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

by Ty Seidule

Billing it a monument to national reconciliation, Wilson called it an “emblem to a reunited people.” I think it’s the cruelest monument in the country. The statue represents all the terrible lies of the Lost Cause. An African American woman, portrayed as an overweight, crying, but loyal “mammy,” takes a white baby from her “master,” a Confederate soldier heading off to war. Clinging to her billowing skirt, another child seeks the “mammy’s” protection. In reality, young enslaved girls, not adult women, looked after white children. Another enslaved figure follows his “master” to war, serving as a body servant. The figures provide one racist trope after another.53 The statue serves as an act of defiance. The sculptor knew exactly what he was doing. Ezekiel wanted to portray an “accurate” history of the loyal, happy slave, not the “lies” told through books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which showed the brutality of slavery. Instead, the artist said the monument represents the South, which fought “for a constitutional right, and not to uphold slavery.”54