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

by Ty Seidule

The historian David Blight wrote that the Civil War is like “the giant sleeping dragon of American history ever ready to rise up when we do not expect it and strike us with unbearable fire.”1 I poked the Civil War beast, and it singed me. History is dangerous. It forms our identity, our shared story. If someone challenges a sacred myth, the reaction can be ferocious.

Then I realized evidence didn’t matter; he had chosen his own facts based on his culture.

The problem is that the myths I learned were just flat-out, fundamentally wrong. And not just wrong in a moral sense, as if that weren’t significant enough, but wrong factually, whether through deception, denial, or willful ignorance. The myths and lies I learned promoted a form of racial hierarchy and white supremacy.

Eleven southern states seceded to protect and expand an African American slave labor system. Unwilling to accept the results of a fair, democratic election, they illegally seized U.S. territory, violently. Together, they formed a new “Confederacy,” in contravention of the U.S. Constitution.7 Then West Point graduates like Robert E. Lee resigned their commissions, abrogating an oath sworn to God to defend the United States. During the bloodiest war in American history, Lee and his comrades killed more U.S. Army soldiers than any other enemy, ever. And they did it for the worst reason possible: to create a nation dedicated to exploit enslaved men, women, and children, forever.

Gettysburg was an opportunity to showcase Lee’s true character, his standing as a gentleman, under the most arduous of circumstances.

The second flag, next to the Stars and Bars, was called the Stainless Banner. William T. Thompson, a Savannah editor, described the flag accurately as “The White Man’s Flag.” It featured the Confederate Battle Flag in the corner of an all-white flag. Thompson’s description of the flag underscored the purpose of the war. “As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause.”9 Yes, the Confederacy proclaimed its racism proudly.

Most importantly, it was the flag of white supremacy. The Mississippi legislature put the Confederate Battle Flag on their state flag in 1894 after the white supremacists took over and rewrote the state’s constitution in 1890. However, it became most popular after World War II when the Dixiecrat party under Strom Thurmond used it. The flag became a symbol of resistance to integration and equal rights. Georgia placed the Confederate Battle Flag on the state flag in 1956 to protest racial integration.

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.

Despite their defeat, former Confederates remained unrepentant. Soon, the leaders of the white South put together a new narrative to explain their failure and to maintain racial control and white supremacy. Today, historians call the series of lies, half-truths, and exaggerations the Lost Cause of the Confederacy myth.36

In March 1861, he made the infamous Cornerstone Speech that clearly marked the Confederate goals: [The Confederacy’s] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.40

The “obedient servant” or “happy slave” myth is the second lie of the Lost Cause.

Because enslavement passed from mother to child, the children of white men born to enslaved women remained enslaved. Think of that for a minute. The white men of the South had no issues with enslaving their own children and living near them for their whole lives. Slave owners would also sell their children hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Their own children!

THE CIVIL WAR left between 650,000 and 750,000 dead because the Confederates fought to create a slave republic based on a morally bankrupt ideology of white supremacy.

The only way to argue for slavery, then or now, is to believe that the enslaved weren’t real human beings. That the lives of those who had darker skin had less worth; that the color of skin meant the difference between human and not quite human. And that is the hideous lesson my Virginia history textbook taught schoolchildren in the Old Dominion.

In 1958, Charlottesville and Norfolk schools as well as those in Prince Edward and Warren Counties closed by order of the governor. Thousands of schoolchildren went without education for half a decade so Virginia could, once again, maintain its racial code. The general assembly also created a voucher system using public funds to allow white parents to send their children to private schools.

We find it hard to confront our past because it’s so ugly, but the alternative to ignoring our racist history is creating a racist future.

In 1956, as a reaction to the requirement to integrate, the Georgia Assembly changed the state flag to incorporate the Confederate Battle Flag. As Denmark Groover, the legislator who guided the bill to passage, said at the time, “The Confederate symbol was added mostly out of defiance to federal integration orders.”

As the historian Karen Cox has noted, a Confederate monument had the same purpose as lynching: enforce white supremacy. It is no coincidence that most Confederate monuments went up between 1890 and 1920, the same period that lynching peaked in the South. Lynching and Confederate monuments served to tell African Americans that they were second-class citizens.

