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

by Ty Seidule

Eleven southern states seceded to protect and expand an African American slave labor system. Unwilling to accept the results of a fair, democratic election, they illegally seized U.S. territory, violently. Together, they formed a new “Confederacy,” in contravention of the U.S. Constitution.7 Then West Point graduates like Robert E. Lee resigned their commissions, abrogating an oath sworn to God to defend the United States. During the bloodiest war in American history, Lee and his comrades killed more U.S. Army soldiers than any other enemy, ever. And they did it for the worst reason possible: to create a nation dedicated to exploit enslaved men, women, and children, forever.

After the Civil War, former Confederates, their children, and their grandchildren created a series of myths and lies to hide that essential truth and sustain a racial hierarchy dedicated to white political power reinforced by violence.

The names we use matter. By saying Union and Confederate, Blue and Gray, North and South, we lose the fundamental difference between the two sides. The United States fought against a rebel force that would not accept the results of a democratic election and chose armed rebellion.

When I hear “the War of Northern Aggression” or “the War Between the States,” I know a Confederate sympathizer or argument against equal rights will soon follow.

Despite their defeat, former Confederates remained unrepentant. Soon, the leaders of the white South put together a new narrative to explain their failure and to maintain racial control and white supremacy. Today, historians call the series of lies, half-truths, and exaggerations the Lost Cause of the Confederacy myth.

The Lost Cause created a flawed memory of the Civil War, a lie that formed the ideological foundation for white supremacy and Jim Crow laws, which used violent terror and de jure segregation to enforce racial control.

they fought for states’ rights: the states’ rights to have slaves.

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.” Mississippi, my dad’s home state, seceded, arguing that “our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest in the world.”

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.

With my background as a historian, I imagined what the “plantation” had been before the Civil War—coffle, rape, torture. Perhaps we should stop calling these places plantations and start calling them by a more accurate name—enslaved labor farms.

The South had its own strengths, chief among them geography. The United States had to defeat multiple armies over a territory twice the size of modern France and Germany combined. Moreover, all the South had to do was not lose. Many a smaller power has won a war of independence by outlasting the larger power. American history is replete with such examples. The Confederates used the example of the American Revolution to explain why they would win. When the Confederates began their ill-advised rebellion, they knew the United States’ strengths.

the KKK was a white terrorist organization that intimidated and killed African Americans to prevent their participation in the democratic process and to keep them in what would become debt peonage. The KKK enforced racial control and white dominance through well-publicized violence.

THE CIVIL WAR left between 650,000 and 750,000 dead because the Confederates fought to create a slave republic based on a morally bankrupt ideology of white supremacy.

We find it hard to confront our past because it’s so ugly, but the alternative to ignoring our racist history is creating a racist future.

Before the Civil War, most lynching victims were white men who failed to adhere to community standards. 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.

Georgia lynch mobs murdered 589 people between 1877 and 1950.

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. Lynching and Confederate monuments served to tell African Americans that they were second-class citizens.

Capital punishment became the new means of enforcing racial control. Between 1901 and 1964, Georgia hanged and electrocuted 609 people. Eighty-two percent of those executed were Black men, even though Georgia was majority white.

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.

Lee Chapel wasn’t the Klan’s stronghold. No. That was too déclassé. Here trod the power elite of the white southern ruling class, a more important part of the system of white supremacy,

The South lost the war but won the battle for the narrative, the history of the war.

In the twenty-first century, the army’s logistic branches like quartermaster, ordnance, and transportation are majority minority and 50 percent African American.

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.

Lee in gray tells us that reactionary forces, worried about the nascent civil rights movement, used West Point to further their own goals and a brilliant but ambitious superintendent allowed it.

When I read Article III, Section 3, Lee’s actions undeniably violated the Constitution he and I swore to defend. He waged war against the United States. Because he fought so well for so long, hundreds of thousands of soldiers died. No other enemy officer in American history was responsible for the deaths of more U.S. Army soldiers than Robert E. Lee. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia killed more than one in three and wounded more than half of all U.S. casualties. In the last year of the war, Lee’s army killed or wounded 127,000 U.S. Army soldiers.

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

As a long-serving army officer and as a historian, can I hold Lee to task for resigning his commission and fighting to destroy the United States? Yes! Lee’s choice was wrong. He violated the Constitution’s proscription against waging war against the United States. The Constitution clearly states the name of that crime: treason.

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.

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.

Lee’s decision to fight against the United States was not just wrong; it was treasonous. Even worse, he committed treason to perpetuate slavery.