"Letter to his Son"

For some reason, I ended up really liking this short letter that Lee wrote to his son. I would even go as far as to say that I like Robert E. Lee, which is a weird thing to say, at least for me, because up until now, I was only told about the side of his life where he was the “evil” Confederate General who killed Union soldiers to “defend slavery.” After reading this though, I now see that it was not really in defense of slavery but he was more in opposition to the fact the “Northern” politicians seemed to making laws that purposely were aimed at negatively effecting the South. One of these points would obviously be slavery, which was a major part of southern economy, but there were various other things that they saw as aimed at them.

In his letter to his son, he talks about how he thinks that the worst thing to happen would be for the Union to break apart. In the beginning of the letter he calls anarchy and war “evils” which shows that he knows that neither of them are good options to the problems that were plaguing the nation at this time. In contrast, though, he says that a country in which force is a tool used on the people and where “brotherly love” is replaced by “strife and civil war” holds “no charm for me” (Lee 385). This shows that while he thinks that preserving the Union is of the utmost importance, he will defend what he thinks is right, and in this case it was the South that he saw was being “bullied” by the North, so he sides with them. In the last line he states that if it comes down to the Union being thrown into chaos from civil war, he was going to return to his “native state” (Virginia) and “share the miseries of my people” and he wouldn’t become violent unless he felt like it was in defense, which history shows that he must have felt he needed to defend himself (Lee 385). In this aspect, he is very much like Thoreau because Thoreau says in Civil Disobedience that people should oppose the government on anything that they find wrong, which is what Lee was doing when he sided with the Confederacy; he believed in the Union above all else, but in his eyes, it was not the same Union that the “founding fathers” created all those years ago.

Lee, Robert E. "Letter to his Son" Glencoe Literature. By Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Douglas Fisher, Beverly Ann. Chin, and Jacqueline Jones. Royster. New York: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 2009. 385. Print.