Robert E. Lee and Me

by Ty Seidule

  When the Detroit-based company gave the first check, the fund’s vice president, Allen W. Merrell, declared that Lee “is loved and respected by all Americans.” Merrell went on to praise Lee the educator who served nobly after military defeat and “exemplifies the American ideal of responsible citizenship.” Lee, who worked to destroy the United States to create a slave republic; Lee, who abrogated his oath. Lee, who killed U.S. Army soldiers, received praise from one of the most respected companies in the country—based in Michigan—for his citizenship. Jubal Early’s vision of the Civil War, first declared in Lee Chapel in 1872, had triumphed in Lee Chapel less than a century later.67

  The Ford Motor Company wanted to preserve “the things for which he stood and which all of us need particularly today.”68 Those remarks came a hundred years and two months after the shelling of Fort Sumter, marking the start of the Civil War. The gift came on the same day, June 2, 1961, that fourteen Freedom Riders on two Trailways buses protesting the apartheid system of Jim Crow racism were arrested while traveling from Montgomery, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi.69 The national praise of Robert E. Lee came during the civil rights movement.

  The renovation done with the Ford Motor Company’s money took the chapel down past the studs and re-created the chapel with steel supports, updated wiring, new pews, and an updated museum downstairs. The renovated Lee Chapel looked the same from the outside, but the inside was vastly different with white walls, not brown, and only two portraits on the walls—Washington wearing a British uniform during the French and Indian War and a smiling Lee wearing a Confederate uniform. Neither portrait shows the military man in the blue uniform of the United States.

  For the reopening ceremony, the university said it would rededicate the shrine “to an entire Nation, for a man whose memory belongs to all America.” Lee the American. A hundred years had passed since Lee’s fateful decision to fight against the United States. By 1962, the year of my birth, Lee had become a figure of national pride. I would grow up during the civil rights struggle far more focused on Lee than on racial equality.70

  * * *

  AS DURING MY time in Alexandria and Monroe, I never learned about the history of African Americans at Washington and Lee. With about seventeen hundred students, W&L had fewer than two dozen African Americans. Better than Sewanee, my dad’s alma mater, which in 1979 had only four students of color. Every part of my life excluded an important history. When people tell me that I’m trying to change history, I point to the stories hidden from me in Virginia and Georgia. I don’t want less history; I want more. The real question is, who chooses the history? Is it Jubal Early? The United Daughters of the Confederacy? Politicians? Few choices are more fraught for people than who decides which stories are told to children—or to college students.

  Washington and Lee had amazing stories buried by the crushing weight of the Lee legacy. The story of John Chavis proves the best example. In 1799, Chavis became the first African American to complete college in the country, and he went to Washington Academy (the name of the school until 1813). One hundred seventy years would pass before an African American, Leslie Smith, graduated from W&L’s law school in 1969. The first African Americans to earn their B.A., Linwood Smothers and Walter Blake, graduated in 1972. Washington and Lee was one of the last colleges to integrate in the country.71

  Chavis’s story is astonishing. After completing his studies, he received a license as a Presbyterian minister and actually preached a sermon in Lexington. After leaving Virginia, he moved to North Carolina, where he founded the John Chavis School in Raleigh, teaching both free African Americans and the children of prominent white families. His students included the future senator Willie P. Mangum, with whom he kept up a regular correspondence. As the historian Charles Lee Smith wrote in 1888, “One of the most remarkable characters in the educational history of North Carolina was a negro. His life finds no parallel in the South, nor, so far as the writer is aware, in any part of our country.”72

  Despite having an example of the first Black graduate of a college in America and one of the few African American teachers in the entire South during the enslaved era, my school had no plaque, no monument, no award—nothing to commemorate John Chavis. Two years after I left, W&L dedicated Chavis Hall as a cultural center and residence hall for minority students. I didn’t learn about Chavis until I returned to W&L for a lecture in 2017. By then, much had changed at W&L, and I think every student knew about Chavis.73

