Robert E. Lee and Me

by Ty Seidule

  Long after I earned a Ph.D. in history, I learned about the Lost Cause of the Confederacy myth. Before the last smoke had cleared the battlefield, white southerners tried to make sense of their epic failure. By eagerly going to war, they sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. The U.S. Army destroyed chattel slavery, emancipated four million men, women, and children from human bondage, and the South lay in ruins. As the dean of Civil War historians, James McPherson, wrote, “The South was not only invaded and conquered, it was utterly destroyed.” Southern wealth decreased by 60 percent.35 How could white southerners cope with the destruction they wrought? Despite their defeat, former Confederates remained unrepentant. Soon, the leaders of the white South put together a new narrative to explain their failure and to maintain racial control and white supremacy. Today, historians call the series of lies, half-truths, and exaggerations the Lost Cause of the Confederacy myth.36

  The Lost Cause became a movement, an ideology, a myth, even a civil religion that would unite first the white South and eventually the nation around the meaning of the Civil War. The Lost Cause might have helped unite the country and bring the South back into the nation far more quickly than bloody civil wars in other lands. But this lie came at a horrible, deadly, impossible cost to the nation, a cost we are still paying today. The Lost Cause created a flawed memory of the Civil War, a lie that formed the ideological foundation for white supremacy and Jim Crow laws, which used violent terror and de jure segregation to enforce racial control. I grew up on the evil lies of the Lost Cause.

  Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind has all the elements of that terrible Lost Cause myth. She argued that the Confederate cause was just. For her, the war wasn’t fought over slavery. No, the men of the South went to war to protect the land.37 The Confederacy defended the southern way of life from the Yankee invader. It was a war of freedom to live the best, most perfect lifestyle ever.

  The Lost Cause myth argued that white southerners fought the Civil War for many reasons—protective tariffs, states’ rights, freedom, the agrarian dream, defense, and on and on. Mitchell couldn’t settle on just one reason, so she picked every reason except the defense of slavery. For her the protection of the land and the southern way of life coalesced into a romantic, almost mystically righteous defense of freedom.

  The reality, the facts, and there are facts, told a different story. Confederate states seceded to protect and expand their peculiar institution of slavery. When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election, the white planter class in the South would not accept the results of a democratic election. Instead, they met in Secession Conventions in each state and declared to the world why they could no longer stay in the United States. Their reason for abrogating the Constitution and leaving the United States couldn’t be more plain. You don’t have to believe me; listen to the southern secessionists’ own words. Sure, they fought for states’ rights: the states’ rights to have slaves.38

  South Carolina led the charge to secession with its declaration on December 20, 1860, stating the reason it left the United States was “the increasing hostility on the part of the non-slave-holding states to the institution of slavery.” Mississippi, my dad’s home state, seceded, arguing that “our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest in the world.” No lies. No obfuscation. In fact, the secessionists argued that slavery was a positive good for both the enslaved and the slave owners.39

  The leadership of the Confederacy made no effort to hide their defense of slavery and white supremacy. Alexander Stephens, a Georgian, served as the vice president of the Confederacy. Standing about five feet six inches and tipping the scales at under a hundred pounds, Stephens impressed few with his skeletal presence, but he made up for his ghoulish appearance with keen intellect and oratorical flair. In March 1861, he made the infamous Cornerstone Speech that clearly marked the Confederate goals:

  [The Confederacy’s] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.40

  When I first found the secession documents and the superb histories of the causes of the Civil War, especially Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion, I couldn’t believe it.41 The pride in white supremacy, the moral rot of the slavery defense, so boldly stated left me reeling.

  The “obedient servant” or “happy slave” myth is the second lie of the Lost Cause. African Americans were “faithful slaves,” loyal to their masters, loyal to the Confederate cause. In Gone With the Wind, Scarlett scoffs at the idea of keeping Confederate soldiers at home “to keep the darkies from rising—why, it’s the silliest thing I ever heard of. Why should our people rise?” Mitchell writes that the enslaved believe slavery was the best thing for them. All of the enslaved house servants stay with Scarlett and her family after the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, freed the enslaved in the rebelling states.42

  Primary sources, historians, contemporary law, and just plain common sense all confirm that the enslaved desperately sought freedom both before the war and during it. A hundred and eighty thousand African Americans, most recently emancipated, fought for their own freedom as U.S. Army soldiers. The number of enslaved fighting as Confederate soldiers is a nice round number—zero.43

  Mitchell praised the loyalty of the enslaved to their white masters. In one telling phrase, she wrote, “Negroes were provoking sometimes and stupid and lazy, but there was a loyalty in them that money couldn’t buy, a feeling of oneness with their white folks which made them risk their lives to keep food on the table.”44 It was all a lie.

