The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee by John Reeves

In the 1975 congressional debate over the Lee pardon measure, Rep. Officials at the Archives said that the oath had never been lost and in fact had been on public display. There’s a good bit of hooey in that story. And so, more than a century later, Congress passed, and President Gerald Ford with much ceremony signed, a pardon. This was the missing piece that would have led Andrew Johnson to pardon Lee. In 1970, the pledge was discovered at the National Archives. The explanation was that Lee’s loyalty oath was lost. Virtually all such requests for pardons were granted. Those men had to apply individually for a pardon, including in their application an oath of allegiance to the United States. But that proclamation excluded those who had held significant positions in the Confederacy. In May 1865, President Andrew Johnson issued a sweeping amnesty for those who had participated in the rebellion against the Union. Reeves points out, was the tension between healing and justice.

Lee.” The core problem in determining whether the heroes of the South should be called to task for the insurrection, Mr. Reeves to write “The Lost Indictment of Robert E. It is the fact that the documents have now been recovered that lead Mr. But not only was he never tried, all the records of the indictment had for decades disappeared. Lee had, after all, been indicted as a traitor. But rather than question why such memorials stay in place, in his new book John Reeves asks an even more basic question: Why the adulation of Lee in the first place? Why was this man, who took the formidable military skills he received as a West Point cadet and turned them against his own country, not punished as a traitor? Why was this man, who was unrepentant in his belief that freed slaves of African descent were inherently inferior beings, not looked upon as a pariah?

The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee by John Reeves