Robert E. Lee and Me

by Ty Seidule

  Every other U.S. headstone features a religious icon like the Christian cross, the Jewish star of David, the Muslim crescent, or nothing at all. In the early twentieth century, the Southern Cross of Honor represented the secular religion of the Lost Cause for white southerners. The Veterans Administration still makes these Confederate headstones with the Southern Cross and ships them out to cemeteries across the nation.50

  In 1903, Arlington started celebrating Confederate Memorial Day, and in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed a bill obligating the federal government to care for all Confederate graves in northern cemeteries in perpetuity. From 1906 through 1912, the Commission for Marking Graves of Confederate Dead followed through on McKinley’s promise, identifying and marking nearly thirty thousand graves. While white southerners appreciated the important work done by the commission, they wanted more. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, the loudest, wealthiest, and most politically astute of the white southern organizations, wanted a monument, a big monument, at the biggest, most prestigious cemetery in the nation—Arlington.51

  The UDC found plenty of enthusiastic backers, including President Theodore Roosevelt and Secretary of War (and future president) William Howard Taft. With the United Daughters of the Confederacy in charge, they soon had money raised, an architect chosen—the former Confederate soldier Moses Ezekiel—and by 1914 a huge monument at the center of the Confederate section in Arlington. The ardent segregationist Woodrow Wilson, the first southern-born president since Andrew Johnson, dedicated the monument. The army took possession, agreeing to preserve the monument in perpetuity. The UDC picked Jefferson Davis’s birthday, June 4, for the dedication of the thirty-two-foot-high monument.52

  Billing it a monument to national reconciliation, Wilson called it an “emblem to a reunited people.” I think it’s the cruelest monument in the country. The statue represents all the terrible lies of the Lost Cause. An African American woman, portrayed as an overweight, crying, but loyal “mammy,” takes a white baby from her “master,” a Confederate soldier heading off to war. Clinging to her billowing skirt, another child seeks the “mammy’s” protection. In reality, young enslaved girls, not adult women, looked after white children. Another enslaved figure follows his “master” to war, serving as a body servant. The figures provide one racist trope after another.53

  The statue serves as an act of defiance. The sculptor knew exactly what he was doing. Ezekiel wanted to portray an “accurate” history of the loyal, happy slave, not the “lies” told through books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which showed the brutality of slavery. Instead, the artist said the monument represents the South, which fought “for a constitutional right, and not to uphold slavery.”54

  Ezekiel created a monument to white supremacy at the final resting place for soldiers who fought and died to create a more just society, including African American soldiers. Inscribed on the monument is the Latin phrase “Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni,” by the Roman poet Lucan. The English translation reads, “The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the conquered cause pleased Cato.” My Roman history is weak, but the historian Jamie Malanowski broke down the meaning:

  You have to know your Latin history to know they’re talking about the Roman Civil War, that the dictator Julius Caesar won, and that Cato was pleased with the republicans’ sacrifice. With that background in mind the inscription is a ‘fuck you’ to the Union. It’s that sneaky little Latin phrase essentially saying ‘we were right and you were wrong, and we’ll always be right and you’ll always be wrong.’55

  The Confederate monument at Arlington isn’t the only one in cemeteries maintained with U.S. government money. All told there are thirty-four monuments that honor Confederate soldiers and politicians in cemeteries maintained by the federal government. Some predate the United States’ magnanimous gesture to maintain Confederate war dead, but the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Military Order of the Stars and Bars, and other neo-Confederate organizations emplaced five new monuments since 1988. The obelisk in Rock Island Confederate Cemetery in Illinois on the east side of the Mississippi River dates to 2003. The inscription finishes with this phrase: “They died for a cause they believed was worth fighting for.”56

  Of the thousands of monuments around the country to the Confederacy, the one in Arlington National Cemetery angers me the most. Every year, the commander in chief sends a wreath, ensuring the Confederate monument receives all the prestige of the U.S. government. That’s why it riles me so much. Among the 400,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines buried on Arlington’s hallowed grounds are my friends, colleagues, and family. One day, I too will be buried there.

