Robert E. Lee and Me

by Ty Seidule

  Gray couldn’t stop integration, but he could highlight Lee. While he strongly suggested a portrait, he couldn’t order West Point to use appropriated government funds. Gray had to provide the money. In 1950, he formed the Lee Portrait Committee with dignitaries including Mr. Gray, William Randolph Hearst, and the Lee historian Douglas Southall Freeman. Additionally, the committee had several wealthy lawyers from Houston who provided most of the money. The committee tried to interest Ulysses S. Grant III, but he declined. The committee consisted of white southerners determined to create a reverential portrait of Lee. They raised $5,000 and gave it to the academy to hire an artist.42

  Here’s where the story becomes more complex and more interesting. The committee went to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York to find an artist. Sidney Dickinson, born in Connecticut and educated in New York City, won the commission. Dickinson had spent 1917 and 1918 at the Calhoun School in rural Alabama outside Montgomery. He joined his father, a Congregationalist minister, and his mother, the school librarian. The school’s founder, his maternal aunt Charlotte Thorn, created a vocational school modeled on Hampton Institute to educate and train African Americans and then ran it for forty years. Booker T. Washington advised her in the project.43

  Sidney Dickinson created a series of paintings called the Alabama Studio the next year. The paintings depicted African Americans with dignity, unlike many white southern artists who painted in the minstrel tradition, portraying African Americans with racist tropes.44

  The committee directed Dickinson to show the Confederate Lee at the height of his glory without specifying what that meant. If asked, Lee’s biographer would probably say that the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863 was Lee’s glory. But Dickinson didn’t pick this moment. Instead, he used a picture taken by the photographer Mathew Brady two weeks after Lee’s defeat at Appomattox in April 1865. Lee’s glory, the artist seems to say, came when he ordered his soldiers to go home instead of continuing the war as a guerrilla force. In 1951, Dickinson tweaked the Lost Cause legend. When Freeman saw the painting, he was outraged. Lee was not at the height of his glory, wrote Freeman. Instead, his face showed the “wrath of defeat.” Freeman finished his complaint by adding, “We Southerners do not like to think that a defeated man is portrayed there.” That comment makes me like the painting a bit more.45

  Freeman didn’t mention the enslaved man, but I’m sure he hated that part of the painting too. When I first realized an enslaved servant was in the portrait, I railed against it. But now that I know more about the artist, I think the painting has a different meaning. For me, the artist links Lee to the institution of slavery. The portrait shows an emancipated man, not an enslaved servant, two weeks after the war ended, moving toward an uncertain but free future. Lee and the slave economy he fought to protect and expand diminish like the setting sun.

  No discussion of slavery was present at the painting’s dedication. The ceremony was one of several events to celebrate West Point’s sesquicentennial. The superintendent who approved the Lee painting in Confederate gray was Maxwell Taylor, then an ambitious two-star. In 1952, Taylor, now a lieutenant general and no longer assigned to West Point, gave the acceptance speech. He tried vainly to walk a line between Lee and Lee’s decision to leave the U.S. Army. Taylor discussed the congressional attacks that harmed West Point after cadets and graduates left to fight for the Confederacy. Taylor had a brilliant mind, but one that could see any position if it helped him politically. Here’s an example: “It is proper for West Point to take pride, not of necessity in the rightness of its Confederate graduates but in their uprightness.” What does that mean? Confederates were wrong, but righteous?46

  Taylor went on to say that some have suggested that West Point “has sat in judgment upon General Lee’s political opinion. This judgment, I believe, West Point has no right to make. The purpose of West Point is to create military leaders and men of character who can lead soldiers to victory. Not judge them for their political opinions.” Does Taylor mean that having political opinions that lead to rebellion and the violent overthrow of the government are acceptable as long as they produce battlefield victory? Should we judge West Point graduates only on their ability to lead soldiers to victory?47

  Then Robert E. Lee would join William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams, commanders in Vietnam, as the only West Point graduates to lead their soldiers to unqualified defeat. West Point has always believed in allegiance to the U.S. Constitution. Many Virginians and other southerners did not decamp to the South. The list of 162 officers who remained loyal to the Union includes the famous—Winfield Scott, George Thomas, and Dennis Hart Mahan—as well as the forgotten such as John Newton and William Hays, both buried in the West Point cemetery.

  Taylor also said that “the issues that divided the country in 1861 have no meaning today.” Of course, that was patently false. The issues of the Civil War have always mattered and particularly at West Point. Duty, Honor, Country, especially country have no meaning? Hogwash! The issues of slavery and inequality had no meaning as the army began integrating its units during the Korean War? Of course not.48

  Gordon Gray, the man most responsible for the portrait, also talked during the ceremony. His speech would not have surprised me as a boy growing up in Virginia. It shows the success of the Lost Cause myth in setting the view of Lee and the Confederacy. He started his remarks with a joke:

  I hope you will indulge me for a moment as a Southerner—I cannot conceal that I am one—about a man about to jump from the top of the Empire State building. A man standing nearby said to him, “My friend, in the name of your wife and children, don’t jump.” The man turned and said: “I have no wife and children.” He said, “Then in the name of your church, don’t jump.” The man said, “I believe in no church.” He said, “Then in the name of Robert E. Lee, don’t jump.” This man said, “Who is Robert E. Lee?” And the man said: “Jump, you damn Yankee, jump.”49

