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

by Ty Seidule

I knew that Virginia was so far and away the best, but a Virginian would never say that. Boasting? That was for Texans. One writer described the Virginia state of mind five years before I was born as a “regal humility” or a mystique “rooted in instincts of graciousness, chivalry, generosity and a benevolent aristocratic idealism, all attributes of the plantation society.”4 The great Mississippi writer William Faulkner, who knew a thing or two about southern identity, spent a year as a writer in residence at the University of Virginia in 1957. He returned to Charlottesville often to visit his daughter, who married a Virginia lawyer. Asked if he liked his stay, the Nobel laureate said, “I like Virginia and I like Virginians because Virginians are all snobs, and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob he has little left to meddle with you, and so it is very pleasant here.”5 White Virginians even had a creed. One I believed fervently as a child. Today, the Virginia Creed is available on coffee mugs or dish towels at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture: To be a Virginian either by birth, marriage, adoption, or even on one’s mother’s side is an introduction to any state in the Union, a passport to any foreign country, and a benediction from above.6

As a Charlottesville resident, I love this quote. Sums is up well, but it's definitely changing.

Several groups protested against these textbooks. The all-Black Virginia Teachers Association wrote in 1964, “This is not objective history; it is Virginia’s history as a [white] Virginian sees it, or rather as he would like to keep it.”

The books continued to be used at least through the late 1970s.60 The Virginia textbooks formed one of the most powerful testaments to white supremacy, an insidious monument that poisoned children’s minds for a generation.61

These textbooks would have just gone out of use when I entered kindergarten in Richmond. It is no wonder that those of my generation have residual attitudes left over from the teachers who taught them.

In 1958, Charlottesville and Norfolk schools as well as those in Prince Edward and Warren Counties closed by order of the governor. Thousands of schoolchildren went without education for half a decade so Virginia could, once again, maintain its racial code.

Yet my white southern roots also know that beneath the veneer of civility lurks a dark past of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy.

In 1968, Good Hope–Peters, like many Black schools, closed in preparation for court-ordered desegregation. Walton County’s newly integrated school system had far more buildings than it needed. Racism is not only morally wrong, but fiscally stupid.9

The racial terror and Jim Crow laws decreased Georgia’s population and retarded its economic potential for generations. Racism isn’t just morally wrong; it’s economically stupid.

The attending physician said Gober’s injuries were too serious for treatment there. Two and a half hours after being shot, Gober arrived at the Athens hospital, twenty miles east of Monroe, where he died.

The Athens hoapital where I was born in 1973!

No, the lies and silence I grew up with can’t compare with the pain of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and oppression, but the damage done to everyone who grew up in a racial hierarchy is still real.

Lee, however, lost his bid to turn Washington College into a land-grant college. Most of the money went to a small Methodist school called the Preston and Olin Institute in the far southwestern part of the state. It would become the largest university in the state, now known as Virginia Polytechnic Institute or, more commonly, Virginia Tech.

Lee himself made clear that he wanted no monuments created or battlefields saved. When he died, that sentiment died with him.

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.

The posts named for Confederate officers during World War I also served to knit white America back together as it fought a common foe. And it worked, but we must recognize that reconciliation came at a steep and horrifying cost. African Americans paid the price with lynching, Jim Crow segregation, and the loss of the franchise. The price for white reconciliation remains far too high.

This is really key to arguments surrounding names and monuments. We want to remember “all” Americans in a spirit of reconciliation and treat the war as a shared experience. However, that ignores the very different experience African Americans have with it.

Americans have a duty to better understand military history so they can hold their military and political leaders accountable.2

The military doesn’t practice democracy; the military enforces democracy.

To create a more just society, we must start by studying our past. If we want to know where to go, we must know where we’ve been.

I sat on the dais at West Point’s graduation. The speaker that year was Secretary of Defense James Mattis. One phrase in his speech resonated with me, and I used it during my talk. “We Americans aren’t made of cotton candy,” Mattis said.8 Damn right. Americans defeated Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. Americans went to the moon. Americans, including African American soldiers, emancipated four million men, women, and children. Americans can and will confront our past, survive, and thrive. We will make a better, more inclusive society for our children and our grandchildren. I believe in this country.

The only way to prevent a racist future is to first understand our racist past.