Robert E. Lee Quotes
Remember, we are all one country now. Dismiss from your mind all sectional feeling, and bring them up to be Americans.
Jones, J. William. Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of Gen. Robert E. Lee. D. Appleton and Company, 1874.
At the time sectionalism was extensive in America. Most Iowa and Northern families still remembered a relative who had been “killed by the rebels” in the Civil War. The South still resented the rest of the country. The East and Midwest had much better educated than the rest of the country. Most important, there was very little contact between Americans of different sections. Until the great Eisenhower initiative of a National Highway System sectionalism was common. Presidents were constantly trying to develop a national American spirit.
At the time he was probably sincere as the whites—especially the farmers—had a great deal of know-how and provided a backbone for the economy. However, as he lost popularity, in order to hang on to power, he established a dictatorship and 20 years later pitted the Blacks against the whites destroying the economy and the country in the process. See related quote.
The Southern authorities were particularly angry with people form the North coming South to demonstrate over unconstitutional and immoral segregation laws. Northerners were considered as having no business with Southern desegregation. Mrs. Peabody, and the wives of a number of wives of Christian Bishops, black and white, went to a restaurant in St. Augustine and requested service which was contrary to the segregation laws of Florida at the time. The women were arrested. The act of civil disobedience in integrating the restaurant was one act of a planned desegregation strategy worked out with Martin Luther King’s SCLC organization. The mature age of the women and their prominent husbands brought a great deal of newspaper coverage which is just what the demonstrators wanted. The photo is of Mrs. Peabody getting arrested. See {637404} and {637406} for more on this incident.
Robert Edward Lee was an American Confederate general best known as a commander of the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. He led the Army of Northern Virginia from 1862 until its surrender in 1865 and earned a reputation as a skilled tactician.
