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by
Ty Seidule
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April 25 - May 23, 2022
Then I realized evidence didn’t matter; he had chosen his own facts based on his culture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
South Carolina led the charge to secession with its declaration on December 20, 1860, stating the reason it left the United States was “the increasing hostility on the part of the non-slave-holding states to the institution of slavery.” Mississippi, my dad’s home state, seceded, arguing that “our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest in the world.” No lies. No obfuscation. In fact, the secessionists argued that slavery was a positive good for both the enslaved and the slave owners.
[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.
In reality, most northerners who came south often tried to help African Americans, or they brought capital to an impoverished people and wrecked economy. In the postwar South, there really wasn’t much to steal.
The Lost Cause and Margaret Mitchell would have us believe that the great threat to the South was the freedmen and the U.S. Army. Yet the four million recently freed ex-slaves suffered from violence far more. Thousands died trying to vote at the hands of white terror groups, not only the Klan, but also its many imitators. The Lost Cause myth propagated by Mitchell and bought by white southerners for a hundred years served as the ideological underpinning for a violently racist society.
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.
As it turns out, the lies of the Lost Cause infused every aspect of my life—and that pisses me off.
The High School etched in marble a list of sixty-eight “old boys” who died in gray. I walked by that tablet dozens of times. Graduates who died wearing U.S. Army blue warranted no memorial.
or even on one’s mother’s side is
The story of how Alexandria went from a part of the District of Columbia back to Virginia reveals its racial history.11 In September 1846, white Alexandrians celebrated the results of a referendum to leave the District of Columbia and return to Virginia, a process called retrocession. After announcing the vote, 763 for retrocession and 222 against, the crowd exploded “with the loudest cheers and a salvo from the artillery.” Nothing like a cannonade to punctuate a celebration. Then “the young folks lighted torches” and carried “flags, banners, and transparencies,” while “firearms … were
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In the District, they had protections for freedom of worship, and several schools existed to teach African Americans. As a part of Virginia, Alexandria shuttered Black churches and schools. Another law required manumitted or free Blacks to leave the state of Virginia within a year. The number of free Blacks dropped precipitously in Alexandria in the ten years after retrocession.
The most logical explanation for retrocession was to protect slavery, but the people of Alexandria and the pro-slavery forces in Congress hid their tracks. The two leaders of the legislation in Congress, John Calhoun of South Carolina in the Senate and R. M. T. Hunter of Virginia in the House, were both staunch advocates of slavery. Only four years after Alexandria rejoined Virginia, Congress outlawed the slave trade but not slavery itself in the District of Columbia. In the Compromise of 1850, the last successful attempt to keep the country together before the Civil War, Henry Clay, the
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In 1864 with the cemeteries full, the federal government seized property on the corner of Washington and Church Streets for a freedmen’s burial ground. By 1869 more than eighteen hundred freedmen had found their final resting place at the cemetery; more than half of those buried were children. But the African American cemetery did not receive the same care as the white national cemetery. After the war, the government maintained the cemetery for a decade or so, but soon the wooden markers rotted away, and everyone forgot that the site was a cemetery. By the time I was born, a service station
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When I talk about the Civil War or Confederate monuments, I hear complaints that I’m trying to change history. Is the new memorial in Alexandria changing history or correcting history? Yes to both. It’s recovering a story lost and creating a more accurate portrayal of the past. History is always changing. We link the past to our conception of the present and we always have. I want to change history because as a child in Alexandria I never understood the repugnant nature of slavery or the powerful history of African Americans in my city.
Samuel Tucker, from my hometown, demanded an end to Jim Crow laws in the 1930s as a twentysomething. He should have been a hero for me and every child in Alexandria.
My hometown wanted to prove it was southern and against civil rights.
“You know perfectly well that this was the most vigorous prosecution of a white defendant accused of killing a black man ever to take place in this courthouse.” A true statement that made the situation even worse.
If the Virginia of my youth was no democracy, if I call a plantation an enslaved labor farm, then I should also call segregated Virginia by its true name—a racial police state. To be clear, the South of my birth was no democracy.
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.
As a southerner, I have extensive experience with foul-smelling industries, which took advantage of the non-union, cheap-labor, low-regulation, and business-friendly South.
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.”
Monroe’s leading citizens felt offended. Not by the lynching and gruesome deaths of African Americans. No. Waltonians decried how the coverage of the lynchings made them look bad. They blamed men from outside Walton County for the crime. The Atlanta Constitution agreed. “The people of Monroe and of the entire county have always been known as the state’s best, most conservative and law-abiding citizens.”
They still try this nonsense today when their own actions show them in a bad light
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.
It bears repeating. Georgia was a racial police state, not a democracy.
having Lee on the altar in the sanctuary meant only one thing. My school—and I—worshipped a Confederate general. She was right.
Merrell went on to praise Lee the educator who served nobly after military defeat and “exemplifies the American ideal of responsible citizenship.” Lee, who worked to destroy the United States to create a slave republic; Lee, who abrogated his oath. Lee, who killed U.S. Army soldiers, received praise from one of the most respected companies in the country—based in Michigan—for his citizenship.
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.
In 2019, law students asked for an option of a different diploma; one that doesn’t feature Lee’s portrait. The University denied that request.
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.
Over the course of my long career, I would find that the army honored Confederate officers just as I did. Despite the Confederates’ record of killing U.S. Army soldiers, my army memorialized Confederate generals as much as or more than the U.S. generals who led America to victory in the Civil War and World War II.
One of the largest military installations in the world, home to the vaunted 82nd Airborne Division, was named after Braxton Bragg, a poorly regarded Confederate general and slaveholder who killed U.S. Army soldiers.
one of the U.S. Army’s most prestigious posts remains named after a fairly low-ranking Confederate commander, one who spent a lifetime trying to destroy the United States.
Gordon admitted he opposed freedom for the enslaved “because we had bought you and paid our money for you.”
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.
At our most racially diverse post, the army honors a man who wore army blue for three decades and then refused to stay when his nation needed him most. Instead, he fought so well and so hard to ensure African Americans stayed enslaved.
We do know that he actively counseled sedition while he led the Military Academy. One cadet asked him if he should leave immediately for the southern cause. Beauregard advised the young man, “Watch me; and when I jump, you jump. What’s the use of jumping too soon?” Even the southern cadet who asked him found Beauregard’s answer inappropriate.
The War Department named the posts after Confederates at the beginning of the two world wars, marking a change from earlier practice. Until 1878, local commanders could name forts.
The price for white reconciliation remains far too high.
the evidence seems strong that FDR changed the name to please Smith, a white supremacist. 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 Confederate streamers did not join the army flag when streamers were first authorized in 1925. Their addition came at a more sinister date—1949. President Harry Truman ordered the military to desegregate in 1948.
Were the names really chosen in the “spirit of reconciliation”? Yes, if the army had mentioned that the reconciliation was for whites only and reinforced Jim Crow apartheid.
historians and especially retired officers need to tell the American people and our soldiers that we honor men who fought to destroy the United States to perpetuate slavery. The facts, I hope, I believe, will result in change.
Our new house, built in the 1930s, was on Lee Road in Lee Housing Area by Lee Gate. To enter Lee Housing Area, a car turns north off Washington Road, creating a sign that has Washington and Lee on one pole.
