The Nation: Restoring Lee

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For more than 100 years, Robert E. Lee has been something of a man with out a country. Never mind that he was one of the most illustrious and magnanimous generals in U.S. history. After he surrendered his sword at Appomattox, he apparently failed to take an oath of loyalty to the U.S. Constitution, which many Confederates were obliged to do if they wished to regain the full U.S. citizenship that they had forfeited. Up to his death in 1870, he was denied citizenship. Ever since, Southern sympathizers have been trying to recover it for him posthumously.

Their seemingly lost cause revived in 1970 when a researcher discovered that there was a Lee loyalty oath, after all, buried among State Department records in a file at the National Archives.

Initially, before he knew of the oath, Lee had written to the White House requesting amnesty. Later, he went to a notary and swore his allegiance, but somehow the oath never caught up with the am nesty petition.

General Lee's supporters are mak ing a drive in this session of Congress to restore his lost citizenship. Last week the senate in Virginia, where Lee was born and died, passed a resolution call ing upon Congress to correct the long standing error. It seemed a modest enough request a century after the War Between the States.