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

by Ty Seidule

The “obedient servant” or “happy slave” myth is the second lie of the Lost Cause. African Americans were “faithful slaves,” loyal to their masters, loyal to the Confederate cause. In Gone With the Wind, Scarlett scoffs at the idea of keeping Confederate soldiers at home “to keep the darkies from rising—why, it’s the silliest thing I ever heard of. Why should our people rise?” Mitchell writes that the enslaved believe slavery was the best thing for them. All of the enslaved house servants stay with Scarlett and her family after the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, freed the enslaved in the rebelling states.42

Primary sources, historians, contemporary law, and just plain common sense all confirm that the enslaved desperately sought freedom both before the war and during it. A hundred and eighty thousand African Americans, most recently emancipated, fought for their own freedom as U.S. Army soldiers. The number of enslaved fighting as Confederate soldiers is a nice round number—zero.43

Perhaps we should stop calling these places plantations and start calling them by a more accurate name—enslaved labor farms.46 Accurate language can help us destroy the lies of the Lost Cause.

The next tenet of the Lost Cause myth dealt with defeat. If a southern man could whip twelve Yankees, as several of Mitchell’s characters proclaim repeatedly, then how could the South have lost? The cause was lost, doomed from the start, because the Yankees had more money, matériel, and manpower. The Yankee victory showed the triumph of might over right. The Appomattox surrender document still had wet ink when Lee gave General Orders No. 9, his farewell address, to the Army of Northern Virginia on April 10, 1865. Lee’s address was the first salvo in what would become a written battle to define the meaning of the war. He argued that his army surrendered only because it had been “compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.”53 Not only did the United States have more of everything; it had Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. Mitchell writes, “Grant was a butcher who did not care how many men he slaughtered for a victory, but a victory he would have.”54 As for Sherman, Mitchell mentioned him seventy-two times, as though he carried a sulfurous pitchfork, leaving Sherman sentinels, the burned chimneys of plantation houses, in his wake. Only someone who fought without mercy and with unlimited resources of men and matériel could have defeated the virtuous Confederates. In reality, Grant and Sherman exhibited extraordinary generalship in a righteous cause. Despite the myth that the “cause” was always lost, the Confederates could have won the war. The South h...

Here, Mitchell is mostly right. Wealthy southern women did support the cause until the end, but the Confederacy also suffered from bread riots in Richmond led by women. In North Carolina, poor white women wrote to the governor telling him, “The time has come that we the comon people has to hav bread or blood … or die in the attempt.”57 After the war, white women provided the leadership, resources, and strategy to vindicate the Lost Cause and preserve Confederate culture in marble and paper.58

The Reconstruction-as-failure myth held that African Americans weren’t

ready for freedom, the vote, or holding high office. Black citizenship proved a costly failure. Mitchell’s characters complain of “illiterate negroes in high public office” as the “final degradation.”60 Scarlett describes African Americans “in legislature where they spent most of their time eating goobers and easing their unaccustomed feet into and out of new shoes.”61 It’s a lie, a racist argument through and through, and Mitchell stokes it in every possible way. In reality, African Americans served with distinction in high office. By 1877, about two thousand Black men in the former Confederate states held elected office at the local, state, and federal levels.62

The Lost Cause narrative featured a racist fear of African Americans, combined with hatred for ...

Reading Gone With the Wind as a historian who had studied this period left me feeling bereft.

Sarah likely moved to the Alexandria pen in a coffle, a line of humans chained to one another by their hands and feet. 19 Growing up in the South, I never heard the word “coffle.” The Alexandria Gazette described how “the children and some of the women are generally crowded into a cart or wagon, while others follow on foot, frequently handcuffed and chained together.” The slavers drove their human cargo many miles in coffles to the overcrowded and fetid slave pens. The Gazette noted that “scarcely a week passes without some of these wretched creatures being driven through our streets.”20

Alexandria became infamous for its numerous enslaved prisons, some of them within blocks of Robert E. Lee’s boyhood home. Many hotels converted their rooms into slave cells to keep up with demand.

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.

