Brooks D. Simpson Quotes

American historian (born 1957)

Brooks Donohue Simpson (born 4 August 1957) is an American historian, and an ASU Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University, best known for his writings about the American Civil War.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Alternative Names: Brooks Donohue Simpson

From Wikidata (CC0)

The Lee myth. Lee being above slavery, Lee being in fact anti-slavery, is essential to the neo-Confederate argument that it's not about race, it's not about slavery. They've done a very good job of covering up Robert E. Lee's actual positions on this.

In 1864, black Union troops were involved in operations against Lee's army outside Richmond and Petersburg, and some of them are taken prisoner. Lee puts them to work on Confederate entrenchments that are in Union free-fire zones. When Grant gets wind of this, he threatens to put Confederate prisoners to work on Union entrenchments under Confederate fire unless Lee pulls out. So Grant was willing to embrace an eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth retaliation policy based upon Confederate treatment of black prisoners. For Grant, it was the color of the uniform, not the skin, that mattered.