No one who is familiar with Donald Trump would believe he invented that argument making an equivalent between Robert E. Lee and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. It was the creation of the Nazis on his staff, Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka and one of the most bizarre figures in the history of the American government, Stephen Miller, the grandson of Byelorussian Jews who had to flee from that country to the United States but who is a protege of the Nazi, Richard Spencer. I can imagine his grandparents joy at seeing the Statue of Liberty allowing them into the country under the terms of Emma Lazarus. The people who Donald Trump supported with ideas developed and inserted into his empty head would have never wanted Stephen Miller's grandparent in the country, Stephen Miller wouldn't have let them in.
Anyway.
Robert E. Lee did have a relationship to George Washington through the family of Martha Custis Washington, he married into the Custis family, his wife was Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee. I have read that among the moral indictments against Lee is that he, against long standing family tradition which kept the families of those enslaved by them together, he broke up virtually every family which came into his imprisonment by marriage through selling out their members. Some of them spent the rest of their lives trying to reunite their broken families, many of them never did find their loved ones. The Lee who that stinking statue purports to depict was said to have been hated by the slaves he held for that and for his particularly brutal treatment, including having slaves beaten for hours and then having brine poured into the wounds. When he invaded free soil, in Pennsylvania he stole free Black peoples freedom and sent them into slavery, he permitted and tolerated war crimes against Black United States soldiers during the war. The myth of Robert E. Lee was a PR lie that has covered up the real character of the traitor. It's one of the many myths held by people who should know how to research history, by writers who created and propagated those lies.
I will stand second to none in my criticism of Washington and Jefferson and the rest of the "founding fathers" who made, among other things, compromises with the slave power who insisted on things like the notorious 3/5ths rule, the Electoral College, the undemocratic constitution of the Senate, and, yes, the Second Amendment which WAS put there to protect the slave patrols which terrorized slaves, kept them from rising up against their enslavement and which turned into, first, the Confederate military and then the terrorists of the KKK and others which persist till this day. But to say that Washington was the moral equivalent to Robert E. Lee is a lie that is so grotesque it could only be invented by the Nazis who comprise Trump's brain.
Update: One person held in slavery at Mount Vernon we know much about is Oney Maria Judge Staines, (sometimes spelled "Ona), who escaped from slavery while the Washington's lived in Philadelphia and who went to New Hampshire where she resisted the entreaties of the President and his wife to return to slavery. Out of curiosity, this morning, I have tried to figure out through the incestuous interconnections between the Custis and Lee and various other lines of inheritance whether or not Oney Judge Staines would have come under the control of Robert E. Lee or not. I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that she might have known it was possible he or someone like him would get his hands on her and her children who remained subject to enslavement their entire lives.
The reason much is known about her is because she gave two interviews to abolitionist newspapers in the 1840s. This passage is crucial.
Being a waiting maid of Mrs. Washington, she was not exposed to any peculiar hardships. If asked why she did not remain in his service, she gives two reasons, first, that she wanted to be free; secondly that she understood that after the decease of her master and mistress, she was to become the property of a grand-daughter of theirs, by name of Custis, and that she was determined never to be her slave.
Being asked how she escaped, she replied substantially as follows, "Whilst they were packing up to go to Virginia, I was packing to go, I didn't know where; for I knew that if I went back to Virginia, I should never get my liberty. I had friends among the colored people of Philadelphia, had my things carried there beforehand, and left Washington's house while they were eating dinner."
She came on board a ship commanded by CAPT. JOHN BOLLES, and bound to Portsmouth, N.H. In relating it, she added, "I never told his name till after he died, a few years since, lest they should punish him for bringing me away."
Washington made two attempts to recover her. First, he sent a man by the name of Bassett to persuade her to return; but she resisted all the argument he employed for this end. He told her they would set her free when she arrived at Mount Vernon, to which she replied, "I am free now and choose to remain so."
Finding all attempts to seduce her to slavery again in this manner useless, Bassett was sent once more by Washington, with orders to bring her and her infant child by force. The messenger, being acquainted with Gov. [then Senator John] Langdon, then of Portsmouth, took up lodgings with him, and disclosed to him the object of his mission.
The good old Governor. (to his honor be it spoken), must have possessed something of the spirit of modern anti-slavery. He entertained Bassett very handsomely, and in the meantime sent word to Mrs. Staines, to leave town before twelve o'clock at night, which she did, retired to a place of concealment, and escaped the clutches of the oppressor.
Shortly after this, Washington died, and, said she, "they never troubled me any more after he was gone."
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