BART director calls Robert E. Lee 'an exemplary general' during budget talks

BART’s board of directors has a lot on its mind these days — tanking ridership, soaring costs, anti-pandemic measures and on Thursday, the unjust vilification of Gen. Robert E. Lee.

What has the losing side’s general in the Civil War have to do with mass transit?

According to Nico Savidge, the San Jose Mercury reporter who was attending Thursday's meeting, BART’s board was discussing “a budget amendment from several progressive directors to explore non-police responses to problems of homelessness and addiction.”

The directors — Bevan Dufty, Rebecca Saltzman, Janice Li and Lateefah Simon — proposed shifting $2 million in budget funds from police to “unarmed ambassadors.”

BART director John McPartland then pivoted from police funding to “monuments we are ripping down all over the place.”

Savidge quoted him as saying:

“I will have to tell you that from a political perspective, we are really shooting ourselves in the foot by virtue of the fact that using — and I’m going to extend this a little bit farther: Robert E. Lee was an exemplary general.

“He was a West Point graduate, and the United States military tried to make him commander in chief of the army, and he turned them down — not because of racism, but because of family. The priorities we have are God, family and country. And he ended up becoming a general that ended up simply doing his job, and he’s being villainized. I don’t care about the statue, I care about the person.”

Today's BART budget discussion has gone in a lot of different directions -- calls for more cuts, new fare gates, shifting money from police.
Then Director McPartland weighed in saying it's wrong to tear down momuments and that Robert E. Lee was "an exemplary gentleman"

— Nico Savidge (@NSavidge) June 25, 2020

McPartland continued on, arguing that riotous mobs tearing down statues polarizes conservatives, “making it a lot tougher for us to end up unseating the current president.” He also compared the destruction of monuments to the disparaging treatment of veterans returning from the Vietnam War.

Gen. Robert E. Lee, whose main form of transit was his horse Traveller, is widely regarded as a brilliant strategist and tactician by historians willing to overlook Pickett’s Charge.

The commander of the Army of Northern Virginia was a slaveholder who once had three escaped slaves flogged and their bleeding backs salted with brine, according to one of the escapees.

Lee also defied his father-in-law’s will stipulating that 196 slaves of his estate — bequeathed to Lee’s wife — be freed upon the old man’s death.

During Lee’s invasion of the North, which culminated in the Battle of Gettysburg, the units of every single infantry and calvary corps under his command were involved in slave raids, historian David G. Smith wrote in an essay for the book Virginia’s Civil War.

The raids, authorized by the Confederate government in Richmond, Va., hunted and captured Black civilians in southern Pennsylvania and shipped them south for enslavement on plantations. Many were not escaped slaves but free men and women who had lived their entire lives in Pennsylvania.

Historians estimate that about 1,000 Blacks were kidnapped, mostly women and children. The fates of most of them have been lost to history.

Correction: An earlier version of the story misquoted BART director John McPartland. McPartland said Confederate Gen. Robert E, Lee was "an exemplary general," not "an exemplary gentleman."

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Mike Moffitt is an SFGATE Reporter. Email: moffitt@sfgate.com. Twitter: @Mike_at_SFGate