  Yet we bring Confederate Battle Flags, enemy flags, into Arlington every year. The Department of the Army regulations specify the size of the Confederate Battle Flag and how to display it on that sacred ground.57 I know both political parties and white citizens in the North and South brought the country back together after the tremendous bloodletting and destruction of the Civil War. The posts named for Confederate officers during World War I also served to knit white America back together as it fought a common foe. And it worked, but we must recognize that reconciliation came at a steep and horrifying cost. African Americans paid the price with lynching, Jim Crow segregation, and the loss of the franchise. The price for white reconciliation remains far too high.

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  AFTER WORLD WAR I, the army closed most of its posts as its end strength dropped from a wartime footing of four million soldiers to a small peacetime force of 140,000.58 While no new forts opened in the interwar period, one post did change its name—Fort Belvoir, ten miles south of my home in Alexandria. When I joined the army, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called Fort Belvoir home. After two rounds of congressionally mandated base closings, the engineers moved to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, while Fort Belvoir became home to units supporting the many alphabet agencies around the nation’s capital.

  Today, fifty thousand military and civilians work at Fort Belvoir, making it one of the largest posts in the Military District of Washington that’s not named the Pentagon. Belvoir hosts the brand-new National Museum of the U.S. Army. I served on the army’s history advisory board for years tracking the progress of this museum. I hope the new museum at Fort Belvoir will attract Americans from all over the country to see the history of their army.

  Until 1935, Fort Belvoir was called Fort Humphreys, named after Andrew A. Humphreys, West Point class of 1831, a stellar Civil War U.S. general, and one of the finest engineers of the nineteenth century. In 1850, Humphreys surveyed the Mississippi River to make it more navigable. After that project, he joined an army team searching for the best route for the transcontinental railroad. When the Civil War started, he became the Army of the Potomac’s chief engineer and cartographer.59

  Humphreys’s ability soon brought him to the front lines, and over the course of the war he earned near-unanimous praise as one of the bravest and most able division commanders. Nicknamed Old Goggle Eyes because he wore glasses, Humphreys was at first disliked by his men because of his stern discipline, but they came to respect him for his battlefield bravery, his competence, and even his coarse language. Assistant Secretary of War Charles Dana called the “charming” Humphreys and William T. Sherman soldiers of “distinguished and brilliant profanity … who would swear to make everything blue.” All soldiers appreciate a leader who curses with flair.60

  At the catastrophic Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, Humphreys led his 3rd Division on the doomed assault against the stonewall of Marye’s Heights, achieving the farthest advance of U.S. forces. As he led the division on horseback from the front, two horses were shot from under him, and his uniform had several bullet holes. One fellow officer called him “the best officer in the Army of the Potomac that day.”61

  The next year, Humphreys’s division saw some of the toughest fighting at Gettysburg, under the command of Major General Dan Sickles, an officer whose political prowess
exceeded his tactical skill.62 Meade, the commanding general at Gettysburg, placed Sickles’s corps along the fishhook-shaped line linked to corps north and south of him. Worried that the Confederates could use the slight high ground to his front, Sickles moved his corps forward without permission, leaving an enormous gap in the line. Now Humphreys’s division had no friendly forces to support it. The Confederate attack into the now famous Peach Orchard decimated his division, leading to some of the highest casualty rates of the entire war. Somehow, Humphreys personally regrouped his shattered forces and held off withering Confederate attack after attack. When I visit Gettysburg, I take cadets to see Humphreys’s statue on the Emmitsburg Road.63

  In November 1864, Humphreys took over II Corps during the siege of Petersburg, leading his soldiers in the pursuit and capture of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. After the war, Humphreys became the chief of engineers in the U.S. Army. In 1879, he retired after nearly half a century of distinguished service to the nation. Harvard honored him with an honorary doctorate. In 1870, the highest mountain in Arizona was named after him. Clearly, for a post created as the home of army engineers, Humphreys’s name fit perfectly. So why would the army change the name of Fort Humphreys to Fort Belvoir in 1935? And who was Belvoir?64

