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

by Ty Seidule

Then I realized evidence didn’t matter; he had chosen his own facts based on his culture.

Eleven southern states seceded to protect and expand an African American slave labor system.

Lee and his comrades killed more U.S. Army soldiers than any other enemy, ever.

Books, movies, songs, school names, street names, monuments, parents, and teachers all reinforced the idea that Lee and the Confederacy were worthy of worship.

second flag, next to the Stars and Bars, was called the Stainless Banner. 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.”9 Yes, the Confederacy proclaimed its racism proudly.

Most importantly, it was the flag of white supremacy. The Mississippi legislature put the Confederate Battle Flag on their state flag in 1894 after the white supremacists took over and rewrote the state’s constitution in 1890.

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.

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.

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.”

March 1861, he made the infamous Cornerstone Speech that clearly marked the Confederate goals: [The Confederacy’s] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.40

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.

Madison also worried that a strong central government might not agree with their notions of property, or, as we call it today, slavery.8

The Virginians Madison and Jefferson agreed to Hamilton’s consolidation of state and federal debt under the new national government, while Hamilton gave Virginia extra money and agreed to a southern location for the new capital, situated between two slave states, Maryland and Virginia.

No. I will not call them plantations and evoke an image of hooped-skirt ladies sipping iced tea on the veranda while the wind whispers through the Spanish moss. I will use a more appropriate term: “enslaved labor farms.”

Samuel Tucker, from my hometown, demanded an end to Jim Crow laws in the 1930s as a twentysomething. He should have been a hero for me and every child in Alexandria.43

As Tucker fought for equality, Alexandria doubled down on memorializing Confederates. The city passed a law in 1953 requiring all new street names that ran north and south to honor Confederates.46

I read through the Virginia history textbook with disbelief, followed by profound anger. I checked the publishing data: first edition 1957; second edition and the one I read 1964. All the lies of the Lost Cause myth in one convenient package to inculcate Virginia children, like me, with the same racist ideology: states’ rights and tariffs as the cause of the Civil War; slavery as a positive good; the War Between the States, not the Civil War; the evils of Reconstruction; the heroism of the Confederate soldier; the righteousness of the cause; the godliness of the Virginia way of life; and, of course, Lee as god. No mention in the book of Harriet Tubman, who led many enslaved people to freedom. No mention of Samuel Tucker. I expected all of that, but the way the text dealt with slavery was the most preposterous and the most chilling.

the Virginia of my youth was no democracy, if I call a plantation an enslaved labor farm, then I should also call segregated Virginia by its true name—a racial police state.

The Klan’s violence ensured newly freed African Americans understood their place at the bottom of the new postwar social structure with no education and no access to the ballot box. Walton County’s Klan leader was William Felker. Felker Street still runs through downtown Monroe.

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.

legal campaign of subjugation, called Jim Crow, plus targeted law enforcement, lack of education resources, and limited economic opportunity, resulted in “the Great Migration.” Starting in the first decade of the twentieth century, more than a million African Americans left the racial violence and poverty of the South for the industrial cities of the North and West. In 1900, Georgia’s Black population was over 47 percent of the total. By 1970, the figure had dropped to just over 25 percent.

The Moore’s Ford lynching in my hometown had all the elements of a terror campaign to enforce white supremacy. Punishment of a breach in social etiquette. Paranoia about Black male sexuality. Enforcement of economic servitude. Violence to prevent Black political equality. And finally, no accountability of the lynchers.

Talmadge ran advertisements that called him “the white people’s candidate.” His campaign slogan left no doubt about his platform: “Let’s keep Georgia white.”

President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9808, creating the Commission on Civil Rights. Truman was an unlikely champion of civil rights.

the U.S. Army rushed him to one of its facilities, but the damage was too extensive; the Aiken police had blinded Sergeant Woodard for life.69

On June 6, 1997, the state of Alabama executed Hays in Yellow Mama for the murder of Michael Donald. The first white person to die for murdering an African American in Alabama since 1913.89

chapel would change from a place where, as the historian Christopher Lawton put it, “Lee could worship God to one where the Lost Cause faithful could ‘worship’ Lee.”

The thumping German victory in 1870, avenging the 1806 Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, came only a month before Lee died. Could Mary Lee have thought that one day, decades in the future, the South would also prevail, seeing Robert E. Lee and Mary Lee as their guardian angels?

She chose the new Lee monument to be like that of a sainted figure of Prussia who lost the first battle but whose new country, Germany, won the war. In a way, her choice seems prescient. The South lost the war but won the battle for the narrative, the history of the war.

Early wrote a memoir that put forward most of the Lost Cause ideas. It was the first memoir written by a senior commander on either side and shaped the dominant view not only in the South but eventually in the entire country. Early argued that the war was about not slavery but the “inestimable right of self-government.” The enslaved became a “class of laborers as happy and contented as any in the world, if not more so.” The South lost because of the overwhelming combat power and the “cruelty and barbarity of the Federal Commanders.”40

Adams quoted Sumner’s famous remarks when the Senate debated giving Arlington back to the Lee family in 1870. Sumner called Lee a “traitor” and said that “General Lee … stands high in the catalogue of those who have imbrued [stained] their hands in their country’s blood. I hand him over to the avenging pen of History.”

Then Adams went all in, teasing the audience that their most beloved son 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.