Garland wrote that “all the Negroes” went “cheerfully.” Lies. Every enslaved worker knew that going to the cotton plantations of the Deep South meant backbreaking work under a quota system enforced by violence. Moreover, Hinds County was the site of an enslaved insurrection scare and the lynching of several enslaved workers. Slaves from Virginia were especially suspect because Deep South slavers believed white Virginians sold the most rebellious Black people to Mississippi to get rid of their influence.78

Washington College broke the terms of the will and profited from selling enslaved people to the cotton farms of Mississippi. Together, the sale of enslaved people and land from the Robinson estate brought $64,480.98 by 1849 (equal to about $2.15 million in 2020 dollars), more than three times the value of the stock given by George Washington. Twelve thousand dollars went to construct two buildings along the Colonnade, including Robinson Hall. When I went to W&L, three prizes had the Robinson name. Washington College emplaced an obelisk monument on the east side of campus in 1855 to Jockey John Robinson with his remains. I passed by the monument regularly with no idea why it was there or whom it honored.80 Washington College survived because of the profits made from enslaved labor, and it created monuments to the slave owners.

Arlington National Cemetery’s origin story is a Civil War story. George Washington Parke Custis, George Washington’s step-grandson and adopted son, owned the eleven hundred acres and built a huge Greek Revival mansion on a bluff with a commanding view of the capital. Custis meant for the mansion to memorialize George Washington and showcase the former president’s relics that Custis inherited. When Custis died in 1857, the property with its two hundred enslaved workers went to his daughter Mary Custis Lee and her husband, Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, who managed the property.41 On April 20, 1861, Lee cast his lot with the Confederacy. General Winfield Scott, devastated by his protégé’s choice, understood that if controlled by the Confederates, Lee’s property would allow the enemy to shell and destroy the Capitol, in effect forcing the U.S. government to abandon Washington. To prevent that calamity, on May 24, Scott ordered U.S. forces to seize the land and hold it, and the army has owned it ever since.42

James Garfield, a major general in the U.S. Volunteers during the war and an Ohio congressman (and future president), gave a speech at Arlington on Decoration Day in 1868 that explained the sacred nature of the cemetery and the feelings toward the Confederates and especially Lee: Seven years ago, this was the home of one who lifted his sword against the life of his country, and who became the great imperator of the rebellion. The soil beneath our feet was watered by the tears of slaves … But, thanks be to God, this arena of rebellion and slavery is a scene of violence and crime no longer. This will be forever the sacred mountain of our capital. Here is our temple.45

President William McKinley, a U.S. Army Civil War veteran, worked on sectional reconciliation throughout his time in office.

Before the war started, Forrest made his fortune selling enslaved people in Memphis, and he participated in the illegal African slave trade. Only the domestic slave trade was legal after 1808, although some scholars estimate up to fifty thousand more Africans were sold into bondage after that date. In 1859, a report started by President Buchanan’s administration found that Forrest sold thirty kidnapped Africans from the ship the Wanderer, one of the last shipments to America from Africa. In 2008, Georgia emplaced a monument to the survivors of the Wanderer.84 Forrest’s wartime record against African American soldiers was equally awful. After a battle at Fort Pillow, near the Mississippi River, in April 1864, soldiers under Forrest’s command, and likely under his orders, massacred Black U.S. soldiers and Black women. In discussing the massacre, a soldier wrote a week after the battle that several Confederate troops “tried to stop the butchery” of the U.S. soldiers but that Forrest “ordered them shot down like dogs, and the bloodbath continued.” “Remember Fort Pillow” became a rallying cry for U.S. soldiers, especially African American soldiers, for the remainder of the war.85 Finally, after the war, Forrest became the first Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. While he eventually resigned from that position, both white and Black people throughout the South knew of Forrest’s infamous role in the first Klan and the Fort Pillow massacre. A political cartoon by Thomas Nast in 1868...

By the 1930s, the Lost Cause myth was no longer a southern phenomenon. President Franklin Roosevelt spoke at the dedication of the Robert E. Lee statue in Dallas in 1936. His description of Lee sounds like Jubal Early giving a speech in 1872 in Lee Chapel. FDR said Lee was a “great general. But, also, all over the United States … [w]e recognize Robert E. Lee as one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen.” The South had lost the war but won the narrative.88

Today, hundreds of thousands of people visit Trophy Point for its million-dollar

dollar view up the Hudson River. Tour guides and Department of History faculty always discuss the soaring Battle Monument that honors the U.S. Army officers and men whose sacrifice “freed a race and welded a nation” during “the War of the Rebellion.” They may need to explain why the Civil War is called “the War of the Rebellion.” They may need to explain why the war “freed a race and welded a nation.” Thanks to African American cadets, there is no Confederate memorial to explain.