  Not who, but what. Belvoir was the name of Lord Thomas Fairfax’s manor house and his enslaved labor farm (plantation), one of the largest in that area of Virginia. Fairfax’s manor thrived in the mid-eighteenth century, but by the end of the American Revolution the house had burned to the ground. By the 1840s, the land had been sold because of the bankruptcy of Fairfax’s heirs. By 1900, no one even knew the location of the house because a forest had reclaimed it. The farm went through numerous hands before the army took over the property. To change the name from an eminent U.S. Army engineer to a defunct enslaved labor farm is strange.65

  The owner of Belvoir was Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron, the only British peer to settle in America. While he was a friend of George Washington’s, he chose the British loyalist side during the American Revolution. Fairfax was one of the biggest owners of enslaved workers in Northern Virginia. At the age of eighty-three, he wrote in his expense book that he paid a man 10 shillings to “bed” (that is, rape) a “negro wench.” Virginia “gentlemen” often raped enslaved girls and women. Rarely, however, do wealthy slave owners actually make their clerks write down so clearly what they have done.66

  The army’s official history describes the change from Fort Humphreys to Fort Belvoir matter-of-factly. President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Humphreys and suggested the name change because of the interest in the recently discovered ruins of the manor house.67 One part of the story is correct. After World War I, engineers on Fort Humphreys discovered the ruins of the Belvoir manor house, stoking interest in the pre-Revolutionary history, especially the link between George Washington and Lord Fairfax. Washington considered Fairfax a mentor. Officers soon discovered the abandoned graves of the Fairfax family and erected a stone memorial on the site.68

  The naming received a big boost in 1932 when the congressman for Alexandria, Howard W. Smith, asked for $40,000 to re-create the Belvoir mansion house for the commanding general of Fort Humphreys.69 Then, in 1935, two days after Roosevelt recommended the name change to Belvoir, Smith again asked for an appropriation of $40,000 for the Belvoir mansion. Both requests failed. The house was never rebuilt.70

  Smith was an ardent white supremacist. Born in Broad Run, Virginia, about thirty miles west of Alexandria, he grew up in a wealthy family that had earned its money from enslaved labor. Smith’s family farm, Cedar Run, had been spared the destruction of the Civil War, but the rest of the county suffered near-complete devastation. Years after Smith died, Speaker of the House Carl Albert, an Oklahoman, said Smith was “brought up believing the Yankees, carpetbaggers, Republicans, and foreigners were enemies of his people and of the way of life they enjoyed.” Albert went on to say that Smith was “a white supremacist who fought racial integration to the bitter end.”71

  In 1933, as a congressman, Smith had nabbed the plum assignment on the House Committee on Rules, one of the oldest standing committees, dating to 1789. Known as the “Speaker’s Committee,” it helps the Speaker maintain control of the House. Through “special rules,” it sets the terms and conditions for debate. As the committee’s website brags, “There is little that the Rules Committee cannot do.”72 In FDR’s first couple of years, Smith voted with the president’s New Deal, but in January 1935 he defied Roosevelt for the first time.

  After the hugely successful 1934 midterm election for the Democrats, FDR launched the Second New Deal. The centerpiece was a $4.8 billion work-relief project to help the desperately poor throughout the country suffering during the Great Depression. The administration wanted the Rules Committee to enforce a gag rule on the legislation to prevent any amendments, thereby making passage more likely. Smith, who had voted for other gag rules, voted against this one, even though 90 percent of the Virginia delegation supported the bill.73

