[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.
[/quote]

I would disagree with the part about "We've changed". The only thing that's really changed between us and them are resources and what amounts to "20-20 hindsight". Many moral principles we take for granted are probably less obvious than we realize. Slavery, for example.

What I think is a good way to think of it is like this: The people of the past were basically desperate post-apocalyptic survivors/well-intentioned extremists. There simply wasn't the resources for any reliable means of investigation, criminal records, or prisons. And, if one had grown up in an environment where roving bands of marauders could loot and pillage at will, perhaps setting up an authoritarian, imperialistic monarchy might come across as a rational, necessary course of action for the preservation of "civilization".