LIKE MANY OTHER institutions, West Point reexamined its Confederate memorialization after the massacre of Black churchgoers in Charleston in 2015 by a Confederate flag–waving racist, forming two committees. Frustratingly, the superintendent chose not to place me or any other historian on the committees.

In 1861, Lincoln was elected fairly under the U.S. Constitution. U.S. Army officers who chose war against the president of the United States and the Constitution were in rebellion and, by law, traitors. As a professional soldier, Lee resigned, but could he ever go against the oath’s prescription to defend “the United States, paramount to any and all allegiance … to any State,” or “against all enemies or opposer”? In my opinion, no. Not legally or ethically. And of course, fighting for slavery meant it was morally wrong too.

One cousin, after hearing of Lee’s decision made after praying for guidance, coldly replied, “I wish he had read over his commission as well as his prayers.” Another West Point graduate, Henry Coppée, criticized Lee in print in 1864. “Treason is Treason,” he said. Lee “flung away his loyalty for no better reason than a mistaken interpretation of noblesse oblige.” Another former army colleague quoted the book of Isaiah: “Robert Lee is commander in chief of the Commonwealth—‘O Lucifer son of morning star how art thou fallen.’”47

Lee could have chosen differently. Like Scott and Thomas, he could have fought for the United States. Or 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 teaching mathematics in Philadelphia. Nor did Lee try to use his influence to stop Virginia from seceding.49

The consequences of Lee’s betrayal led many others on the path to treason. Lee’s decision was momentous because of his status: son of an American Revolution war hero, Mexican-American War hero, army colonel, son-in-law of George Washington’s adopted son, and suppressor of John Brown’s raid.

In Alexandria, all looked to Lee. The local newspaper, my hometown paper, the Alexandria Gazette, wrote on the day Lee mailed his resignation, but before his decision was announced, “We do not know, and have no right to speak for or anticipate, the course of Col. Robert E. Lee. Whatever he may do, will be conscientious and honorable.” The pro-secession Gazette put no pressure on Lee to resign. If he did resign, the paper hoped Virginia would give him command of its troops. The paper fawned over him. “His reputation, his acknowledged ability, his chivalric character, his probity, honor and—may we add, to his eternal praise—his Christian life and conduct—make his name a ‘tower of strength.’”50 Lee’s actions carried great weight in Virginia and among army officers. One person who lived near Arlington noticed that “none of them wanted secession, and were waiting to see what Colonel Robert Lee would do.” A relative noted, “For some the question ‘What will Colonel Lee do?’ was only second in interest to ‘What will Virginia do?’” Lieutenant Orton Williams, Mary Lee’s cousin, was aide-de-camp to Winfield Scott. When Williams heard the news, he said, “Now that ‘Cousin Robert’ had resigned everyone seemed to be doing so.”51

Would as many officers have resigned their commission if the popular Robert E. Lee had remained loyal? Of course, we will never know, but Lee’s decision was momentous not only for his family but for many others trying to decide what to do.52 As a long-serving army officer and as a historian, can I h...

States? Yes! Lee’s choice was wrong. He violated the Constitution’s proscription against waging war against the United States. The Constitution clear...

Why did Lee choose to resign his commission and bear arms against the country he swore to defend for three decades? We have Lee’s letter to his cousin Lieutenant Roger Jones in the West Point archives, and I show it to my class every year. “I have been unable to make up my mind to raise my hand against my native state, my relatives, my children, & my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army & never desire to draw my sword save in defense of my state. I consider it useless to go into the reasons that influence me.”53 If Lee had honored his oath, more members of his family might have stayed loyal. The vast majority of senior officers did stay. Lee went with his home state of Virginia—for a few weeks. He quickly resigned his commission leading the State of Virginia’s forces to accept a role in the Confederate States of America’s army. As historian Gary W. Gallagher has noted, Lee became a Confederate nationalist, almost overnight.54

