Robert E. Lee and Me

by Ty Seidule

  Cullum Hall was finished in 1898, only six months after the second dedication ceremony for Battle Monument. While the first ceremony occurred in 1864, the money proved insufficient for a glorious monument envisioned by West Point. Instead, a professor invested the money wisely. Thirty years later the faculty had enough for a grand monument.

  During the dedication ceremony in 1897, Professor Charles Larned explained that the monument was the only one to recognize the professional army. In the 1890s, majestic statues dedicated to the leaders and soldiers of the U.S. Army went up all over the country, but none to the regulars. He harked back to the criticism of West Point during the war, writing, “This granite … vindicates the professional in the face of political favoritism and demoralization without limits.”23

  While Larned complained about the country’s treatment of the army, he did understand the purpose of “the War of the Rebellion,” as the lettering read on the column. The war, said Larned, “freed a race and welded a nation.” During all my study of the Civil War, I’ve never heard a better description of the U.S. Army’s role in the most important and devastating war in American history. West Point’s faculty understood the purpose and the outcome of the Civil War clearly at the end of the nineteenth century. The war saved the United States of America and destroyed the evil of race-based slavery. And West Point officers played an indispensable role.24

  A year after Battle Monument’s dedication, the last anti-Confederate monument debuted. Today, West Point’s motto, “Duty, Honor, Country,” seems as old as the bedrock granite of the Hudson Highlands. Yet the motto dates only to 1898. As the senior faculty prepared for the 1902 West Point centennial, they wanted a motto. The words they chose reflect their continued anger at the Confederate graduates who brought shame to West Point. The committee that recommended the motto said that “‘Duty Honor Country’ clearly and concisely expresses the genius of this institution.” The genius Larned described was fealty to the United States. “Duty, Honor, Country” was another anti-Confederate memorial at West Point.25

  My research changed my opinion. I identified with Larned and his compatriots. West Point officers of that era were spot on about the Confederates. I looked at our campus in a new light as I started sharing my research with cadets, faculty, and the public. The Confederates chose slavery and treason over nation. I became more righteous, but without telling anyone about my own background. Yet I had only one part of the story about West Point and about myself. If West Point was so anti-Confederate until 1898, why the change? Why were so many monuments to Lee all around me?

  * * *

  ON JUNE 11, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt came to West Point to celebrate the U.S. Military Academy’s centennial. West Point loves its ceremonial pomp, but this day might have been the grandest. A cavalry troop escorted the president from the train to the plain, where the artillery detachment gave the president a twenty-one-cannon salute followed by a cadet parade.26

  Roosevelt heaped praise on the academy, declaring, “No other educational institution in the land has contributed as many names as West Point has contributed to the honor roll of the nation’s greatest citizens.” The president and Congress showed the criticism of the 1860s was long past, showering West Point with what it most needed: money. As someone who served in uniform for so long, I know that if the government is happy with West Point, it gives money. Unhappy, and it takes money away.27

  After the Spanish-American War, Congress showed love in the form of a $5.5 million appropriation. The New York Times argued that West Point received the money because of the “Spanish War and its sequels.” West Point’s officers made the difference between victory and defeat. Anyone who argued otherwise was guilty of “very dense stupidity.” After decades of starving the army in peacetime, the nation realized it needed a professional army led by educated officers to police its new empire in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba.28

  The money Congress appropriated transformed West Point, creating its iconic military-Gothic architecture, including the Riding Hall, which would eventually become Thayer Hall and house my office in the Department of History. The money also paid for the Cadet Chapel, administration and academic buildings, and a new gym. And most important for the Seidule family, the beautiful house on Thayer Road overlooking the Hudson River where we spent our last eight years at West Point.

  With love from the president and Congress, West Point also started to forgive the Confederates. West Point invited several former Confederate graduates back for the ceremony, but it chose wisely. The senior former Confederate commander was Lee’s “Old War Horse,” James Longstreet, a superb soldier, unfairly blamed by Jubal Early for the Gettysburg defeat. Sporting long, wispy white sideburns, the wizened eighty-one-year-old needed an ear trumpet to hear the speeches. West Point welcomed Longstreet back with more grace than much of the white South. In their eyes he was a traitor, one of the few senior Confederate commanders to join the Republican Party after the war and one who endorsed biracial politics.

  After moving to New Orleans from his native Georgia, he received a number of plum jobs from his antebellum friend President Grant, eventually leading the local militia, which had Black troops, against white terror groups. His former friend and West Point classmate Henry Hill wrote about Longstreet in the newspaper, “Our Scalawag is the local leper of the community. Unlike the carpetbagger [northerner], he [Longstreet] is a native, which is so much worse.” Because Longstreet fought against the Redeemer white supremacists, no monument honors him in the South.29

  Another former Confederate shared the dais with Roosevelt and gave a speech after the president. For the first time, West Point allowed a Confederate graduate to speak to cadets. When Edward Porter Alexander, an 1857 graduate and Longstreet’s chief of artillery during the war, addressed the crowd, many wondered how the Confederate veteran would handle the issue of secession and defeat. He started his talk by highlighting the camaraderie of the men in gray. Then, to the surprise of the crowd, he went much further:

  Whose vision is now so dull that he does not recognize the blessing it is to himself and to his children to live in an undivided country?… And the answer is the acknowledgment that it was best for the South that the cause was “Lost!”

