When was robert e lee pardoned

Lee surrendered at Appomattox courthouse on April 9, , the general was pardoned by President Lincoln. He was unable to return to his estate in Arlington, Virginia, however, because it now sat in the middle of a national cemetery, overlooking the graves of thousands of union soldiers. Lee and his family instead moved to Lexington, Virginia, where he became the president of Washington College.

In , Lee signed an amnesty oath, asking once again to become a citizen of the United States. In fact, the issue of amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders became enmeshed in the struggle to pardon Lee and Davis.

The two ex-Confederates benefited from the urge for national reconciliation that followed the divisions of Vietnam and Watergate. Ultimately, the same impulse helped win clemency for s draft evaders. The tendency toward forgiveness gained momentum from a heightened distrust in government's capacity to act wisely and punish justly, as well as a reinvigorated public sympathy toward those who dissented from Washington's authority. Robert Penn Warren has noted that "the Civil War is our only 'felt' history—history lived in the national imagination.

XL, No. In the wake of both the Civil War and the Vietnam conflict, the federal government's pardoning policy generated tremendous controversy.

The stakes were higher and the debate considerably more acrimonious during the Reconstruction period than in the s. Prior to his assassination, Abraham Lincoln instituted a generous program of amnesty for ex-Confederates. Lincoln offered pardon to all who took an oath of loyalty to the United States.

More than a hundred years later, in , an archivist at the National Archives discovered Lee's Amnesty Oath among State Department records reported in Prologue, Winter Apparently Secretary of State William H.

Seward had given Lee's application to a friend as a souvenir, and the State Department had pigeonholed the oath. In , Lee's full rights of citizenship were posthumously restored by a joint congressional resolution effective June 13, At the August 5, , signing ceremony, President Gerald R. Ford acknowledged the discovery of Lee's Oath of Allegiance in the National Archives and remarked: "General Lee's character has been an example to succeeding generations, making the restoration of his citizenship an event in which every American can take pride.

Lee signed his Amnesty Oath on October 2, , but was not restored to full citizenship in his lifetime. Purchase This Issue. Top Skip to main content.