Lee chose the Confederacy because of his abiding belief in slavery. A senior army colonel as intelligent as Robert E. Lee knew full well why the states seceded; they told the world why they seceded—to protect and expand slavery. Lee chose to fight for a new nation whose explicit, constitutional guarantee was human bondage—forever.55 While Lee believed in slavery, he also profited from it far more than other army colonels. At the age of twenty-four, two years after graduating from West Point, Lee married Mary Custis, the only child of George Washington Parke Custis, the adopted son of George Washington. Custis earned his money through inheritance, and that inherited wealth derived from the work of enslaved labor. Enslaved labor created much of his wealth including the prestigious, Doric-columned Arlington House with its commanding view of the

capital. Custis owned two other enslaved labor farms—Romancoke and White House. A year after marrying Mary Custis, Lee inherited enslaved workers from his mother’s estate. During his many years in the army, Lee hired out those enslaved workers and pocketed the profit, creating wealth. By the time he wrote his only will as a U.S. Army officer in 1846 as he headed to fight in Mexico, he estimated his net worth at $40,000 in stocks, bonds, and property, including enslaved workers, or more than $1.3 million today. His salary as a second lieutenant was $62.50 a month (about $1,700 today). That increased to $126 as a captain in 1846 (about $4,000 today). Lee invested well in stocks and bonds, and the proceeds from hiring out enslaved servants helped build his substantial nest egg.56 During his army years, Lee used enslaved labor borrowed from Arlington. Of course, his father-in-law never charged him, despite the large fees the enslaved servants could have generated. When Lee’s wife, Mary, accompanied him on his many army assignments, she brought even more enslaved servants from Arlington, far more than most army officers. Up to 1857, Lee benefited financially from hiring out his enslaved workers, while he also had the use of his wife’s enslaved

Instead, Lee chose another path, keeping the enslaved workers as long as he could to pay off Custis’s debts and build money for the family. To do this, he broke families apart using the hiring system. During Custis’s time running Arlington, he recognized marriages and kept families together, never selling them or hiring them out. By 1860, Lee had used the hiring system to such a degree that only one enslaved family remained together at Arlington. Lee separated husbands, wives, and children and hired them out across Virginia to make more money. Additionally, Lee used the hiring system to make “troublemakers” go away, or at least move them to another farm. He did this to a man named Reuben whom Lee called a “great rogue and rascal.” Whenever Lee made a decision regarding enslaved people, he chose profit over human decency.63

as possible. He demanded efficiency and hard work, as though they were soldiers. The enslaved fought back, often successfully, while calling Lee “a hard taskmaster” and the “worst man I ever saw.” The result was even less work done by the enslaved and open protest. Many felt they were already emancipated and escaped to freedom.64

In addition to his keen financial interest and belief in human bondage, Lee loathed those who fought for emancipation. He deplored the “evil passions” of abolitionists who stirred “disloyalty” among slaves. Lee believed abolitionists created problems by enticing slaves to rebel, forcing action by slaveholders. Antislavery zealots were meddlers in a system they did not understand. Lee

wanted the abolitionists to “leave the slave alone if he would not anger the master.” Those who wrote against the evils of slavery, not the system itself, Lee believed, were creating the problems of human bondage.68

During the war, Lee’s actions and words about enslaved people also show that he fought the war to maintain slavery. 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.70

That letter stands as the most damning indictment of Lee’s belief in slavery. Here, Lee discusses what will happen if the United States wins and emancipates four million African American enslaved people. The loss of racial hierarchy would be degradation worse than death. The white women of the South would have to worry about the constant threat of rape or “pollution.” Black male sexuality, which Lee so openly fears, paled in comparison to the very real rape culture of white southern men against Black women.

through enslavement would be gone if the United States won. The Emancipation Proclamation declared the enslaved in the rebelling states “forever free.” Then Lincoln declared that freedmen “will be received into the armed service of the United States.” Armed, emancipated African Americans wearing U.S. Army blue in vast numbers would fight against the Confederates who wanted to enslave them. Lee and the Confederates sowed the wind, and with the Emancipation Proclamation the whirlwind began.71 The Emancipation Proclamation brought out Lee’s anger and his true feelings. After Lincoln announced the new policy, an enraged Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Congress argued about how to respond. Secretary of War James

Seddon suggested summary executions for all African Americans wearing the U.S. Army uniform. Beauregard also recommended executing every single U.S. soldier no matter their color after the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet if Confederates executed African American soldiers, the previous owners would lose valuable property. One proposal allowed Confederate soldiers to sell captured Black fugitives and pocket the money.72

