Lee Never Explicitly Spoke Out Against Slavery

One of the interesting facts about Robert E. Lee is that Lee never explicitly spoke out against slavery. Although Lee is frequently seen as being against slavery, he, unlike other white southerners, never outright condemned it. He vehemently criticized abolitionists, saying that they were attempting to "interfere with and transform the internal institutions of the South" through their "systematic and progressive endeavors." Lee went so far as to say that slavery fit within the natural order. He called slavery a "moral and political evil" in a letter to his wife sent in 1856, largely because of the harm it caused to white people.

When Lee's father-in-law passed away in 1857, he inherited Arlington House, where many of the slaves had been misled into thinking that they would be emancipated at the time of his passing. However, Lee kept the slaves and had them work harder to fix the failing estate; he was so strict that it almost sparked a slave uprising. Three of the slaves managed to escape in 1859, and after their arrest, Lee gave the order to lash them extremely hard.