When people have no political outlet nor means of changing a racist society, rioting is their only voice.

On June 6, 1997, the state of Alabama executed Hays in Yellow Mama for the murder of Michael Donald. The first white person to die for murdering an African American in Alabama since 1913.

Visitors place carrots and apples on Traveller’s grave and pennies as well. Always heads down. No one wanted to have the hated Lincoln’s face visible to Lee’s grave.

Early argued that the war was about not slavery but the “inestimable right of self-government.” The enslaved became a “class of laborers as happy and contented as any in the world, if not more so.” The South lost because of the overwhelming combat power and the “cruelty and barbarity of the Federal Commanders.”40

the best money-raising group in the South, the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They figure prominently throughout the twentieth century because of their unrivaled success in building memorials in marble and on paper to further the Lost Cause myth and vindicate the Confederacy. Smith knew that if the national UDC leadership said they would raise funds for him, he could bank on it.61

What had been seen as a chapel with Lee’s remains now became a shrine in its own right. While Lee did not design the building, he received credit anyway. The building became, as one postcard described it, “the Westminster Abbey of the Confederacy,” infused with the godlike cult of Lee. After several years of fighting, Smith conceded defeat. The Lexington women won, and the small chapel became, as they called it, “the Holy Shrine.”64

The “Old South” meant adherence to the religion of white supremacy, and its cathedral was Lee Chapel.

When people tell me that I’m trying to change history, I point to the stories hidden from me in Virginia and Georgia. I don’t want less history; I want more. The real question is, who chooses the history? Is it Jubal Early? The United Daughters of the Confederacy? Politicians? Few choices are more fraught for people than who decides which stories are told to children—or to college students.

Washington College survived because of the profits made from enslaved labor, and it created monuments to the slave owners.

I raised my right hand and swore the 1862 anti-Confederate oath in Lee Chapel, surrounded by Confederate flags, next to a portrait of Lee in Confederate gray. The oath I took was a reaction to the very man in the very uniform next to me at my commissioning ceremony. Without the historical context, taking an oath next to a Lee portrait seemed like the perfect setting. I believed Robert E. Lee was a patriotic American who did his duty. Every part of my upbringing led me to that conclusion. But I was wrong.

Two of the three large army posts in my home state of Georgia remain named for secessionists who never served in the U.S. Army but who did kill U.S. Army soldiers. Benning and Gordon believed until the end of their lives that African Americans, who today make up more than 20 percent of the army, were not fully human. The U.S. Army gives its highest honor to unrepentant white supremacists.

Starting in 1901, Confederate dead were reinterred into their own section of Arlington in concentric circles on the westernmost edge of the cemetery on a road named after Stonewall Jackson.48

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.”

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.

The army felt comfortable naming posts for people like Nathan Bedford Forrest because it didn’t see African Americans as fully human. The 1932 report included this assessment: The Negro … is lower in the scale of evolutionary development than the white but the important point is not the question of inferiority but the fact that the black race is different from our own … The Race is characterized by the greatest fecundity of all the races and by the urge to mate in a corresponding degree.91

President Harry Truman ordered the military to desegregate in 1948. Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall, a North Carolinian, did his best to keep the service segregated, allowing states to maintain segregated National Guard units. In fact, Royall was the leading spokesman in the Truman administration against integration.

West Point memorialized Lee in reaction to the integration of African Americans and the move toward equal rights.

Robert E. Lee resigned his commission, fought against his country, killed U.S. Army soldiers, and violated Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution. Lee committed treason.

In fact, because Lee fought so well for so long, the South stayed in the war for four years, ensuring the destruction of the South’s infrastructure, not to mention the horrific bloodletting.

No other enemy officer in American history was responsible for the deaths of more U.S. Army soldiers than Robert E. Lee. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia killed more than one in three and wounded more than half of all U.S. casualties. In the last year of the war, Lee’s army killed or wounded 127,000 U.S. Army soldiers.25

On January 10, 1863, Lee wrote to the Confederate secretary of war after the publication of the Emancipation Proclamation, calling it savage and brutal policy … which leaves us no alternative but success or degradation worse than death, if we would save the honor of our families from pollution, our social system from destruction.

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.

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.