OK, you get what you pay for — I picked up a DVD for free at the local public library about Robert E. Lee, one of the History Channel’s “Great Commanders.”
It’s available to all on Youtube, for free also:
I knew the basics about Lee, and was watching mostly to hear the words slavery, the essential cause of the Confederate secession, or slaves, who Lee himself owned and mistreated.
I watched in vain.
No mention at all.
Danny Glover (!) was the narrator, and there were several Lee-friendly historians attesting to his “Christian” character and his military prowess in killing soldiers of the United States Army.
Glover read a script that spoke of “preserving the South’s sovereignty” and Lee as a “defender of state’s rights.”
No mention that the “rights” and “sovereignty” at issue were the ownership by well-off white people like Lee of black chattel slaves, and the ability to spread slavery to new states.
The recent controversies about memorials to Confederate “heroes” might make it seem that Lost Cause propaganda, in historiography, Southern politics, and downtown monuments, is something from the misty past, part of Southern “heritage” — nothing to do with slavery and its post-war successor, Jim Crow discrimination and often-gruesome public lynchings.
But this History Channel slavery-free, Lee-is-great show was first shown just 20 years ago.
And the current comments under the YouTube above are all Lee-adulatory, like this one:
Robt.E.Lee was the greatest General ever to command an army!
IMO, not even in the Civil War — Grant beat Lee, after all. Then there’s Sherman, who, unlike Lee, was essentially undefeated as an army commander.
And that was a good thing, because it preserved the union and ended slavery.
A word the History Channel decided not to mention, because it didn’t want to confuse viewers with anything that would distract from the “Christian” military greatness of a traitor to the United States of America.