  Mitchell described Tara, the O’Hara plantation, as a white southern paradise in the novel. The word “plantation” riles me. It connotes a moonlight and magnolias vision of sipping iced tea on the veranda waiting for Scarlett to say, “Fiddle-dee-dee.” For most of my life, I viewed plantations exclusively through the lens of the white planter class. Growing up, I learned the great sin of the Civil War was General William Tecumseh Sherman’s infamous March to the Sea and his supposed indiscriminate, illegal, and immoral burning of private property. Actually, Sherman’s hard-war policy was purposeful and directed, causing few civilian casualties.45 After reading about the enslaved experience, I find it hard to feel sorry for the planters.

  I went to a wedding on one of these “plantations.” Sherman had burned it to the ground in 1864, and a wealthy northern industrialist rebuilt the plantation house in the early twentieth century. The evidence of slavery had been erased, but the specter of human bondage haunted me as I walked the grounds. I felt as if I were visiting a site of mass atrocities, made worse because no placard, no monument, highlighted the unspeakable cruelty of chattel slavery. With my background as a historian, I imagined what the “plantation” had been before the Civil War—coffle, rape, torture. Perhaps we should stop calling these places plantations and start calling them by a more accurate name—enslaved labor farms.46 Accurate language can help us destroy the lies of the Lost Cause.

  The Lost Cause myth changed not just our memory but our morality, arguing that African Americans were better off in slavery than they were free. Lincoln had it right when he said, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy and a West Point graduate, declared in his turgid and endless memoir that the enslaved were “comfortable and happy.”47 Mitchell declared that the better class of the formerly enslaved “scorned” freedom.48 Slavery, she argued, was for the best.

  Slavery was an abomination that featured the lash, torture, branding, and the constant threat of white slaveholders selling or leasing humans to locations far from their loved ones. Sexual violence against African American women was not only condoned; it was legal.49 One historian wrote that by the 1850s sex between white slave owners and f
emale enslaved servants “had reached a crescendo.”50 Enslaved women had no right to refuse sexual advances by slave owners. One enslaved woman from Virginia recalled years later, “Did de dirty suckers associate wid slave wimen?… Lord chile, dat wuz common. What we saw, couldn’t do nothing ’bout it. My blood is bilin’ now [at the] thoughts of dem times.”51 Rosa Maddox, a formerly enslaved woman, told an interviewer that “a white man laid a nigger gal whenever he wanted her.” Young white men in the South often had their first sexual experience with an enslaved woman. Rape was a part of the culture.52

  Because enslavement passed from mother to child, the children of white men born to enslaved women remained enslaved. Think of that for a minute. The white men of the South had no issues with enslaving their own children and living near them for their whole lives. Slave owners would also sell their children hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Their own children! Now I’m of an age when my children are married and thinking of having children. I can’t wait. One of life’s most amazing and joyous experiences is holding a grandchild. Yet in the antebellum South, grandparents had no issue looking at their own grandchildren as less than human, unworthy of their love and affection. I can’t imagine forsaking a child or grandchild. My own blood. The immorality of slavery remains a blight on this nation. Yet for far too long I identified with the enslavers.

  The next tenet of the Lost Cause myth dealt with defeat. If a southern man could whip twelve Yankees, as several of Mitchell’s characters proclaim repeatedly, then how could the South have lost? The cause was lost, doomed from the start, because the Yankees had more money, matériel, and manpower. The Yankee victory showed the triumph of might over right. The Appomattox surrender document still had wet ink when Lee gave General Orders No. 9, his farewell address, to the Army of Northern Virginia on April 10, 1865. Lee’s address was the first salvo in what would become a written battle to define the meaning of the war. He argued that his army surrendered only because it had been “compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.”53

  Not only did the United States have more of everything; it had Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. Mitchell writes, “Grant was a butcher who did not care how many men he slaughtered for a victory, but a victory he would have.”54 As for Sherman, Mitchell mentioned him seventy-two times, as though he carried a sulfurous pitchfork, leaving Sherman sentinels, the burned chimneys of plantation houses, in his wake. Only someone who fought without mercy and with unlimited resources of men and matériel could have defeated the virtuous Confederates. In reality, Grant and Sherman exhibited extraordinary generalship in a righteous cause.

  Despite the myth that the “cause” was always lost, the Confederates could have won the war. The South had its own strengths, chief among them geography. The United States had to defeat multiple armies over a territory twice the size of modern France and Germany combined. Moreover, all the South had to do was not lose. Many a smaller power has won a war of independence by outlasting the larger power. American history is replete with such examples. The Confederates used the example of the American Revolution to explain why they would win. When the Confederates began their ill-advised rebellion, they knew the United States’ strengths.

  The United States, however, did face multiple problems. The war could have gone the other way. It had to mobilize as no nation had ever mobilized before and then project that power hundreds of miles away. During four years of war, it had to keep its disparate population united despite enormous bloodletting. The unmatched leadership of President Abraham Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, and Commanding General Ulysses S. Grant was crucial to victory. After all, the United States had to man and equip multiple armies, send them south, far from home, and destroy, not just defeat, Confederate armies. The war, the historian James McPherson argues persuasively, was won on the battlefield and could have turned out differently.55 Yet the Lost Cause myth created after the war made it seem as if the Yankee population and industry meant the United States was destined to win. No. Not true.