Adams argued that the “war penalty” the defeated Confederates paid, “slave confiscation, and reconstruction under African rule,” was “unworthy” and “ungenerous.” Truly, the Lost Cause had triumphed nationally, and the proof was in Lee Chapel.56

Adams, a former commander of African American troops, argued that Reconstruction policy was cruel for one reason and one reason only. It gave equal rights to African Americans. He agreed with the white supremacists. Two years later, Adams would return to Virginia to give a speech called “The Solid South and the Afro-American Race Problem.” His racist speech in Lexington was a mere warm-up for the one in Richmond. First calling African Americans “a distinct alien element in the body politic,” he went even further by stating the country’s greatest problem was “the unhappy presence of Africans.” Who should solve this “problem”? Adams asked, then answered. The white people of the South knew best.

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). One hundred seventy years would pass before an African American, Leslie Smith, graduated from W&L’s law school in 1969.

The oath means we work not for a king or president but for an idea.

The “Ironclad Test Oath,” which became law in 1862, differed in one crucial way from most pledges. Most oaths are promissory notes. A person pledges that in the future he or she will be loyal to a government or tell the truth. The Ironclad Oath included the promissory note, but it also featured a background check to include swearing, “I have given no aid, countenance, counsel, or encouragement to persons engaged in armed hostility … to the United States” or “pretended government.”

One of the largest military installations in the world, home to the vaunted 82nd Airborne Division, was named after Braxton Bragg, a poorly regarded Confederate general and slaveholder who killed U.S. Army soldiers.

Benning was a Fire-Eater, the nickname given by northerners to the most rabid southern believers in slavery and secession. Before the Civil War, Fire-Eaters pleaded with fellow white southerners, with increasing success, to secede from the Union to protect and expand slavery.

Benning’s speech at the Virginia Convention was the culmination of his decade-long fight to break apart the United States and create a southern slave republic. Benning told the Virginians that Georgia seceded for only one reason, “a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery.” Virginia should be worried, even terrified that the “black Republican party of the North” embraced “a sentiment of hatred to slavery as extreme as hatred can exist.”

While Benning rose to the rank of brigadier general, he never commanded at a higher rank than brigade. Yet one of the U.S. Army’s most prestigious posts remains named after a fairly low-ranking Confederate commander, one who spent a lifetime trying to destroy the United States.

Like Benning, Gordon defended slavery with vigor. In 1860, he argued that African slavery was “the Mightiest Engine in the universe for civilization, elevation, and refinement of mankind.” He told his fellow white Georgians to never apologize nor ever admit that slavery was wrong; instead, “take the position everywhere that it [slavery] is morally, socially, and politically right—and that it is, in truth, the hand-maid of liberty.” Although Gordon is not seen as a Fire-Eater like Benning, his biographer argued that he “fanned the flames of southern independence” to create a new country based on protecting and expanding slavery.

Gordon did not rely on African Americans to heed his violent warning. Instead, he helped lead the Ku Klux Klan, calling it “a brotherhood of … peaceable, law-abiding citizens.” The Klan had three purposes. First, claw back any political rights from African Americans through violent terror. Second, preserve southern white independence from any federal influence whatsoever. Finally, ensure white Democratic Party supremacy politically, culturally, and socially.17 Gordon led the Georgia Klan as its Grand Dragon and even led the national organization when Nathan Bedford Forrest’s health failed.

Two of the three large army posts in my home state of Georgia remain named for secessionists who never served in the U.S. Army but who did kill U.S. Army soldiers. Benning and Gordon believed until the end of their lives that African Americans, who today make up more than 20 percent of the army, were not fully human. The U.S. Army gives its highest honor to unrepentant white supremacists.

Two posts in Louisiana, Fort Polk and Camp Beauregard, bear mentioning. Fort Polk is named after Leonidas Polk, the Fighting Bishop, West Point class of 1827. Before the war, he founded Sewanee, the University of the South, my father’s alma mater. Polk founded the college to provide southern men bound for ministry with an education that showed slavery was compatible with Christianity in general and the Episcopal religion in particular. Polk took off his clerical robes for a Confederate general’s stars because he believed thoroughly in the institution of slavery.

Historians today consider Polk among the worst generals on either side. Yet Fort Polk, Louisiana, near Leesville (named for Robert E. Lee), is home to the Joint Readiness Training Center, one of the premier training sites for the army.

Camp Beauregard, near Pineville in central Louisiana, honors the Confederate general Pierre G. T. Beauregard, West Point class of 1838. Beauregard came from a prominent slave-owning family in Louisiana. He then married into one of the state’s wealthiest families. His wife’s family, the Villerés, benefited from the 95 enslaved workers on forced-labor sugar farms. In 1850, his wife died in childbirth. Beauregard then married Caroline Deslonde, whose family owned 160 enslaved workers.

Beauregard brought Eugene and Mary with him to New York, but he probably left Sally Hardin, another enslaved servant, back in Louisiana. Hardin had recently given birth to Beauregard’s daughter, Susan. Enslaved women had no legal right to refuse sex with a slave owner—ever. We have a word for sex without consent: rape. Yet Beauregard ensured that his daughter learned to read and

John Bell Hood, West Point class of 1853. A native of Kentucky, Hood wanted the neutral state to act boldly and join the other slave states. When it hesitated after the secessionist attack on Fort Sumter, Hood renounced his ties to the Bluegrass State and adopted Texas as his home. During the war, he served the Confederacy as an aggressive and effective brigade and division commander, despite severe battlefield wounds including losing the use of his arm at Gettysburg and a leg at Chickamauga.

Next, the army wanted to name camps after someone from the home state of the unit stationed there, with a preference for Civil War generals. Finally, the War Department wanted to ensure no camp name would offend local sensibilities.