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

by Ty Seidule

Virtually every American historian would fully subscribe to the proposition that the southern states seceded to preserve slavery, precipitating the Civil War.

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.”

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.

Meet Robert E. Lee led me to revere Lee and see the Confederate cause as noble, but it also had a clear message on how to view African Americans.

Created in the 1980s, Splash Mountain, a log flume ride, has its origins in the racist Song of the South movie.

I read Gone With the Wind for pleasure but believed it as history. As an adult, and for the first time in four decades, I reread the book. I only wanted to skim a few parts, count how many times Mitchell used slanderous terms about African Americans. The answer? She used “darky” 123 times, “nigger” 103 times, and “wench” 10 times.

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.”

Samuel Tucker, an African American lawyer born in 1913 who helped destroy the apartheid racial system in Virginia and the nation.

The general assembly also created a voucher system using public funds to allow white parents to send their children to private schools. The federal courts ruled the closures and the vouchers unconstitutional, but Harry Byrd would not give up.

Slave owners preferred to let the justice system execute enslaved people because owners would receive state compensation. During the Civil War, that changed. To intimidate enslaved workers from uprisings, white communities gruesomely executed Black people to enforce submission.

The terrible irony was that during the slave era and beyond, white men sexually exploited Black women routinely. Conversely, white men rejected the very idea that white women could consent to sex with a Black man.

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.

Truman’s uncle James Chiles rode with the notorious Quantrill’s Raiders, pro-Confederate guerrillas, and participated in the Lawrence, Kansas, massacre.

When asked after he left the White House what inspired him to create the Civil Rights Commission, Truman remembered exactly. It was the Monroe lynching combined with the beating and blinding of Sergeant Isaac Woodard in South Carolina that horrified the president.

With Knowles’s testimony, an Alabama jury convicted Henry Hays of first-degree murder and sentenced him to life in prison, but the judge, in a nearly unprecedented move, overruled the jury’s verdict and sentenced him to die. On June 6, 1997, the state of Alabama executed Hays in Yellow Mama for the murder of Michael Donald.

Today, however, the Lee name on the masthead honoring a soldier who resigned his commission to fight for a slave republic haunts the university and will for decades to come. Only two other colleges bear the name of a Confederate general, Gordon State College in Georgia and Nicholls State University in Louisiana.

In 1872, the university invited Jubal Early to speak on Lee’s sixty-fifth birthday. Early would become the Saint Peter of the Lee cult, creating and spreading the gospel of the Confederate chieftain.

Early believed that God ordained white supremacy, and no matter what the cost white southerners must maintain the racial hierarchy of the slave era.

was false to his flag,—educated at the national academy, an officer of the United States Army, he abjured his allegiance and bore arms against the government he had sworn to uphold. In other words, he was a military traitor.

In 1961, the U.S. Department of the Interior declared the chapel a national historic landmark. When the university went looking for money to save the dilapidated building, it searched nationally and in 1961, it received a large grant from the Ford Motor Company Fund in Michigan.

The story of John Chavis proves the best example. In 1799, Chavis became the first African American to complete college in the country, and he went to Washington Academy (the name of the school until 1813).

Since 1775, the army has put down rebellions, broken strikes, enforced civil rights, forced Native Americans onto reservations, propped up dictators, and freed people across the globe from tyranny.

The oath we take is a Civil War, really a War of the Rebellion, oath.

My first assignment took me to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, named for the Confederate general Braxton Bragg, one of ten army installations named for Confederate officers.

“The black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything.”

Gordon led the Georgia Klan as its Grand Dragon and even led the national organization when Nathan Bedford Forrest’s health failed. Gordon would go on to serve as Georgia’s governor and senator. Until his death in 1904, he fought for white supremacy.

The final post in the South, Camp Benning, received its name after much local input, one of the few times the army took the local preferences into account during World War I. The army listened to recommendations of the Columbus chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Rotary Club to name the camp after the local hero Henry Benning.

In the early twentieth century, the Southern Cross of Honor represented the secular religion of the Lost Cause for white southerners. The Veterans Administration still makes these Confederate headstones with the Southern Cross and ships them out to cemeteries across the nation.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy, the loudest, wealthiest, and most politically astute of the white southern organizations, wanted a monument, a big monument, at the biggest, most prestigious cemetery in the nation—Arlington.

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.”

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.

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 the summer of 1929, the first Black congressman elected in the twentieth century, Oscar De Priest from Chicago, appointed an African American to West Point with great publicity.

Confederate memorials are often about current politics.

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.

Robert E. Lee served in the U.S. Army either as a cadet or as a Regular Army officer from 1825 to 1861. Thirty-six years. Yet at the age of fifty-four, he committed treason. No court ever convicted him, although he was indicted. Lee was paroled at Appomattox and eventually granted full amnesty, as all former Confederates were on Christmas Day 1868.24

How could Lee take a promotion and the oath and then resign three weeks later? Southern leaders did approach him in mid-March, but historians are divided on whether he had accepted an offer before his resignation. The thirty-six hours between resignation and acceptance of a commission from Virginia gives pause, but there is no hard evidence.

May 1866, Mary Lee wrote to her friend about African Americans in Lexington, “We are all here dreadfully plundered by the lazy idle negroes who are lounging about the streets doing nothing but looking what they may plunder during the night…”

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 Confederates’ treason and racism, while only a pittance goes to African American cemeteries from the slave era.

Now southern cities are leading the country in telling a more honest story of the past because African Americans have enough political power to force change.

Tennessee strengthened its Heritage Protection Act. Cities that remove Confederate monuments would no longer receive state grants for five years. The law was a reaction to Memphis’s removing a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest. The Tennessee legislature punished the city by taking out $250,000 from its state allotment in 2018.