  The Lost Cause myth held that the Confederate soldier was ever true. Mitchell wrote that the Confederate soldiers “rode gaily into sure disaster because they were gallant.” Mitchell also compares the law-abiding Confederates with the rapacious U.S. soldiers. Lee lauded his defeated soldiers’ “unsurpassed courage and fortitude” as well as “valor and devotion.” The soldiers in gray performed their duty faithfully until the end; only huge numbers and dastardly U.S. generals could lead to Confederate defeat. The historical record is more complex. Both sides saw desertion rates above 10 percent, and the Army of Northern Virginia had severe straggling problems. Historian Michael Fellman argued that “the vast majority [of the Confederate army] had surrendered before their commander [Lee] formalized their acts.”56

  If the soldiers, according to the Lost Cause tradition, fought like hell but with honor, then the Confederate generals were gods. The greatest star in the Confederate constellation, the Christlike Lee, was without fault, without sin, a wholly perfect deity the likes of which no one had seen, ever. Mitchell describes Lee several times in Gone With the Wind with a reverence greater than that accorded to any disciple, Old Testament hero, or even Christ himself.

  If the soldiers fought with honor, led by saints, the women of the South remained devoted to the cause to the very end—and beyond. Mitchell has the women working in the gangrenous, pestilential hospital wards or plowing the fields themselves after the enslaved workers left. Scarlett hated working in the wards, but she went nonetheless. Her reward for working the plow on the farm was bruised and calloused hands. No task was too menial for the finely bred wealthy white women. They would do what must be done.

  Here, Mitchell is mostly right. Wealthy southern women did support the cause until the end, but the Confederacy also suffered from bread riots in Richmond led by women. In North Carolina, poor white women wrote to the governor telling him, “The time has come that we the comon people has to hav bread or blood … or die in the attempt.”57 After the war, white women provided the leadership, resources, and strategy to vindicate the Lost Cause and preserve Confederate culture in marble and paper.58

  Another tenet of the Lost Cause myth held that Reconstruction was an abject failure. After the secessionists’ defeat and occupation by the U.S. Army, southern states had to “reconstruct” their state governments to gain entry back into the United States. Mitchell called Reconstruction a “worse scourge” than the war itself. Ashley Wilkes says, “Reconstruction is worse than death.”59 Gone With the Wind is more a novel about Reconstruction than it is a book about the Civil War.

  The Reconstruction-as-failure myth held that African Americans weren’t ready for freedom, the vote, or holding high office. Black citizenship proved a costly failure. Mitchell’s characters complain of “illiterate negroes in high public office” as the “final degradation.”60 Scarlett describes African Americans “in legislature where they spent most of their time eating goobers and easing their unaccustomed feet into and out of new shoes.”61 It’s a lie, a racist argument through and through, and Mitchell stokes it in every possible way. In reality, African Americans served with distinction in high office. By 1877, about two thousand Black men in the former Confederate states held elected office at the local, state, and federal levels.62

  The Lost Cause narrative featured a racist fear of African Americans, combined with hatred for carpetbaggers and scalawags. I loved those words as a kid because they were curse words acceptable in polite company. A carpetbagger came to the South from the North with his suitcase, a carpetbag, ready to exploit the South. “Carpetbaggers will steal anything that isn’t red hot or nailed down.”63 In reality, most northerners who came south often tried to help African Americans, or they brought capital to an impoverished people and wrecked economy. In the postwar South, there really wasn’t much to steal.

  To white southerners, scalawags were even worse. Scarlett called them “dirty Sc
allawags, the lousy, trashy poor whites.” One Richmond newspaper explained the original meaning “applied to all of the mean, lean, mangy, hidebound skiny [sic], worthless cattle in every particular drove.”64 The term applied to the white southerners who took the Yankee money and believed in biracial alliances. In other words, turncoats to the white southern cause.

  Rhett Butler, the hero, starts as a scalawag before becoming a Redeemer. Redeemers, elite white southerners, took power back from African Americans and Republican legislatures that tried to bring a more just system to the South. Redeemers used terror to ensure they gained political power. Mitchell’s sympathy lies with the noble white South. Despite the “humiliation” of Black rule, white southerners exhibit a moral superiority to the venal and victorious Yankees. As a kid, I knew the Redeemers were the good guys and the scalawags the bad guys.

  For Mitchell and other Lost Causers, the rightness of white supremacy required protection beyond the law. Mitchell knew just what was needed and why: “It was the large number of outrages on women and the ever-present fear for the safety of their wives and daughters that drove Southern men to cold and trembling fury and caused the Ku Klux Klan to spring up overnight.” Scarlett’s second husband, Frank Kennedy, dies fighting with the KKK, and Ashley Wilkes, another important character, also is a member. Melanie’s sister tells Scarlett that both men are in the Klan: “They are men, aren’t they?” Mitchell wrote in a letter after the book came out, “One of the earliest purposes of the Klan was to protect women and children. Later it was used to keep Negroes from voting eight or ten times at every election.”65 Men defined their masculinity through membership in the KKK to protect their women.