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

by Ty Seidule

Looking at what “might have been” shows the possibility of a terrible future, but it’s speculation. We do know, however, what Robert E. Lee did. For me, the biggest issue was the fateful, awful decision he made in April 1861. Lee’s decision to fight against the United States was not just wrong; it was treasonous. Even worse, he committed treason to perpetuate slavery. 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. Frederick Douglass described the experience of a typical enslaved man, “robbed of wife, of children, of his hard earnings, of home, of friends, of society, of knowledge, and of all that makes his life desirable.”115

Lee did fight bravely in army blue in the Mexican-American War. He was a superb college president. He did take the loyalty oath in 1865. For me, however, Lee is no hero. As an army officer, I can’t honor a colonel who abrogated his solemn oath, sworn to God. As an American, I can’t honor someone who killed so many U.S. Army soldiers. As a human being, I can’t honor a man who fought so hard for so long to keep millions of people in perpetual bondage. As W. E. B. Du Bois said in 1928, “Robert E. Lee led a bloody war to perpetuate slavery.”116

Yet hundreds of communities honor Lee and his Confederate brothers. What should we do about all the Confederate memorials across the country? My job is not to tell communities if they should remove memorials to Lee, but they should study the circumstances that led to their creation. Everyone must understand what those monuments represent. 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. Du Bois wrote in 1931 that the statues’ “inscription” should read: “Sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery.” The Confederate monuments that went up after World War II often serve as an argument against integration and equal rights.117 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...

Writing in 1870, Frederick Douglass seems remarkably prescient: “Monuments to the ‘Lost Cause’ will prove monuments to folly in the memories of a wicked rebellion … a needless record of stupidity and wrong.” 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 Confeder...

Teachers in K–12 education are doing mighty work as well. My sister-in-law Patti Coggins has shown me the engaging and accurate U.S. history curriculum

in Loudoun County, Virginia. The governor of Virginia has started an initiative to include more Black history, asking schools to take students to local African American historical sites that describe enslavement and Jim Crow segregation.120

As a nation, we have argued over the meaning of the Civil War since it started in 1861. I can safely predict we will argue about it for generations to come, but slowly, surely, the view of the Civil War throughout the country is becoming more accurate. I hope,...

Because of our decentralized governance system, we will never have a single solution to the problem of Confederate memorialization. Nor will we ever have a single solution to fix the legacy, the immorality, of slavery and segregation. To create a more just society, we must start by study...