Robert E. Lee and Me

by Ty Seidule

  At one lecture, someone asked me if I found anything positive about Lee’s decision to fight for Virginia, his home state. I told him that my perspective comes from wearing the blue uniform of a U.S. Army officer for so many decades. My perspective comes from studying history, especially the reasons for southern states’ secession. My perspective comes from believing in the United States of America and its Constitution. I went on, qualifying and qualifying my answer until I realized I had given no answer. So I did. Do I find anything positive about Lee’s decision to fight for Virginia? No.

  Lee did fight bravely in army blue in the Mexican-American War. He was a superb college president. He did take the loyalty oath in 1865. For me, however, Lee is no hero. As an army officer, I can’t honor a colonel who abrogated his solemn oath, sworn to God. As an American, I can’t honor someone who killed so many U.S. Army soldiers. As a human being, I can’t honor a man who fought so hard for so long to keep millions of people in perpetual bondage. As W. E. B. Du Bois said in 1928, “Robert E. Lee led a bloody war to perpetuate slavery.”116

  Yet hundreds of communities honor Lee and his Confederate brothers. What should we do about all the Confederate memorials across the country? My job is not to tell communities if they should remove memorials to Lee, but they should study the circumstances that led to their creation. Everyone must understand what those monuments represent. A monument tells historians more about who emplaced it than it does the figure memorialized. While some memorials went up right after the war, especially in cemeteries, most Confederate monuments were built between 1890 and 1920, and those glorify white supremacy. Du Bois wrote in 1931 that the statues’ “inscription” should read: “Sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery.” The Confederate monuments that went up after World War II often serve as an argument against integration and equal rights.117

  To those who say I am trying to change history, they should realize that the history of Confederate monuments represents a racist legacy all people should abhor. Moreover, many people did protest their construction. In 1900, Georgia’s population was 46.7 percent African American and Virginia’s was 35.6 percent, but Black people had been purged from the voting rolls and had no voice on the use of public land or money.118

  Writing in 1870, Frederick Douglass seems remarkably prescient: “Monuments to the ‘Lost Cause’ will prove monuments to folly in the memories of a wicked rebellion … a needless record of stupidity and wrong.” Despite many Confederate statues’ removal, the vast majority remain in place. Over the last ten years, federal and state governments have paid more than $40 million to maintain memorials to Confederates’ treason and racism, while only a pittance goes to African American cemeteries from the slave era.119

  Despite the efforts of many, we’ve had this problem for so long that we aren’t going to fix it quickly. So, what is the answer? More history and more education. We need to educate generation after generation about the facts so they don’t grow up with the lies I did. West Point and W&L teach a variety of courses about the issues I’ve raised here. What a difference from my era. Both schools take students on trips to the Civil Rights Trail to visit communities in the South, talking to veterans of the successful protests against racial apartheid.

  Our students visit the superb museums in the South, including ones in Richmond, Atlanta, Greensboro, Jackson, Memphis, Montgomery, Washington, and a host of other cities that explain a different version of history from what I learned as a child, especially regarding the civil rights era. In fact, the civil rights movement has become something almost all Americans can agree on. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and others are seen as heroes everywhere. Now southern cities are leading the country in telling a more honest story of the past because African Americans have enough political power to force change. I hope in the future more museums will discuss honestly the hundreds of years of enforced bondage.

  My fellow historians deserve a shout-out too. For the last fifty years, they have mined so many different sources to tell a more accurate story of slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy from dozens of different viewpoints, helping the nation change one student at a time.

  Teachers in K–12 education are doing mighty work as well. My sister-in-law Patti Coggins has shown me the engaging and accurate U.S. history curriculum in Loudoun County, Virginia. The governor of Virginia has started an initiative to include more Black history, asking schools to take students to local African American historical sites that describe enslavement and Jim Crow segregation.120

  As a nation, we have argued over the meaning of the Civil War since it started in 1861. I can safely predict we will argue about it for generations to come, but slowly, surely, the view of the Civil War throughout the country is becoming more accurate. I hope, no, I believe, that the Lost Cause will not infect my grandchildren.