  Then, on February 6, 1935, Smith testified before the House Ways and Means Committee about the “economic security act” that would become the Social Security Act when it was signed in the summer. Smith was not an initial supporter. In particular, he worried that the bill would cost Virginia more because “25%” of the state were laborers. He baldly declared that African Americans would require more money because they served the state as laborers and domestics. States, he argued, should control who receives money and how much. Smith wanted to ensure that the rural southerners in Virginia, especially African Americans, would not benefit from an old-age pension. Smith’s testimony made his support for passage of the bill unlikely or at least unclear. FDR worried that he represented not only himself but the entire Byrd machine and therefore the Virginia delegation.74

  On February 9, 1935, three days after Smith’s testimony, FDR visited Fort Humphreys and announced the name change from a hero of the U.S. Army to “Fort Belvoir in memory of the early plantation of that name.” The Washington Post made it a front-page story.75 Smith had to be happy. General Humphreys captured Lee’s son at the Battle of Sayler’s Creek, a stinging defeat for the Confederate army and one of the largest defeats of any army in the field during the war. Having a fort named after a U.S. Civil War general who defeated Lee in Smith’s own district had to rankle him.76

  Changing the name to the old slave plantation allowed Smith to substitute a name more acceptable to the segregationists without naming it after another person. For FDR, the name meant nothing, but he pocketed a favor from an important Virginian, a member of the all-important Rules Committee. That summer, Smith voted for the Social Security Act, despite his initial reluctance. Neither FDR nor Smith wrote about the incident, but the evidence seems strong that FDR changed the name to please Smith, a white supremacist. While many people complain about the posts named for Confederates, I find the name Fort Belvoir, renamed after an eighteenth-century enslaved labor farm in the 1930s, even worse.

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  THE NEXT BATCH of Confederate post names occurred during the preparation for World War II. Eventually, nearly fifteen million Americans would wear a U.S. military uniform between 1940 and 1946, nearly four times the amount from World War I. To house those enormous numbers, most of whom went into the U.S. Army, the War Department created an untold number of new camps. Even today, there is no single document that lists the total number of camps and sub-camps all over the country.77

  The army created the camps as it needed them and named them over the entire course of the war, unlike the single batch created during World War I. The naming convention from the War Department changed slightly as well. During World War I, troops from the same locale were stationed at posts together. The manning policy for World War II stopped taking the troops’ original location into account. Instead of naming posts after military figures affiliated with the unit stationed at the location, the sensibilities of the local populace became the most importan
t factor in naming.78

  Of the ten Confederate posts today, the War Department named six from 1940 to 1942.79 The efforts of local politicians combined with the acute sensitivity of senior army leaders not to offend their white hosts led to Confederate names. When Camp A. P. Hill received its name, a local newspaper wrote admiringly,

  The War Department shrewdly took the measure of local responsibilities … The Army appealed to a vein of patriotism which no self-respecting Virginian could be without. Indeed, it is probably the only decision the War Department made concerning the fort which aroused no controversy in the local community.80

  The army honored the Confederate general John Brown Gordon again in World War II. In response, the John Gordon chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans telegraphed the War Department to say, “Thank you for your thoughtful and gracious act.” Fort Rucker, today the home of army aviation, took its name from a relatively low-ranking Confederate cavalry officer. The War Department chose to honor Edmund Rucker after an Alabama senator recommended the name.81

  I knew about the ten army posts named for Confederates, but until I researched the army’s World War II posts, I missed one of the most egregious examples. In Tennessee, the army took over a National Guard base named after Austin Peay, a reforming governor of the state, near Tullahoma, Tennessee. The army vastly increased the camp in size and scale to nearly eighty thousand acres with thirteen hundred buildings and fifty-five miles of road that required twenty thousand workers to build. By the end of the war, the camp was one of the largest training bases in American history, in-processing more than 250,000 soldiers. Eleven divisions trained there, and it provided logistical support to the Tennessee maneuvers, one of the largest war games in the history of the country. Eventually, the camp would also house twenty-five thousand German prisoners of war. The camp in middle Tennessee was massive and important.82