ll let you know if I find out more later.
December 7th, 2009 at 10:46 am
YOu said it seems UNLIKELY that Lee whipped the slaves, as the slaves said he did?
Are you fucking mental? How is that unlikely you idiot? What the fuck do you think the slave masters would do you fucking idiot, when slaves ran away? Get them counseling dumb ass? Find out how they feel?
Of course he whipped them — whipping was fucking COMMON you dumb fuck — especially if the slaves ran away.
Run away slaves were usually the smartest, the healthiest slaves, the slaves that the owners needed the most. They didnt need the old slaves, they didnt need the crippled slaves. They needed the strong young slaves — or the female slaves they could rape or molest. Female slaves often ran away because the owner sold her children.
How the fuck do you think Lee got his money dumb ass? From slave labor, and from selling slave children. Virginia was well known for being a “breeding” state, where the “surplus of the nigger womb” was sold to slavers further South.
People like Nathan Bedford Forrest made fortunes buying “nigger children” from people like Lee, and marching them South by whip – the dead slaves, the injured, were left on the side of the road as examples to the other slaves.
How the fuck can you idiots sit there and say its unlikely Lee mistreated his slaves? You dumb fucks — of course he mistreated them. Whipping you dumb fucks is what you did to slaves who dared to even ANSWER back or make a face. Let me repeat that so you fucking get it. If a slave made any comment the owner didnt like — the slave was whipped. Sometimes tied upside down, and whipped– almost alway naked.
This you dumb fucks is how they kept the slaves in line.
So tell me dumb fuck how is unlikely that Lee whipped his slaves for running away?
Fucking idiots — 150 years later you dumb fucks are still busy trying to excuse the slave rapers the child beater, the cattle drivers of children.
You fucking make me sick – you are as bad as the slave rapers and child sellers.
February 2nd, 2010 at 8:49 pm
Mark,
The passage above that you’re responding to is a quotation from a published book, Michael Fellman’s The Making of Robert E. Lee. I quoted the passage because I think the historical material in it is interesting and worth putting online. (Although it is in need of some factual corrections — among them the corrections that I included underneath the quotation, with the links to primary sources.) I certainly did not say that “it is unlikely Lee mistreated his slaves.” As you might guess if you read over my sarcastic remark at the end of the quotation about Lee’s protestations of innocence.
You don’t need to convince me that slavery was brutal or that Lee would have had the Norrises whipped after he forced them back into captivity. I’m already all over that. Michael Fellman is the dude who wrote what you’re responding to. But, in fact, you don’t need to convince Fellman, either; he already knows. He didn’t say that it was unlikely that Lee had the Norrises whipped after they were recaptured; he says that it was unlikely that Lee personally did the whipping of the female slave, Mary Norris. Which is probably right: rich landowners like Lee rarely did the whipping personally. The usual custom was to call in another man — often the overseer, or the local constable or sheriff — to do it for him. Fellman is well aware that whipping and other forms of physical torture were standard operating procedure for Southern slavers; as he himself writes: “… slavery was so violent that it cast all masters in the roles of potential brutes. … [C]orporal punishment (for which Lee substituted the euphemism “firmness”) was an intrinsic and necessary part of slave discipline. Although it was supposed to be applied only in a calm and rational manner, overtly physical domination of slaves, unchecked by law, was always brutal and potentially savage.”
For what it’s worth, Fellman’s inclination to believe that Lee called in a third party to do the whipping is corroborated by other evidence; according to Wesley Norris’s first-hand account, Lee first ordered the overseer, Gwin, to tie the recaptured slaves to a post and whip them; after the overseer refused, Norris says that Lee called in the “county constable,” Dick Williams.
My own view, and I expect Fellman’s view too, although I can’t speak for him, is that it doesn’t make any moral difference whether Lee personally held the whip when Mary Norris was tortured, or whether he handed the whip over to someone else and ordered him to do the torturing on his behalf. But while I don’t think it makes any difference, Lee would have thought that it made a moral difference — because, in the slaveholding culture of white Virginia, it was considered unseemly for a “gentleman†to personally, physically participate in lashing a slave, and especially unseemly for him personally, physically participate in lashing a woman. This helps explain why the accusations that Lee himself whipped Mary Norris were considered so sensationalistic at the time — even though Lee and all of his white friends and neighbors were perfectly comfortable with having slaves whipped; it also helps explain Lee’s indignant protests at the story, although, again, he had never hesitated to use whipping, chaining, and other forms of “firmness†against the people that he enslaved. It doesn’t change my reaction to what Lee did one bit whether he whipped Mary Norris himself, or whether he ordered someone else to do it for him; but it does help understand Lee’s reaction to some of the things that were said about him.whipping, chaining, and other forms of “firmness†against the people that he enslaved. It doesn’t change my reaction to what Lee did one bit whether he whipped Mary Norris himself, or whether he ordered someone else to do it for him; but it does help understand Lee’s reaction to some of the things that were said about him.
Hope this helps.
July 1st, 2012 at 11:45 pm
Other than the accusation (of one person) that Lee had someone whipped, where is the evidence? Please supply it or refrain from repeating, what apprears to be, an unproven accusation.
Thanks, Tom Forehand, Jr.
August 14th, 2012 at 5:00 pm
Tom,
Well, look, the evidential basis is discussed at great length in this post and in the ensuing comment thread: Robert E. Lee owned slaves and defended slavery. You can read up on it in detail there.
The “accusations” first were made many years before that “one person” (Wesley Norris, one of the victims of the whipping) was able to come forward and tell his own story. (This was of course hard to do while he was enslaved in Virginia and in Alabama.) In any case, the initial allegations (which contain a number inaccuracies, or at least inconsistencies with Norris’s own account) first appeared in a pair of anonymous letters published in the New York Tribune, who claimed to have third-hand knowledge of the events, apparently gleaned from the victims’ families. (It could not have been gotten from Wesley Norris, or from his sister or their cousin, who had been hired out to other plantations after they were recaptured and punished.) After the war, the victim of the whipping came forward, independently, and told his story. Now of course you might be inclined to say “Well, Wesley Norris, he’s only one person.” But I do think that first-hand testimony of a survivor is at least a prima facie reason to take the claims seriously.
In all honesty, however, I do not know how much familiarity you have with the history of the period, but if it surprises you that Robert E. Lee, a large-scale slave owner, might have “had someone whipped,” then I have to say that this looks like a more or less insane bit of historical nostalgia. Although biographers of Lee have argued a great deal over the particulars of this case, nobody pretends that slavery in Virginia wasn’t maintained by force, or that this force did not often take the form of restraint, imprisonment and whipping. Lee’s own letters repeatedly speak of the need for “firmness” in dealing with slaves, and repeatedly speak of using restraint and corporal punishment, not only against the Norrises but also against other slaves under his power, e.g. the treatment of Reuben, Parks and Edward described in this same passage from Fellman. If you want particulars we can talk some more about particulars, but if you are operating under the delusion that Virginia slavemasters didn’t routinely use violence against the slaves under the power, that this is an extraordinary “accusation” that needs the gathering of extraordinary evidence, then the best thing for you would probably be to take a step back and spend a bit more time studying the common practices of the period.