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

by Ty Seidule

The Lost Cause myth argued that white southerners fought the Civil War for many reasons—protective tariffs, states’ rights, freedom, the agrarian dream, defense, and on and on. Mitchell couldn’t settle on just one reason, so she picked every reason except the defense of slavery.

Perhaps we should stop calling these places plantations and start calling them by a more accurate name—enslaved labor farms.

Slavery was an abomination that featured the lash, torture, branding, and the constant threat of white slaveholders selling or leasing humans to locations far from their loved ones. Sexual violence against African American women was not only condoned; it was legal.

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.”

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.

Every aspect of slavery was just as evil as the abolitionists and the peerlessly honest former slave Frederick Douglass described it.

The Virginia textbooks formed one of the most powerful testaments to white supremacy, an insidious monument that poisoned children’s minds for a generation.

Florida and Texas, call your office.

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.

By one count, the non-church-affiliated private school enrollment in the former Confederate states increased by nearly 250 percent from 1961 to 1970.

The same held true for Protestant schools, which increased over 150 percent.

In 1956, as a reaction to the requirement to integrate, the Georgia Assembly changed the state flag to incorporate the Confederate Battle Flag. As Denmark Groover, the legislator who guided the bill to passage, said at the time, “The Confederate symbol was added mostly out of defiance to federal integration orders.”14 While I lived in Georgia, the white supremacist Confederate Battle Flag dominated the state flag. In 2003, Georgia changed its flag, losing the Confederate Battle Flag and returning to a version of the flag first introduced in 1879. The current flag is an homage to the first Confederate national flag, the Stars and Bars. White southerners continue to focus on a four-year period when they fought a rebellion to create a slave republic and lost badly.

The evidence is clear. Violence against Black people maintained a racial hierarchy. From 1882 to 1889, the ratio of Black to white lynching victims remained about the same as in the antebellum era—four to one. After 1900, the ratio was seventeen to one. Some white people were lynched as vigilante crimes, but African Americans suffered the overwhelming number of extrajudicial killings.22

As mob violence became more widespread and effective in enforcing racial subjugation, lynchings became more public and more macabre. Huge crowds would gather for the planned events. Hanging proved too quick and efficient a means of death. Instead, lynch mobs turned to genital mutilation, dismemberment, and burning, like something from the medieval era. Crowds would clamor to take souvenirs of the hanging tree, rope, and even the fingers and skins of the victims.

Local papers blared the headline “Walton Runs Red with Blood; Lynchings at Dawn and Noon.” Monroe’s leading citizens felt offended. Not by the lynching and gruesome deaths of African Americans. No. Waltonians decried how the coverage of the lynchings made them look bad. They blamed men from outside Walton County for the crime. The Atlanta Constitution agreed. “The people of Monroe and of the entire county have always been known as the state’s best, most conservative and law-abiding citizens.”

Sickening.

Once I started reading, I needed to find every lynching in my hometowns. Yet no account in the mainstream newspapers told the lynching stories from the victims’ point of view.

As the historian 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. Lynching and Confederate monuments served to tell African Americans that they were second-class citizens.40

Raised a Catholic, she understood that having Lee on the altar in the sanctuary meant only one thing. My school—and I—worshipped a Confederate general.

She was right.

When the Detroit-based company gave the first check, the fund’s vice president, Allen W. Merrell, declared that Lee “is loved and respected by all Americans.” Merrell went on to praise Lee the educator who served nobly after military defeat and “exemplifies the American ideal of responsible citizenship.” Lee, who worked to destroy the United States to create a slave republic; Lee, who abrogated his oath. Lee, who killed U.S. Army soldiers, received praise from one of the most respected companies in the country—based in Michigan—for his citizenship. Jubal Early’s vision of the Civil War, first declared in Lee Chapel in 1872, had triumphed in Lee Chapel less than a century later.67

Every part of my life excluded an important history. 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.

Soon, he moved most of the enslaved workers to his land in Hinds County, Mississippi. 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