  Because of our decentralized governance system, we will never have a single solution to the problem of Confederate memorialization. Nor will we ever have a single solution to fix the legacy, the immorality, of slavery and segregation. To create a more just society, we must start by studying our past. If we want to know where to go, we must know where we’ve been.

  Epilogue

  A Southern Soldier Confronts the Lost Cause in the Shrine of the South

  On August 12, 2017, white supremacists carrying Confederate and Nazi flags marched in Charlottesville chanting, “White lives matter,” “You will not replace us,” and other racist and anti-Semitic tropes. The “Unite the Right” thugs carried assault weapons and dressed menacingly, although the tiki torches from Home Depot spoiled their attempt at intimidation. The rally brought together white nationalists to highlight various conspiracy theories and racist ideologies, but they chose Charlottesville because of Robert E. Lee. The city council had voted to remove the heroic bronze statue of Lee mounted on Traveller along with a similar statue of Stonewall Jackson riding Little Sorrel a few blocks away.

  The massacre of Black churchgoers in Charleston in 2015 amplified the debate over Confederate memorialization. The African American community, historians, and many others had decried the continued use of the Confederate Battle Flag and monuments as a paean to white supremacy for decades, but the violence in Charleston supercharged the debate. The live televised coverage of the thuggish “Unite the Right” white supremacists in Charlottesville turned the national conversation again toward the meaning of the Confederacy. With alt-right protesters carrying the Confederate and Nazi flags side by side, many Americans began to see the similarities between two race-based societies.

  After the Charlottesville massacre, several national media outlets contacted me asking for my opinion, but the army would not allow me to comment publicly. I wrote an op-ed explaining how the army honors former Confederates like Henry Benning and John Gordon with the names of prestigious installations. When President Donald Trump referred to “very fine people on both sides,” I chose not to publish it rather than bring West Point and the army into a controversy neither institution wanted.

  After more than thirty years in uniform, I’m still a company man at heart. An op-ed calling Lee a traitor for slavery in August 2017 would have brought political heat to the institutions I love. I chose to retire from the army to give myself the freedom to criticize the nation, and particularly the army’s continued honoring of Confederates—and to write this book.

  Surprisingly, Washington and Lee University provided me with a public forum to talk about Confederate memory. After the Charlottesville horror, Professor Ted DeLaney invited me to give a lecture. Ted started his career at W&L as a custodian before graduating twenty years later. He was now a senior professor, an African American historian, and the moral conscience of W&L. The university had started a commission to investigate the school’s racial legacy and an education program to bring scholars to talk about Lee and the history of the university. Ted had seen my video on the cause of the war; he knew my views. My credentials as a W&L graduate and army officer would
make it more difficult for the community to reject my arguments.

  Thirty-three years earlier I had stood on the stage of Lee Chapel to receive my U.S. Army commission. In 1984, I raised my right hand and repeated the oath of office to start my army career surrounded by Confederate flags. In 2017, on Constitution Day, I stood on the same stage and delivered a speech titled “Robert E. Lee and Me: Reflections on Confederate Memory by a W&L Grad, Soldier, and Scholar.” During the course of my career as an army officer and academic, I’ve given hundreds of public talks to audiences large and small.

  Yet I was more nervous to return to W&L than I have been for any other lecture, ever. I would criticize Robert E. Lee in Lee Chapel, standing on top of his tomb. The “Recumbent Lee,” the statue of the Confederate general lying asleep on the battlefield with his sword in hand ready to smite the enemies of the white southern ruling class, would frame me as I spoke from behind the lectern. Stage left was Lee’s portrait wearing his Confederate uniform. Stage right hung Washington’s portrait. A colonel between two of the most famous generals in American history. The old army aphorism described my feelings accurately. I was “nervous in the service.”