  If I missed Chavis’s remarkable story, I was no less clued in about how W&L survived prior to the Civil War. The story, I thought, went from Washington’s gift to Lee’s presidency to everlasting collegiate glory. Of course, there was more. After Washington’s generous gift of James River Canal stock, the next large gift came from John Robinson. Robinson arrived in Rockbridge County in 1773 from Ireland as an indentured servant. By the end of the American Revolution, he had reinvented himself as Jockey John, a horse trader who made his fortune on horses, whiskey, and soldiers. Robinson bought the fledgling U.S. government’s IOUs from soldiers for pennies on the dollar. After the federal government, led by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, paid those debts dollar for dollar, Robinson became a wealthy man.74

  Jockey John bought a thousand-acre farm in present-day Buena Vista, Virginia, and enslaved labor to work it. Robinson never married, and when he died in 1826, he bequeathed his entire estate to Washington College, including between seventy-three and eighty-four enslaved workers. The enslaved people ranged from seventy-eight years to three months and in value from $500 for a blacksmith named Stephen to $0 for a blind thirty-nine-year-old woman named Elsey.75

  Robinson’s will instructed the college, his sole beneficiary, to retain “all the negroes of which I may die possessed together with their increase shall be retained for the purposes of labour upon the above Lands for the space of fifty years after my decease.” Even after his death, Robinson wanted to ensure the “comfort and happiness” of his enslaved workers. The leaders of Washington College ignored the will. First, the college hired out enslaved workers. An advertisement created by the college announced, “Negroes for Hire: Twenty lively Negroes belonging to WASHINGTON COLEGE [sic]: consisting of Men, Women, boys and girls, many of them very valuable.” Return on the rent of land and enslaved workers turned the college a tidy profit of $5,000 a year, not including several who worked at the college.76

  In 1836, despite the will’s clear proscription against selling Robinson’s enslaved workers, Washington College sold most of them to Samuel Garland, from Lynchburg, Virginia, for $28,000. The school kept some families together, retaining eight men and one woman to keep them in the same county as their spouses. Garland promised to keep the families together but did not promise to keep them in Virginia.77

  Soon, he moved most of the enslaved workers to his land in Hinds County, Mississippi. Garland wrote that “all the Negroes” went “cheerfully.” Lies. Every enslaved worker knew that going to the cotton plantations of the Deep South meant backbreaking work under a quota system enforced by violence. Moreover, Hinds County was the site of an enslaved insurrection scare and the lynching of several enslaved workers. Slaves from Virginia were especially suspect because Deep South slavers believed white Virginians sold the most rebellious Black people to Mississippi to get rid of their influence.78

  Several of Washington College’s enslaved people resisted. A man named Billy attempted to escape because his wife stayed in Lexington. Despite Washington College’s demand that families stay together, Billy was sold away from his family. Another enslaved person named Frank also fled. A woman named Mary Ann refused to work as a field hand. Other enslaved people died on the trip to Mississippi.79

  Washington College broke the terms of the will and profited from selling enslaved people to the cotton farms of Mississippi. Together, the sale of enslaved people and land from the Robinson estate brought $64,480.98 by 1849 (equal to about $2.15 million in 2020 dollars), more than three times the value
of the stock given by George Washington. Twelve thousand dollars went to construct two buildings along the Colonnade, including Robinson Hall. When I went to W&L, three prizes had the Robinson name. Washington College emplaced an obelisk monument on the east side of campus in 1855 to Jockey John Robinson with his remains. I passed by the monument regularly with no idea why it was there or whom it honored.80 Washington College survived because of the profits made from enslaved labor, and it created monuments to the slave owners.

