I believe, but will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is
a moral and political evil in any country. I think it, however,
a greater evil to the white than to the black race; and while
my feelings are strongly interested in behalf of the latter, my
sympathies are stronger for the former. The blacks are immeasurably
better off here than in Africa--morally, socially and physically.
The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their
instruction as a race and I hope it will prepare and lead them to
better things. How long this subjection may be necessary is known
and ordered by a wise and merciful Providence. Their emancipation
will sooner result from a mild and melting influence than from the
storms and contests of fiery controversy. This influence though
slow is sure."

Such were the views of Robert Lee on this great question of the day,
and even as he wrote the country was beginning to notice a country
lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, who was expressing almost identically
the same opinions in no uncertain terms.

But the calm advice of Lincoln and Lee did not appeal to the hot-heads
who were for abolishing slavery instantly at any and every cost.
In October, 1859, when Lee was on a short visit to Arlington, John
Brown, whose father had once lived with Grant's father, attempted
to take the whole matter into his already blood-stained hands.
It is a strange coincidence that Lee should have chanced to be in
Virginia just at this particular crisis, and still stranger that
the errand which had called him home should have related to the
emancipation of slaves. But the facts were that Mr. Custis, his
father-in-law, had died a few weeks previously, leaving him as the
executor of his will, which provided, among other things, for the