  As I prepared for the speech, I looked at others who had talked at Lee Chapel. Jubal Early spoke at the same lectern in 1872 on what would have been Lee’s sixty-fifth birthday. He told an adoring crowd, “Our beloved Chief stands, like some lofty column which rears its head among the highest, in grandeur pure and sublime, needing no additional lustre; and he is all our own.”1 Immediately after the war, Early and the rest of the southern aristocracy worked to change the narrative of the war from slavery to states’ rights and created the Lee cult. How would the crowd react today? I was certainly going to provide some tarnish to the Lee legacy.

  Then I read an article written by a Washington and Lee professor in 1950: “Every schoolboy knows the pronouncement of Light Horse Harry Lee about George Washington: ‘First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.’ For many Southerners, and most Virginians, the tribute no longer belongs to a Washington who made the most of victory, but to the son of Light Horse Harry Lee, who made the most of defeat.” That was the attitude I had at W&L in the 1980s. Now I was going back to my alma mater to publicly criticize the Marble Man. Would my alma mater reject the evidence and reject me too?2

  The university was not my only worry. Lexington was home to a group of neo-Confederates known as the Virginia Flaggers who began in 2011 with the motto “Return the Flags—Restore the Honor.” The Flaggers tried to make the celebration of Lee-Jackson Day a big deal by dressing in Confederate costumes and trooping through the streets of Lexington.3

  In 1889, Virginia made Lee’s birthday a state holiday. In 1904, it added Stonewall Jackson to the celebration after someone realized his birthday was only two days after Lee’s. In 1984, the Virginia General Assembly created Lee-Jackson-King Day when it added Martin Luther King Jr.’s name to the holiday. Resistance to irony remains a strong part of white southern identity. In 2000, the law changed to separate Lee-Jackson Day from the MLK holiday. Finally, in March 2020, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam signed a bill into law ending the observance of Lee-Jackson Day and creating an Election Day holiday in its stead. All told, eleven states still have twenty-two Confederate holidays mandated by law.4

  In 2014, the Flaggers protested W&L’s removal of Confederate flags from Lee Chapel after protests initiated by African American law students. Then the university prevented the group from marching in Confederate costumes on campus and holding a ceremony in Lee Chapel. Barred from campus, the Flaggers became more inventive. On a couple of hilltops visible from the interstate leading to Lexington, the Flaggers constructed tall flagpoles from which they flew enormous Confederate Battle Flags. In addition to the Lexington Flaggers, my talk was only a month after the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, an hour to the north. Would the alt-right neo-Confederates and neo-Nazis who had just defiled Charlottesville protest in Lexington?5

  History is dangerous. I knew that from the 2015 video I made. Articles on the right criticized me as an army officer for being too political. The left criticized me for creating propaganda for the army. The army itself investigated whether I had violated rules on political speech. History forms an important part of a person’s identity. By saying directly that Southern citizens had fought to preserve and expand slavery, I had attacked a cherished myth. My fellow citizens flooded my public West Point email address with hundreds of critical responses including several actual death threats.6

  Because I was talking in Lee Chapel, my wife counseled me against giving an academic lecture. The only way to change people’s minds was to tell my truth. Quit hiding behind the impartial, know-it-all historian and open up about the southerner, the boy who grew up on Lee idolatry, and the man who wrapped his identity around the heroes of the Confederacy. Be honest. Be vulnerable. Above all, tell the truth.

  From Ted’s invitation to the lecture was only a couple of weeks, but I was really telling my story more than the history of Lee. But this was not a story I had shared before. My public identity was army officer, historian, husband, father. Now I would reveal my own racist past. Terrifying.

