Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

by Ty Seidule

I didn’t share my own guilt and my own shame of growing up believing a series of lies about the Civil War and its legacy. The same lies that have infected our nation. To convince my colleagues, to convince anyone, I had to change my narrative. In subsequent conversations, in new lectures, in new books, in this book, I must tell my story as honestly as possible, even though it reveals a racist past, my own racist past. Telling my story might provide a path to understanding why the facts of the Civil War remained buried beneath layer after layer of myth and even outright lies, and why they continue to spark debate in this country.

Many people don’t understand why these monuments are so problematic. Neither did I. The power of white southern culture and white southern history—actually not history, myth—shaped my understanding of the Civil War almost from infancy, true, but it shaped something more important than my view of the past. The white southern myths created my identity.

Why did I have such a reverential view of Lee? Every part of my life made Lee a deity and his belief in the Confederate cause noble. Southern and Confederate were, for me, interchangeable. Books, movies, songs, school names, street names, monuments, parents, and teachers all reinforced the idea that Lee and the Confederacy were worthy of worship.

my culture gave more credit to Lee in defeat than to his opponent in victory.

As a white southern boy, I knew only Lee because the entire narrative of the Civil War was a civics lesson and the right answer, no, the righteous answer was always Robert E. Lee and the Confederates.

I grew up with language about the Civil War that mirrored that parity. The names we give the war itself and those who fought it matter. Our shared understanding of the war comes from the language we use.

The names we use matter. By saying Union and Confederate, Blue and Gray, North and South, we lose the fundamental difference between the two sides. The United States fought against a rebel force that would not accept the results of a democratic election and chose armed rebellion. At Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and a dozen other U.S. Army posts, the secessionists fired on U.S. property and then seized it.

The southern slaveholders were not fighting some foreign or lost-to-history army called the Union. The Confederacy fought the United States of America, the country I spent a career defending. I will call those men who fought to save their country and, by 1863, end the scourge of race-based slavery by their proper name—U.S. Army soldiers.

As a child, I heard “the Civil War” or “the War Between the States.” The latter phrase was rarely used during the war, but the losing Confederate politicians and generals adopted this term after the war. The United Confederate Veterans chose “the War Between the States” as the official name in 1898, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) started a multiyear campaign to promote the term.

“The War Between the States” created the impression of two equal sides, two sovereign nations.

Using the phrase “the War Between the States” erroneously gives the rebelling states constitutional claim to a righteous cause.

“The Civil War” works for me; as an added bonus, the Confederate veterans hated it.

The Lost Cause became a movement, an ideology, a myth, even a civil religion that would unite first the white South and eventually the nation around the meaning of the Civil War. The Lost Cause might have helped unite the country and bring the South back into the nation far more quickly than bloody civil wars in other lands. But this lie came at a horrible, deadly, impossible cost to the nation, a cost we are still paying today.

The Lost Cause created a flawed memory of the Civil War, a lie that formed the ideological foundation for white supremacy and Jim Crow laws, which used violent terror and de jure segregation to enforce racial control.

The Lost Cause myth argued that white southerners fought the Civil War for many reasons—protective tariffs, states’ rights, freedom, the agrarian dream, defense, and on and on. Mitchell couldn’t settle on just one reason, so she picked every reason except the defense of slavery. For her the protection of the land and the southern way of life coalesced into a romantic, almost mystically righteous defense of freedom.

The reality, the facts, and there are facts, told a different story. Confederate states seceded to protect and expand their peculiar institution of slavery.