  While I was at W&L in the 1980s, I should have known another incredible story about a person of color. A fellow history major, Ted DeLaney was a year behind me academically but nineteen years older. A native of Lexington, Ted attended segregated Black schools through high school. As he said, “In Virginia, genteel as it was … there were people fighting like hell to keep it segregated.”81

  The United Negro College Fund offered him a scholarship to Morehouse College in Atlanta, but his mother worried about the distance and violence in Atlanta during the civil rights movement. Ted stayed home. Like many African Americans in Lexington, he went to the building and grounds department at W&L looking for work. He landed a custodial job in the biology department in 1963. The department chair noticed Ted’s intellect and converted him into a higher-paying lab assistant. He maintained that job for twenty years. In 1979, he began taking classes, and in 1983, at the age of forty, he quit his job and became a full-time student, graduating in 1985 with a degree in history.82

  After three years teaching high school history in Asheville, Ted received a letter from his W&L Professor Holt Merchant urging him to get his graduate degree. In 1995, Ted received his Ph.D. in history from William & Mary, and after a short stint teaching in New York, he returned to Washington and Lee as a history professor. He pushed for recognition of Chavis. Then he started the Africana studies program and taught the institutional history course, discovering the lives of the enslaved at Washington College. Finally, in 2019, he retired, fifty-six years after he first started as a custodian. Ted DeLaney represents the America I love.83

  In every place I lived, I find institutional racism and Confederate worship, but I also find people who turn the Declaration of Independence’s soaring words of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness into reality. Jefferson, the brilliant writer and slaver, wrote those words but didn’t live them. Ted DeLaney, the descendant of enslaved people, made them a reality. I wish I had known Ted as a student, but I am so lucky to call him a friend today.

  * * *

  ON MY LAST day at Washington and Lee, I felt sad to leave but sure of my status as a well-educated southern gentleman. On graduation day, we processed down from the Colonnade in our black robes and sat on the lawn near Lee Chapel. As my name was called, I went on the dais to receive my diploma from W&L’s president. The diploma had pictures of Washington and Lee on real sheepskin. In 2019, law students asked for an option of a different diploma; one that doesn’t feature Lee’s portrait. The University denied that request. The problem of Confederate memorialization at Washington and Lee will never go away. Of course, I didn’t look closely at the diploma then. In fact, I don’t remember anything about my graduation. My memory comes from a grainy picture of me smiling after receiving the diploma.84

  I do remember the next event that day. My army commissioning ceremony. During my freshman year, I took an ROTC class because it promised an easy A and I could rappel off a cliff. Mission accomplished on both counts. Toward the end of my freshman year, one of the army officers stationed at W&L asked me if I wanted to apply for an ROTC scholarship. The army needed more officers, and ROTC scholarships provided a way to entice college students into the army. Without much thought, I filled out a one-page form.

  That summer, I received a letter that I had won a three-year scholarship that would cover all tuition, books, and supplies and give me a $100 stipend every month. Only my dad thought I should take the scholarship. The rest of the family saw the army as a place for miscreants. I didn’t want to take it either, but after my parents’ recent divorce they were low on funds and so was I. It was either drop out and work for a year to save money, go to a cheaper school, or take the scholarship. For purely fiscal reasons, I took the scholarship. At eighteen, I could barely imagine life after graduation, much less a military career. The army provided me with a way to stay in school, my school, Washington and Lee University.

  To prepare for the commissioning ceremony, I shed my black graduation robe to reveal my brand-new army uniform. My parents’ graduation present to me was a set of custom-made “Class A” green and “Dress Blue” uniforms. The Haas Tailoring Company from Baltimore sent a tailor to W&L to fit us for uniforms. Haas outfitted George S. Patton Jr., the tailor told me. My new uniforms had my initials embroidered on the inside coat pocket. It was the first and last time I had a custom-made suit.

  Thirty-five years later, almost to the day, I wore the same Haas Dress Blue coat to my retirement ceremony. Every time I donned that blue uniform, I felt a part of something special. Washington picked the blue color at the start of the Revolutionary War. Ulysses S. Grant and the rest of the U.S. Army wore a version of the same uniform during the Civil War.

