Lee fought in the Mexican–American War under General Winfield Scott as a captain. Later, Scott wrote about Lee calling him "the very best soldier I ever saw in the field." After the war, Lee helped the army build forts. In 1855, Lee became a lieutenant colonel, and joined a cavalry regiment. As a Colonel, Lee was called on to stop the "slave rebellion", otherwise known as John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. Brown's raid was ended in less than an hour by Lee.
Lee inherited a number of slaves with Arlington House. He proved not to be a very good slave master. He tried kindness and refused to use torture. But the slaves knew their freedom had been granted them in the will and refused to work. Lee wanted to grant them their freedom but needed them to help him see out the work at Arlington House. Personally, Lee hated slavery calling it an "evil" to both blacks and whites. But he thought it had to be ended gradually or the economy of the South would wikt:collapse. But Lee did agree with other Southerners thinking that blacks were inferior. He believed God would work out the problem in his own time. Lee, like Thomas Jefferson had mixed feelings about slavery.
The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 caused several states to secede in protest. This put Lee in a difficult position. The newly formed Confederate States of America offered Lee the rank of brigadier general. Lee did not respond to the offer. Winfield Scott offered him command of the army of U.S. volunteers. He didn't answer this offer, either. Between April 12–14, 1861, U.S. troops were bombarded at Fort Sumter at Charleston, South Carolina. The same day Virginia seceded from the Union. Lee did not support secession but he could not fight his own state of Virginia. Lee resigned his U.S. Army commission on April 22, 1861, at Arlington House. He told his friends that he would not be a part of an invasion of the South. Several days later he accepted command of all Virginia forces.
At first, Lee did not command any soldiers in battle. Instead, he helped Confederate president Jefferson Davis make military decisions. In 1862, he became the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. He would lead the army for the rest of the war. He would win many battles, even though the Union army in the battles had more men and weapons. At the Battle of Gettysburg, he tried to invade the Union in order to end the war. But his army was defeated and he had to retreat back into Virginia.
During 1864 and 1865, Lee fought Union general Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia. During the end of 1864 and the beginning of 1865, Lee and Grant fought near Richmond, Virginia in a series of battles called the Siege of Petersburg. In April 1865, Grant forced Lee to retreat from Richmond. After a series of battles, Grant surrounded Lee near Appomattox Courthouse and forced Lee to surrender. Before he surrendered, he said "I would rather die a thousand deaths than surrender".
President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation granting amnesty and pardon to those Confederates who were a part of the rebellion against the United States. It contained 14 exempted classes and members of these groups had to make an application to the President of the United States asking for a pardon. Lee sent an application to General Grant. On June 13, 1865, Lee wrote to President Johnson:
On October 2, 1865, Lee became president of Washington College in Virginia. That same day Lee signed his Amnesty Oath as required by President Johnson. But Lee was not pardoned and his citizenship was not restored.
His amnesty oath was found over a hundred years later in the National Archives. It appears United States Secretary of State William H. Seward had given the application to a friend to keep as a souvenir. The State Department had simply ignored Lee's application and it was never granted. In a 1975 Joint resolution by the United States Congress, Lee's rights as a citizen were restored with the effective date of June 13, 1865. The act was signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford on August 5, 1975.
Lee had a stroke on September 28, 1870 and died on October 12, 1870. Washington College changed its name to Washington and Lee University in Lee's honor. Lee's birthday is celebrated in several southern states as a holiday.
1830s
1820s
1819
Isaiah
Isaiah was a prophet of God in Judaism, Islam, Christianity and Bahá'í. He lived from about 740 to 681 BC. The name "Isaiah" means "the Lord is salvation" in the Hebrew language.
Isaiah is also the name of a book in the Old Testament of the Bible, which tells the story of the Israelites in Isaiah's time. According to Christianity, Isaiah predicted in this book, the birth and then death of Jesus, hundreds of years before it actually happened. Judaism does not agree with that interpretation.
Isaiah was known to be the Shakespeare of the Bible due to his good education and the quality of the passages he wrote. He was cut in half by King Manasseh which led to his gruesome death. Most of Isaiah's Bible passages begin with 'God's message to'.
Leopold Poetsch
Leopold Poetsch was a German antiSemitic professor and a high school teacher of Adolf Hitler who influenced the future leader's later views.
Poetsch came from the southern German border area. There, political fights between Slavs and ethnic Germans angered him and made him one who was for the Pan-German movement. He started to teach in Maribor, Slovenia and later moved to Linz, Austria to teach history.
Hitler was very interested in what Poetsch said. Poetsch hated the Habsburgs and argued that all ethnic Germans should be united by a single government. He said that the Aryan race was stronger, in better health, and more fit to rule than all other people. Poetsch said that Jews and Slavs were what he called "inferior races". (This view was held a lot in Germany after World War I.)
Hitler began reading an anti-Semitic newspaper in his area. In his later years, Hitler spoke of Poetsch as a "great man." As dictator of Germany, Hitler tried to get all German-speaking people together and persecuted Slavs, Jews, Gypsies, and others. Hitler later tried to kill them all in the "Final Solution."
Armenian Genocide
The Armenian Genocide was the forced deportation and the killings of most Armenians from 1915 to 1917 in the Ottoman Empire, which was ruled by the Young Turks.
In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire joined World War I on the side of the Central Powers. İsmail Enver, the Minister of War, launched a disastrous military campaign against Russian forces in the Caucasus in the hope of capturing Baku. His forces were routed at the Battle of Sarikamis, and many of his men froze to death.
Returning to Istanbul, Enver largely blamed the Armenians living in the region for actively siding with the Russians. Despite the tensions, the Armenians had thrived under Ottoman rule. Most Armenians were better educated and wealthier than their Turkish counterparts, who were jealous of their success. The resentment was fuelled by suspicions that the Christian Armenians would support fellow Christian governments, especially Russia, which shared an unstable border with the Ottoman Empire, as opposed to the Muslim Ottoman caliphate.
In 1914, the Ottoman War Office had already begun a propaganda drive to present Armenians as a liability and a threat to the Ottomans' security. An Ottoman naval officer in the War Office described the planning:
The Ottoman government, moving quickly, arrested an estimated 250 Armenian intellectuals on the night of 24 April 1915. The acts of genocide against the Armenians continued for nine years until 1922, with around 388,000 Armenians remaining.
The massacres of Armenians in 1894, 1895, 1896 and 1909 were still fresh in their minds.