The kidnapping of African Americans on Lee’s Gettysburg campaign was probably even more widespread than the evidence we have suggests. When Lee’s army left Pennsylvania after its ignoble defeat at Gettysburg, they took hundreds of African Americans with them. But not everyone. The U.S. Army lieutenant Chester Leach reported that one African American man accepted

torture, mutilation, and eventual death at the Pennsylvania border rather than submit to enslavement in Virginia.77 The more I read about Confederate policy toward emancipated African Americans, the more the true nature of the southern states’ war becomes apparent. Lee led an army whose purpose was to support a new nation dedicated to subjugation. Of course, the Confederates would see free Black men as a threat. The enslaved fought for their own freedom, first by escaping to U.S. camps and then by fighting as soldiers. If African American soldiers could fight valiantly, which they did, the entire argument of slavery was bankrupt.78 We should also remember that Lee had African Americans in his army, as enslaved servants and workers, not soldiers. The Army of Northern Virginia hired thousands of enslaved workers from owners to dig fortifications and bury bodies.79 The South used enslaved workers to free more white men for combat. After Grant took command and the likelihood of victory diminished, Lee wanted even more enslaved workers in the army. He wrote to Jefferson Davis in the fall of 1864,

A considerable number could be placed in the ranks by relieving all able bodied white men employed as teamsters, cooks, mechanics, and laborers and supplying their places with negroes … It seems to me that we must choose between employing negroes ourselves, and having them employed against us.80 In no way did Lee want emancipated slaves in his ranks, but he desperately needed more men to contend with the U.S. forces under Grant and his own lack of manpower, exacerbated by the losses of the Gettysburg campaign. By early 1865, he advocated using enslaved men as soldiers because

no other way to continue fighting. The South lost enslaved workers in factories and farms as the U.S. Army controlled more and more territory. Emancipated men joined the U.S. Colors, while others worked in a variety of industries or as laborers. For every Black person the Confederacy lost, the United States gained. Lee said the U.S. “progress will thus add to his numbers.” Lee saw that the United States would end slavery on its terms. In fact, the U.S. Army and the effects of war had already devastated slavery in Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana.81

In June 1865, Grant issued General Orders No. 108. In class, I have my cadets stand as I recite it aloud, telling them to answer with “Huzzah!” Soldiers of the Armies of the United States! By your patriotic devotion to your country in the hour of danger and alarm—your magnificent fighting, bravery and endurance—you have maintained the supremacy of the Union and the Constitution, overthrown all armed opposition to the enforcement of the law, and of the Proclamations forever Abolishing Slavery, the cause and pretext for the Rebellion, and opened the way to the Rightful Authorities to restore Order and inaugurate Peace on a permanent and enduring basis on every foot of American soil. Your marches, Sieges, and Battles, in distance, duration, resolution and brilliancy of result, dim the luster of the world’s past military achievements, and will be the patriot’s precedent in the defense of liberty and Right in all time to come. In obedience to your country’s call, you left your homes and families and volunteered in its defense. Victory has crowned your valor.

Lee’s finest hour, in his entire life, came on October 2, 1865. On that day in front of a notary public in Lexington, Lee signed an amnesty oath to the United States, his first U.S. oath since March 1861.100 By signing the oath, Lee applied for a pardon from President Andrew Johnson. The U.S. attorney general, James Speed, wrote that “the acceptance of a pardon is a confession of guilt.” Lee might not have believed Speed, but he knew many southerners did. They would see his oath as evidence that secession was wrong.101 Yet he took it anyway. I Robert E. Lee of Lexington Virginia

Historians don’t usually do counterfactual history or predict the future, but we should wonder what would have happened if the Confederacy had won, if Lee had been successful. 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.” Changing the constitution required two-thirds votes of the states; no easy task. Because the price of enslaved people was at an all-time high in 1860, slavery would have continued for decades or longer. In 1840 the number of enslaved people stood at 2.5 million. By 1860 the number had grown to four million.114

If Lee’s cause had emerged victorious, millions of people would have endured misery, rape, family separation, torture, and murder well into the future. As bad as the Jim Crow era would become, and it was awful, slavery was far worse. We must remember: Lee fought for perpetual slavery.

With a porous border to the north of the Confederacy, enslaved people would have continued to flee to freedom. How would the new southern country react? By deploying the Confederate army to the border? Certainly, skirmishes leading to more wa...