This is General Robert E. Lee. He was the South's top General and had a brilliant record on the battlefield.

Lee was a gentleman. He was quite civilized and not to leave a trail of horrible battlefield atrocities. He was well thought of on both sides of the lines. He actually went to West Point with many of the Northern generals and considered them friends.

Recently when the furor over the state flags that took some of the symbols of confederate flags, I decided to read up on Robert E. Lee.

Unfortunately many people have taken the position that anyone that had anything to do with the Confederacy was a monster or just plain evil by default. I would like to remind these people that it was a very different time.

Slavery was a institution that was very literally biblical. Very few people saw the citizens of other countries as equals, much less members of other races. To judge them by current attitudes and prejudices is just plain ignorant. It may be how the half-wit academicians in your college teach history but, I would submit that they have their head up their ass.

Let's consider the end of the Civil War. The South, once rich and fertile, was devastated. Cities and farms were burned. Railroads destroyed, bridges down and ferries burned. Generations of work were destroyed. In Mississippi 1/5th of the 1st budget for the reorganized state went to purchase artificial limbs for maimed soldiers. The complete disruption and displacement of people caused by the war killed 40% of the entire states population. Starvation and disease was rampant.

There were people that wanted to continue the fight. They wanted to resist the occupation and make it a ongoing, bloody quagmire.

General Lee went on a tour of the South where he was a strong and consistent voice for reconciliation despite the North's humiliating occupation. These are some of the things he said to the crowds of people who were begging him to lead them to freedom:

Madam, don't bring up your sons to detest the United States government. Recollect that we form one country now. Abandon all these local animosities, and make your sons Americans.

We must forgive our enemies. I can truly say that not a day has passed since the war began that I have not prayed for them.

I think it wisest not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the example of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.

When asked by a woman on what she should do with a Confederate flag after the end of the American Civil War, he said quite simply:

Fold it up and put it away.

When you study people with an open mind, they will astonish you. Lee is not politically correct or considered a great man outside the South. In fact he is probably a great American hero. Had he been a different person, he could have easily turned the South into a long bloody quagmire of occupation. Our history may have been very different had this man and others not taken up the banner of national reconciliation.

From what I've learned and, being a person of good conscious I have changed my mind on the confederate flag. Perhaps it is time as Lee suggested to Fold it up and put it away.