  The rapt crowd exploded in a frenzy of applause. When the audience quieted down, he went even further. “The right to secede, the stake for which we fought so desperately, were it now offered us as a gift, we would reject as we would a proposition of suicide.” A rejection of secession plus a concession that the United States was better together than apart did much to mollify the memory of treason and congressional criticism. Of course, Alexander made no mention of the real reason he fought: to protect and expand slavery.30

  * * *

  YET, DESPITE THE presidential recognition of West Point, the infusion of much-needed appropriations, and a Confederate apology of sorts, another thirty years would pass before West Point would honor Robert E. Lee. After years of letters from southerners to the army, Congress, and the Military Academy, two new Lee memorials arrived in 1931 courtesy of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.31

  In the main academic building, three glass cases list the annual award winner of the Robert E. Lee prize in mathematics. I walked past those award plaques for nearly two decades before I noticed them. The prize went to the cadet who scored highest in mandatory math classes. Then and now, cadets take more credit hours in math than in any other subject outside their major.

  In 1931, West Point considered a math prize among its highest academic honors. A woman from the UDC would come each spring and present the winner with an officer’s sword. A good friend and fellow faculty member at West Point won the Lee prize as a cadet and has it hanging on his office wall. I examined it carefully. Etched on the sword’s scabbard was the Lee family crest with the words “Non Incautus Futuri” (Not Unmindful of the Future), the same motto as my alma mater, Washington and Lee University. Additionally, the sword had two crossed flags—the U.S
. flag and the Confederate national flag. Sixty-six years after the end of the Civil War, West Point allowed the Confederate flag, the flag of treason, to be honored as a prize.

  The UDC’s second gift was a painting showing Superintendent Lee in the uniform of a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel with a stylized West Point in the background. The UDC wanted the portrait to show Lee wearing the uniform of the Confederate States of America, but the army’s chief of staff refused to countenance a portrait of Lee in gray at West Point. The army would allow Lee to be honored for his time in blue, but not yet for his leadership in a rebellion. Now that Lee was back, his likeness would multiply over the next seventy years.32

  The UDC asked to recognize Lee in 1930, and the army agreed in 1931. Between the rejection of all things Confederate in the nineteenth century and 1930, much had changed in the nation and the army. Lee was a figure of nationwide reverence, while Jim Crow segregation became entrenched. West Point had changed too. In 1929, African American cadets returned to West Point after a nearly fifty-year absence. As I would discover time and again, integration and efforts at achieving equal rights brought Confederate memorialization. West Point allowed the return of Robert E. Lee when African American cadets arrived at West Point in the twentieth century.

  In the summer of 1929, the first Black congressman elected in the twentieth century, Oscar De Priest from Chicago, appointed an African American to West Point with great publicity. De Priest argued, “If Negroes can fight as common soldiers, they are good enough to be officers.” As soon as he arrived in Washington, he looked to appoint African American high school graduates to the service academies. As he told The Washington Post in 1930, “I am the only one who would appoint a boy of the race with which I am identified.”33

  De Priest’s first nomination came shortly after he assumed office. Alonzo Parham from Chicago arrived at West Point in July 1929 to much fanfare in the Black and white press. The Chicago Daily Tribune called him the “humble Negro boy.” After six months, West Point separated Parham for failing mathematics, a subject that more than sixty cadets failed. When Parham left, the Black press and the NAACP launched articles and an investigation to find out what happened. De Priest was contacted by Walter White, the director of the NAACP, to discuss whether Parham received fair treatment. White wrote that Parham “has been subjected to a most terrific ostracism.” The editor of the Afro-American newspaper said, “West Point is a perfect hell for Negros.”34

  De Priest refused to stop nominating African Americans. He promised to send a “bigger, blacker Negro” to West Point when Parham failed. After a couple of other potential cadets failed the entrance exam, De Priest found his man in 1932. At six feet two inches, Benjamin O. Davis Jr. was certainly bigger, and he might have been the toughest, most resilient cadet ever to attend West Point. His father, Benjamin O. Davis Sr., was the only African American officer in the Regular Army. Davis and his wife prepped Ben from an early age to succeed. Before passing the West Point entry exam, Ben attended Fisk University, the University of Chicago, the Ohio State University, and Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve).35

  Davis described himself during his four years at West Point as “a prisoner in solitary confinement.” The commandant of cadets told Davis on his first day that he “would be treated like a white man.” Davis wrote that the colonel’s “condescending attitude thoroughly disgusted him.” The commandant also told him that cadets choose their roommate, and because none wanted to live with an African American man, Davis would room alone. Cadets came to West Point knowing no one. They did not choose roommates. The commandant lied. Racism requires falsehood, hypocrisy, and spite.36

