[quote=mdk]
Well they were definitely slaves -- if anything should be in quotation marks it's "HIS." Dude owned slaves, there's not really a moral upside to that, so let's not step around the issue at all. Lots of people in history owned slaves. Once upon a time, Hammurabi was literally *THE* paragon of morality. We've changed. If we're gonna be objective about historical figures then we need to get past the part where we try to make them 'okay' by modern standards. Lee was kind of a bastard, who did lots of other cool stuff and was otherwise a pretty remarkably awesome dude.
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That was in addition to a response saying that though he owned slaves he probably wasn't anywhere close enough to them to ever feel strongly about releasing them as some posters in this thread have implied. I am adding to what Vilage said: Lee wasn't involved in the process of obtaining or caring for slaves. They were in his name and he allowed it to happen, but he just simply didn't care to change the course of the practice.

If Lee were a state he was closer to being a border state than Georgia or Alabama. He believed in a solid Union like the border states but permitted slavery. Infact, he was probably more ignorant to slavery than not before and during the Civil War. As written by Freeman:

[i]"This [opinion] was the prevailing view among most religious people of Lee's class in the border states. They believed that slavery existed because God willed it and they thought it would end when God so ruled. The time and the means were not theirs to decide, conscious though they were of the ill-effects of Negro slavery on both races. Lee shared these convictions of his neighbors without having come in contact with the worst evils of African bondage. He spent no considerable time in any state south of Virginia from the day he left Fort Pulaski in 1831 until he went to Texas in 1856. All his reflective years had been passed in the North or in the border states. He had never been among the blacks on a cotton or rice plantation. At Arlington, the servants had been notoriously indolent, their master's master. Lee, in short, was only acquainted with slavery at its best, and he judged it accordingly. At the same time, he was under no illusion regarding the aims of the Abolitionists or the effect of their agitation."[/i]

He really made a emmancipation switch in the later days of the war when he basically had no men left and needed an army. Ulysses S. Grant had basically ended up grinding all his men up in his brunt and brash direct attacks on him, grinding both sides up and punishing limited Confederate industry. Lee couldn't keep up with ol' drunk Grant.