  Gray told this joke in New York at the dedication ceremony during West Point’s sesquicentennial. Notice that belief in family and church is subordinate to belief in the Lost Cause. Worse than lack of family, worse than atheism, is ignorance of Robert E. Lee. Gray meant for the portrait to help cadets revere Lee, as I once did. Yet now I tell a more nuanced story. Lee in gray tells us that reactionary forces, worried about the nascent civil rights movement, used West Point to further their own goals and a brilliant but ambitious superintendent allowed it. Yet an artist subverted the Lost Cause or at least tweaked it. At West Point, Lee in Confederate gray will always—and justly—be linked to the fight for slavery.

  If I had any doubt about Gray’s views, further research confirmed that he was a fervent segregationist. He later led the University of North Carolina system. In November 1954, just after the decision by the Supreme Court overturning the separate but equal doctrine, Gray told an audience, “If I had to make a choice between a complete system of publicly supported higher education or a complete system of private higher education, I would choose the latter as a greater safeguard of the things for which we live.” In other words, he would privatize the University of North Carolina system to ensure segregation.50

  At West Point, however, the idea of supporting neo-Confederates still remained controversial. Lee’s great-grandson and great-granddaughter unveiled the portrait in the West Point library. Yet, while West Point allowed this painting of Lee promoting the Lost Cause myth, it refused to allow the United Daughters of the Confederacy or the Sons of the Confederacy to attend the ceremony, despite vigorous requests from southerners including Senator Clyde Hoey from North Carolina. The memory of Lee and the Confederates at West Point has always been contested.51

  West Point’s next major Lee memorial came in 1970 with the naming of Lee Barracks, perhaps the most visible memorial for cadets. Today, I’ve had many cadets tell me how uncomfortable they feel living in a building honoring Lee. The academy named all but one of its barracks in that year. Eisenhower, Bradley, Grant, MacA
rthur, Sherman, Scott, Pershing—the names represent the highest-ranking and most famous generals in American history. All but one name honor West Point graduates. Winfield Scott was a hero in the War of 1812, commanded the famed Veracruz campaign in the Mexican-American War, and commanded the U.S. Army at the beginning of the Civil War. He also spent much of his later life living at West Point and was one of the academy’s strongest supporters. West Point named all the barracks after U.S. four- or five-star generals—except one.

  When I give a tour of West Point, that’s my trivia question. Which barracks is named for a colonel? The answer is Lee Barracks. He served as superintendent as a lieutenant colonel. His highest rank in the U.S. Army was colonel. In 1970, why would the United States Military Academy name a barrack after either a U.S. Army colonel or an enemy general who resigned his commission to fight against his country?

  The first reason was the Civil War centennial. From 1961 to 1965, the country celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the war while trying its best to refrain from talking about slavery and Jim Crow. The centennial’s animating idea held that soldiers from the North and South should be honored for their martial valor, for their brotherhood. The Civil War centennial and the civil rights movement were contemporaneous, but West Point did not link the two events.52

  The second reason came from an increase in integration at West Point. The naming of Lee Barracks occurred less than a year after the largest class of African American cadets entered the academy. Until 1968, no class had more than a handful of Black cadets. In fact, the class of 1951 called themselves the “Black Class” because they started with the greatest number of African American cadets—five. By 1968, the corps was increasing to forty-four hundred cadets, but the total number of Black cadets in four classes remained fewer than twenty. Under pressure from the army, West Point started a minority admissions plan in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In the fall of 1969, forty-four Black cadets entered West Point. The next year, Lee Barracks was named. I have no “smoking gun” that academy officials named Lee Barracks because of the tenfold increase in African Americans, but I keep finding Confederate memorialization whenever West Point increases integration.53

  The more research I did, the more memorials to Lee I found. What shocked me even more than the monuments in the 1930s, 1950s, and 1970s was the one the academy put up to Lee in the twenty-first century. By then, nearly every American historian understood the centrality of slavery in the Civil War. Somehow, Lee remained a great hero at the academy.

  In 2001, the class of 1961 presented Reconciliation Plaza to West Point. They dedicated it on the fortieth anniversary of their graduation and the 140th anniversary of the graduation of the classes of 1861. The memorial consists of eighteen three-by-three-foot black granite markers just to the east of Grant Hall. Together, the markers seem to form a graveyard. The class of 1961 listed the members of their class who died in Vietnam as well as the West Point classes of May and June 1861 who died during the Civil War, both United States and Confederate. The rest of the markers then tell a peculiar story about how West Point graduates helped each other despite fighting on opposing sides. The first marker says,

  Once Divided … Now United. Along the wall are displayed compelling examples of acts and events that are testimony to the reconciliation which transpired between 1861 and 1913 across the United States.