  Born on July 3 worshipping Robert E. Lee. Happily bused to a segregated African American school named for Lee. Graduated from a segregation academy in the same town as the last mass lynching in American history. Went to Washington and Lee University to become an educated Christian Virginia gentleman. Became an army officer like my heroes Washington and Lee. Served at posts named for Confederates and lived on Lee Road at West Point. My entire life led me to worship slave-owning traitors. With the story about me, I was ready—nervous, but ready.

  At the lectern, I addressed a full house. In the “Shrine of the South,” I told the crowd that Lee and his fellow Confederates refused to accept the outcome of a fair, democratic election. The southern states seceded to protect and expand slavery. Framed by Lee’s portrait to the left and his statue to the rear, I argued, on Constitution Day, that Lee had violated Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them.” Then I told the audience that the reason he fought against the United States was not complicated. Lee believed in racial control through slavery. He fought to create a slave republic because he believed in slavery. A simple argument.

  After my full-throated critique of Lee, the crowd hushed. Someone had called Lee a traitor for slavery in Lee Chapel. I stopped the lecture and strode back a dozen steps to look at the Recumbent Lee statue, the chapel’s altar. The statue survived my remarks—no cracks. I checked out the floor and the ceiling. Lee Chapel had no foundational damage despite my words. I wasn’t struck by lightning or swallowed whole into the ground. I assured the crowd that even though many of them may feel uncomfortable, discomfort causes no lasting damage.

  The truth, however, is ruthless. I heard an interview with the late writer John Updike, who said telling the truth is a ruthless act. Updike tried to “rub humanity’s face in the facts.”7 I have a convert’s zeal. I know it. Sometimes my passion can verge on righteousness, but the facts don’t care about feelings. Calling out myth, especially the virulent Lost Cause of the Confederacy virus, is painful for many white southerners. Big deal. So what! We’ve all had to deal with pain. That’s life. We’ve all dealt with disappointment, with tragedy, with learning that our childhood heroes were real-life people who screwed up. Or in Lee’s case, much, much worse.

  I grew up with a series of lies that helped further white supremacy. That’s uncomfortable. To see real agony, think about the millions of people who lived their entire lives enslaved, knowing that enslavement would be the future for their children and their children’s children. Think of living with the violence of the Jim Crow era as an African American.

  Despite the discomfort of dealing with slavery and segregation, we can handle it. A few months prior to my talk in Lee Chapel, I sat on the dais at West
Point’s graduation. The speaker that year was Secretary of Defense James Mattis. One phrase in his speech resonated with me, and I used it during my talk. “We Americans aren’t made of cotton candy,” Mattis said.8 Damn right. Americans defeated Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. Americans went to the moon. Americans, including African American soldiers, emancipated four million men, women, and children. Americans can and will confront our past, survive, and thrive. We will make a better, more inclusive society for our children and our grandchildren. I believe in this country.

  Today, we are finally, finally, having a national dialogue on what the Confederacy and the Lost Cause myth meant. It’s gut-wrenching. The truth is ruthless. We are finding out that many of the stories and myths that white America grew up with were untrue and racist. We are finally taking into account the millions of African Americans who lived enslaved, realizing that their lives were every bit as important as the white planter class. Cities and schools across the country are confronting the past.

  Washington and Lee University looked carefully at its history by creating a commission on institutional history with scholars, alumni, trustees, and students. The commission recommended sweeping changes to deal with the Lost Cause legacy at the school. The university accepted only a few of those proposals, changing the name of two buildings. In Lee Chapel, the portrait of Lee in Confederate gray has been replaced by one of Lee in a black suit. The school also hides Lee’s recumbent statue behind a firewall during ceremonies.

  The commission’s report recommended far greater changes, however. The Shrine of the South, Lee Chapel, should become a museum and no longer host university events. W&L disregarded that recommendation. Instead, it opted to build a new museum. If that museum is ever funded, I guarantee that the story told by the university will be contested before the architect completes the first blueprint.9 W&L still has far to go to address its Lost Cause legacy. Even the few changes W&L has made have created a fierce backlash from alumni. No surprise. History is dangerous.10