Recently, I got into a discussion with a friend who asserted that Robert E. Lee, later in his life, was a progressive figure who worked to shift the South away from it's roots in slavery. In particular, he used this quote:
"So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interests of the south. So fully am I satisfied of this, as regards Virginia especially, that I would cheerfully have lost all I have lost by the war, and have suffered all I have suffered, to have this object attained."
Does anyone know the context this remark was intended in? Was it a genuine sentiment, and did Lee favor Reconstruction after the war? Did he go so far as to work against racist forces in the South?
I saw that there were several threads about Lee in the past, but none seemed to address this question specifically. Was Lee in earnest about reconciliation not just with the North, but with the changing tide of attitudes about slavery?
While I cannot offer much on Lee himself, many Virginians were not enthusiastic supporters of slavery. Like nearly all Americans they believed society either should or naturally would be divided based on race, but the institution of slavery itself had become something of a liability by the outbreak of the Civil War.
Certainly the most influential families in Virginia were major slaveholders. They had built their slave economy on tobacco, and despite its decline relative to cotton slaves functioned as a store of wealth. But this asset could only be liquidated by "selling South," to the Cotton Belt, where the real profits from slavery now were. In effect this meant that the states of the Upper South were tied to the Deep South: abolition would literally destroy much of their wealth, but they weren't particularly profiting from it, either.
An excellent overview of the changing nature of slavery up to the Civil War is by Steven Deyle:
[p. 834] The domestic slave trade transformed southern society, making human chattel the most valuable form of property in the South. But this wealth came with a price. The slave trade tied Virginia slaveholders' own fortunes to the new southwestern empire for slavery. As enslaved Virginians poured into he Southwest via this trade, southern political power followed in their wake. When Abraham Lincoln's 1860 election threatened the security of the South's largest capital asset, politicians from the Deep South, not Virginians, took the lead in responding to this crisis with secession. In the end Virginia (and several other Upper South states) had little choice but to follow because of the bond that the slave trade had cemented between them and their Deep South compatriots.
"An 'Abominable' New Trade: The Closing of the African Slave Trade and the Changing Patterns of U.S. Political Power, 1808-60." The William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2009): 833-50.