Freedmen’s Patrol Goes Looking for a “Good” Slaveholder
Building off a post by Kevin Levin, one of the best (and least-heralded) CW blogs out there thoroughly dismantles the notion of a “good” slaveholder, making it clear that even masters who saw themselves as benevolent patriarchs relied on the threat of intimidation and violence to maintain their authority — and did not hesitate to use it when they needed to. (You know, benevolent patriarchs like Bobby Lee.)
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Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
This means a great deal to me. Thank you, Andy.
You do important work. Simple as that.
Important work, indeed. Thanks to you, Andy, and to Freedman’s Patrol and Kevin Levin.
And by the way, where did you find the artwork at the top of the post? Wow.
Kevin found that somewhere in a K-12 textbook from (I think) the 1960s. I totally stole it from him.
That’s from my seventh-grade Virginia history text, _Virginia: History, Government, Geography_, co-written by Francis Butler Simkins (New York, 1957, rev. ed., 1964). Adam Wesley Dean wrote an excellent article about its creation in the 2009 Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.
Thanks, Andy. Another site to visit regularly …
Great post thank you for sharing! I was given the VA textbook that the image comes from. How they discuss slavery is terrible and negligent, but it does explain why so many people don’t understand how truly horrendous and vile the institution was.