  At the commissioning ceremony in Lee Chapel, twenty-four cadets, all men, all on scholarship, all in uniform, sat in the pews, waiting. The speech given by a general made no impression on me; they never do. Then we lined up and one by one went onstage. I still have a picture of me waiting. My hair looks too long, but I stood proudly at the position of attention on stage, ramrod straight, fingers bent and cupped correctly. As I waited for my name to be called, I stood next to a portrait of my hero, bathed in a halo of light—General Robert E. Lee, Confederate States of America, radiant in his gray uniform. As I went forward to receive my commission, I stood in front of Lee’s recumbent statue with Confederate flags, enemy flags, surrounding me. True, there was also a U.S. flag, but there were far more Confederate flags.

  Once we had all accepted our commissions and were seated back in the pews, we received the order to stand. I raised my right hand, along with my fellow new second lieutenants, and took the commissioning oath:

  I, James Tyrus Seidule, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

  Since May 31, 1984, I’ve repeated the oath at my own promotion ceremonies. I’ve commissioned scores of cadets and promoted dozens of officers with those hallowed words. For every West Point graduation, I sit on the dais and watch the commandant of cadets commission a thousand cadets a year into the U.S. Army, saying the oath in unison. In 2015, I gave the oath to my son as he started his service to our nation. The oath has served as the guiding principle of my life. With that oath I promised to go to war and have gone to war to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

  Since 1775, the army has put down rebellions, broken strikes, enforced civil rights, forced Native Americans onto reservations, propped up dictators, and freed people across the globe from tyranny. As a military, we’ve represented the United States of America at its best—and at its worst. The oath means we work not for a king or president but for an idea. All officers learn that if they obey an unlawful order, an order in contravention of the Constitution or against the laws of war, they will go to jail.

  Until I started researching the Civil War and Confederates, I had no idea about the oath’s origins. The oath we take is a Civil War, really a War of the Rebellion, oath. As Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, wrote in Washington in the summer of 1862, “The question often occurred to me … what proportion of all these people … were true at heart to the Union, and what part were tainted, more or less, with treasonable sy
mpathies and wishes.”85 Congress had the same concern. Worried about traitors in their midst, Congress passed a law requiring a loyalty oath to almost everyone who had a federal job, including the military.

  The “Ironclad Test Oath,” which became law in 1862, differed in one crucial way from most pledges. Most oaths are promissory notes. A person pledges that in the future he or she will be loyal to a government or tell the truth. The Ironclad Oath included the promissory note, but it also featured a background check to include swearing, “I have given no aid, countenance, counsel, or encouragement to persons engaged in armed hostility … to the United States” or “pretended government.”86

  The white-hot hatred of Confederates animates the oath. In 1864, Congress tried to apply the Ironclad Oath to all southern voters and jurors coming back into the Union with the passage of the Wade-Davis Bill, vetoed by Lincoln. Of course, no former Confederate could take this oath truthfully. A vengeful Congress didn’t care. The oaths became a Reconstruction-era issue, and the controversy over the oath never went away until President Chester Arthur signed a bill repealing the law in 1884.87

  The oath I took is the rump of the Ironclad Oath. Congress deleted the background check portion in 1884 and left the promissory note. The current oath still has traces of anti-Confederate hostility. Who were the domestic enemies? Confederates. I promised that I had “no purpose of evasion.” The traitorous Confederates and their spies might have lied to infiltrate the U.S. government.

  I raised my right hand and swore the 1862 anti-Confederate oath in Lee Chapel, surrounded by Confederate flags, next to a portrait of Lee in Confederate gray. The oath I took was a reaction to the very man in the very uniform next to me at my commissioning ceremony. Without the historical context, taking an oath next to a Lee portrait seemed like the perfect setting. I believed Robert E. Lee was a patriotic American who did his duty. Every part of my upbringing led me to that conclusion. But I was wrong.