The first quote (without citation... Historian rule #1, always include references fren) is actually a 2nd hand recounting of something Lee allegedly said 14 years before the claim was even made. A simple Google search for Rev. Dr. Leyburn & Robert E. Lee should get you to the origin of the propaganda. It's hearsay, without any direct evidence to corroborate. The second "quote" is literally just a section of the first fake quote.

It is true that Lee is on record, prior to the Rebellion, calling slavery a "moral and political evil" (in line with slaveholding Founders like Jefferson for instance). However, in the same letter, he contended that it was a "greater evil to the white than to the colored race" because it made whites lazy. He adopted a Jeffersonian approach of claiming that [paraphrasing] "I'm doing the good Christian thing of educating and helping these poor dumb brutes." It's a weak dodge of taking accountability for his actions, which he himself knew was immoral. At least in Jefferson's case, he ACTIVELY made efforts to abolish slavery (tried multiple times in VA prior to America gaining independence, wanted to include it in the charges against the King in the DOI, signed into law the federal ban on the slave import, enforced the NW ordinance etc). He was also dirt broke after his presidency and couldn't afford to free his slaves and get them out of the state into a free state and in better living conditions (see his correspondence with Edward Coles when he criticizes the VA laws that made impossible for somebody in his position to actually ensure that freed slaves wouldn't end up back into [potentially worse] bondage).

Lee violates his oath to defend the Constitution, which he took as a military officer. He took up arms to defend an effort to violate states rights (like those of PA written to protect the rights of blacks in its jurisdiction against illegal abduction), and to promote a national effort to protect and expand slavery from the Atlantic to the Pacific and beyond. On top of being a terribly overrated military commander (on the battlefield = mediocre, in overall operational capacity = utterly incompetent), he was a traitor and should we take him for face value that he genuinely desired abolition, a coward. Plenty of Virginians and other southerners remained loyal to their country, the United States, and fought and died to preserve the Union and free humans from tyrannical, evil bondage. Lee can't hide behind his bullshit southern gentleman persona.

Nobody was or is a saint. But Lee was far more evil than good, compared to those who fought against him and the evil cause he defended, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of American deaths.

The neoconfederate attacks against Lincoln and Grant (two of the greatest American Patriots in history) are right out of the leftist playbook. Ignorant southern "conservatives" have been duped into buying into this Lost Cause propaganda and thus help aid the left in their attacks against those who actually should be praised for their American patriotism. When "conservatives" promote this garbage, they give leftists ammo to paint them as uneducated, illiterate, history denying morons. IT'S A TRAP over 100 years in the making. Democrats started pushing this alternative history immediately after the rebellion was crushed. It's well past time that "we" as "conservatives" stop allying ourselfs with objective villains.