  At first, Davis found a few friends among his fellow cadets. On his third day he heard a rap on his door and a command to go to the “sinks”—West Point lingo for latrines. An upperclassman asked the other cadets, and I quote here from Davis’s oral history interviews, “What are we going to do about the Nigger?” Davis described his reaction as “crestfallen.” The white cadets silenced Davis from that day until graduation. Cadets refused to talk to Davis or acknowledge his presence except for official duties. No one showed him even the slightest human decency. Yet despite all the hardship and prejudice, Davis made it, graduating in 1936. As he later said, “I decided that first month at West Point that I would never quit.”37

  Cadets from all over the country silenced Davis, not just those from the South. Racism was and remains a national institution. One Sunday morning, I was at the farmers market in Highland Falls, the small town just outside West Point’s gates, and I told a friend about my research on Davis. She told me that when she bought her house in town in the 1990s, the last line of the housing covenant read, “You shall not sell this property to a Negro.” Another friend told me that she bought property in Beacon, across the Hudson and north of West Point, in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The housing covenant said the same thing. Racism exists from sea to shining sea.

  A year after Davis graduated, Lee’s name graced another public spot at West Point. Major General William Connor announced in 1937 that he would create a Lee Room with a portrait of Lee in the superintendent’s Quarters 100, perhaps the most famous house in the army. Everyone who went there for a reception would have his or her picture taken with the superintendent next to Lee’s portrait, the largest and most prominent in the house. At least Lee wore a blue uniform from his time as superintendent.38

  While racism played a role in bringing Lee back to West Point, it wasn’t the only reason. In May 1935, Douglas Southall Freeman won the Pulitzer Prize for his four-volume biography of Robert E. Lee. Historian T. Harry Williams called Freeman’s work “a Virginia gentleman writing about a Virginia gentleman.”39 I never read the book growing up, but it infused my knowledge of Lee without my realizing it. Freeman’s work remained the standard biography of Lee for decades, and everything since then has been a reaction to it.

  Freeman’s best-selling biography combined with African American cadets coming to West Point led to a third group of memorials. In 1935, the academy named its newest housing development after Lee. Lee Housing Area on Lee Road that ends at Lee Gate remains one of the most sought-after places to live on post, and we called it home for three years.

  Cadets often run from their barrack to Lee Gate and back. As they run along Lee Road, they pass by streets named after other superintendents including Beauregard Road. In the 1930s while Davis was a cadet, West Point named a road for a superintendent fired after five days for sedition. An officer who proudly brought his enslaved servants to the Military Academy. An officer who became the first general officer in the Confederate army. An officer who commanded enemy forces that fired on the U.S. Army at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Never has a superintendent served so poorly for such a short time.

  In 2006, we moved away from Lee Road to larger quarters when I was promoted to full colonel, but it was living on Lee Road that started my research and self-discovery. West Point named Lee Road and Lee Gate to honor a Confederate who fought against his country. The timing, during the tenure of the first African American cadet at West Point in the twentieth century, pointed me to the conclusion I would reach again and again. West Point memorialized Lee in reaction to the integration of African Americans and the move toward equal rights.

  The same held true for the next memorial to Lee. An imposing painting of Lee hangs on the south wall of West Point’s library. Grant’s portrait hangs on the north wall. The portrait of Lee shows him resplendent in his formal gray uniform with yellow piping on the sleeve and three stars in a wreath on his collar, designating a general in the army of the Confederate States of America. For years, I passed that portrait thinking it was a fitting tribute to my hero. After my epiphany, after I discovered West Point’s earlier banishment of Confederates, I looked at Lee’s portrait more carefully.

  While Lee looks dignified, there is more to the painting. In the background, a white house is visible next to a copse of trees as the sun
sets. While Lee stands formally, there is a sense of movement in the right foreground. An enslaved servant in tattered clothes leads a white horse toward the viewer. What does that mean? Why did West Point accept a picture of Lee wearing the colors of the enemy with an enslaved servant pictured prominently?

  In 1950, during the planning of the academy’s sesquicentennial, Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray, a North Carolinian, ordered West Point to add a portrait of Lee in his Confederate uniform. Gray argued that such a picture of Lee at the “height of his fame” would “symbolize the end of sectional difference.” At this point in my research, I knew to look for the context behind any decision to memorialize Lee at West Point. Sure enough, Gray’s Lee portrait was a reaction to integration.40

  The Korean War raged in 1950. At the same time, the army tried to slow roll implementation of racial integration ordered by President Harry Truman on July 26, 1948, in Executive Order 9981. The military has trumpeted its role in bringing racial equality to America, but the history is far more complex and less flattering. Neither uniformed leadership nor Gray wanted to integrate the army. In fact, the previous secretary of the army, Kenneth Royall, had been forced into retirement because he would not integrate quickly enough. Only the personnel requirements of the Korean War forced the army to integrate. Segregated units wasted manpower.41