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by
Ty Seidule
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April 25 - May 23, 2022
West Point might have more monuments to Lee than my alma mater, Washington and Lee University. How did this happen? I asked, but no one knew or cared. As a historian, I knew how to solve this problem. I went to the archives, and there I spent the next several years trying to understand when and why West Point honored Lee. And that process changed me. The history changed me. The archives changed me. The facts changed me.
In the nineteenth century, West Point banished the Confederates from memory. Not one single plaque, monument, or memorial recognized a Confederate graduate at West Point. No Confederate graduate was buried in West Point’s prestigious cemetery. But why would West Point reject the Confederates, especially Lee? And even more perplexing, why would they embrace Lee in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?
In 1929, African American cadets returned to West Point after a nearly fifty-year absence. As I would discover time and again, integration and efforts at achieving equal rights brought Confederate memorialization. West Point allowed the return of Robert E. Lee when African American cadets arrived at West Point in the twentieth century.
The commandant also told him that cadets choose their roommate, and because none wanted to live with an African American man, Davis would room alone. Cadets came to West Point knowing no one. They did not choose roommates. The commandant lied. Racism requires falsehood, hypocrisy, and spite.36
Cadets from all over the country silenced Davis, not just those from the South. Racism was and remains a national institution.
West Point memorialized Lee in reaction to the integration of African Americans and the move toward equal rights.
Why did West Point accept a picture of Lee wearing the colors of the enemy with an enslaved servant pictured prominently?
Gray argued that such a picture of Lee at the “height of his fame” would “symbolize the end of sectional difference.” At this point in my research, I knew to look for the context behind any decision to memorialize Lee at West Point. Sure enough, Gray’s Lee portrait was a reaction to integration.40
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
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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.
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?
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.
upon reflection, the 650,000 deaths would seem to confirm that each side really did try to kill the other often and successfully.
As a soldier and as a historian, I need to see beyond the myth I grew up believing to understand the man and his decision.
Growing up in Virginia, I thought Lee went with the Confederacy because all of his family, friends, and army colleagues pushed him in that direction. Wrong. Much of his extended family wanted to stay in the Union. Not just in 1861, but for generations past.
Looking carefully at those eight U.S. Army colonels from Virginia confirms that Lee’s decision was abnormal. Of those eight, seven remained loyal to their solemn oath to the U.S. Constitution. Only one colonel resigned to fight against the United States. Robert E. Lee. Put another way, 88 percent of long-serving Regular Army colonels from Virginia stayed with the United States.
Lee was an outlier. Most officers of his experience and rank remained with the United States.45 Growing up in Virginia, I saw no monument to these brave and loyal men. I still don’t.
The more I learned about Lee’s decision, the more I realized that he did not have to leave the U.S. Army. Freeman’s admonition that joining the Confederacy was “the answer he was born to make” is another lie from the Lost Cause myth. Lee chose to renounce his oath.
he could have sat out the war. Lee was fifty-four and older than most of the battlefield commanders. Alfred Mordecai, West Point class of 1823, was the leading expert on ordnance in the country. A North Carolinian by birth, Mordecai rejected an offer to serve in the Confederacy but still resigned his U.S. Army commission and sat out the war
By the time he chose secession, Lee identified far more with the southern slaveholding class than he did with his fellow officers. He certainly spent more time managing enslaved workers than he did leading soldiers.
Whenever Lee made a decision regarding enslaved people, he chose profit over human decency.63
The more I read about Confederate policy toward emancipated African Americans, the more the true nature of the southern states’ war becomes apparent.
Arming the enslaved was a last gasp to try to save the system the United States was ending by force. Lee’s attempt to arm slaves did not show he was for emancipation; it showed how desperate he was to defeat the United States and maintain at least a semblance of racial control.
Despite all the states’ rights blather of the Confederacy, its constitution allowed no states’ rights on slavery. One clause barred any state from making a law “impairing the right of property in negro slaves.”
Slavery was and is wrong. That’s not a hard moral judgment. Four million men, women, and children were not property; they were people who deserved to share the American dream.
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.
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.
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.
An important point to remember is that we don’t own the actions of people who lived in the 1860s or the 1930s. But we do have a responsibility to acknowledge the past, to acknowledge the facts. The past does not have to control us, especially if we understand it.