  Weird. As though the nation reconciled in 1861 and throughout the Civil War? Three markers explain how West Point graduates remained friends despite being on different sides of the war. One marker describes how a mortally wounded Confederate major general, Stephen Dodson Ramseur, class of 1860, was comforted through the night while he lay dying by “his Union friends, whom he had met at West Point”: Major General George Custer, Colonel Wesley Merritt, and Lieutenant Colonel Alexander C. Pennington. The West Point bond was more important, the marker argues, than the war itself. Yet upon reflection, the 650,000 deaths would seem to confirm that each side really did try to kill the other often and successfully.

  The memorial has another quotation from Lincoln’s second inaugural address, the same quotation featured in the Lincoln Memorial: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds.” True, Lincoln did say this, but the West Point memorial leaves out another important sentiment from the same address. More than half of Lincoln’s address is about slavery, which he said was “somehow the cause of the war.” In the speech, he famously prayed for an end to “this mighty scourge of war … until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” Yet no part of West Point’s Reconciliation Plaza mentions slavery, the cause of the war.

  In the middle point of the markers are two relief monuments, one of Grant on the north side and one of Lee on the south, looking dignified in his Confederate uniform. The story continues with the ways West Point led the nation toward reconciliation with its alumni association. Reconciliation of white America. That’s what the memorial commemorates. No mention of how the war ended chattel slavery. No mention of the emancipation of nearly four million men, women, and children. No mention of treason. No mention of how loyal West Point graduates saved the United States of America from a slaveholders’ rebellion.

  Instead, the war provides West Point graduates with ways to bring America together. Yet Jim Crow, white terror, and lynching don’t figure into this narrative either. On walks around campus explaining the Civil War, I always make Reconciliation Plaza my last stop. I explain that the other paeans to Lee exist because periods of integration led to counterefforts of Confederate memorialization, but this one remains, at least to me, difficult to explain. One possible explanation is that the class of 1961, who created the memorial, born around 1939, grew up on the Lost Cause myth and remain deeply influenced by the Civil War centennial’s idea of martial valor on both sides.

  However flawed Reconciliation Plaza may be, I take heart that no huge Confederate monument, like the one at Arlington, blights West Point’s campus. But it almost happened. In May 1971, President Richard Nixon visited West Point. After a parade, he visited Battle Monument, a memorial to the U.S. Regular Army officers and men who “freed a race and welded a nation” during “the War of the Rebellion.” After the academy’s superintendent, Major General William Knowlton, explained the purpose of Battle Monument, Nixon remarked, “Oh, that’s fine, General. Where’s the one for the Confederate Army?”

  Knowlton answered, “Well, sir, we don’t have one up here.”

  “Oh, General,” the president replied, “I’ve just been down to Alabama and I got a wonderful reception down there, and this is a time of healing of all these things, and this is the theme of my administration, bringing us together, and you’ve got to get a monument up here to those Confederate dead.”54

  Confederate memorials are often about current politics. A Confederate memorial at West Point might have helped protect Nixon’s southern flank and his election prospects in 1972. He had recently returned from a trip to meet southern governors, including Alabama’s George Wallace. Wallace had run as an independent in the 1968 presidential election and won several states. He looked to be even more formidable in 1972. Nixon pondered a worst-case scenario in which Wallace would win enough states to deprive Nixon or the Democratic nominee of a majority of Electoral College votes. In that scenario, the House of Representatives, controlled by the Democrats, would elect the president with each state receiving one vote.55

  The next day, the deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs, Brigadier General Alexander M. Haig, called to pressure Knowlton. The president wanted a memorial, and Haig wanted to make sure the superintendent received the message. After several more calls from the White House, Knowlton understood. The president was not suggesting a Confederate memorial; the commander in chief demanded a
statue, a big statue on Trophy Point. After receiving a direct order, Knowlton started the memorialization process, but he did not want a Confederate monument. During his tenure as superintendent, he had raised the number of African Americans per class from eight to eighty. A Confederate monument would devastate his efforts to recruit Black cadets.56

  Knowlton was a savvy leader. He asked Cadet Percy Squire, the senior ranking Black cadet, what he thought of a Confederate monument on Trophy Point. Knowlton said Squire “had leadership oozing out of his fingertips,” while his white classmates considered him the most radical member of the class of 1972. Knowlton described the reaction after telling Squire as “instant turmoil and chaos.”57

  Squire convened a meeting of all African American cadets on the night of October 25, 1971, which lasted more than three hours. Anger over a Confederate monument created seething resentment that bordered on mutiny. Knowlton called it “a screaming, yelling rebellion.” Some cadets argued for resigning en masse. Others called for strikes, mass demonstrations, or sit-ins. If ordered to march in a parade for a Confederate monument dedication, cadets would refuse to participate or refuse to render honors or sit down during the parade.58

  Squire developed a sophisticated strategy to use the most radical cadets as a threat to gain the majority’s demands. The first step was writing a “militant manifesto” (some called it the Black manifesto), modeled after demands made by prisoners during the Attica prison riot a month and a half earlier. The prisoners had a list of twenty-five grievances against their treatment. State authorities worked on those demands until Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered an assault by the police to retake the prison. The Black cadets made thirteen grievances against the academy. The language also evoked the American colonists’ petitions against the British government in the Declaration of Independence.59