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

by Ty Seidule

The army listened to recommendations of the Columbus chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Rotary Club to name the camp after the local hero Henry Benning.

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

States, he argued, should control who receives money and how much. Smith wanted to ensure that the rural southerners in Virginia, especially African Americans, would not benefit from an old-age pension. Smith’s testimony made his support for passage of the bill unlikely or at least unclear. FDR worried that he represented not only himself but the entire Byrd machine and therefore the Virginia delegation.74 On February 9, 1935, three days after Smith’s testimony, FDR visited Fort Humphreys and announced the name change from a hero of the U.S. Army to “Fort Belvoir in memory of the early plantation of that name.” The Washington Post made it a front-page story.75 Smith had to be happy.

Having a fort named after a U.S. Civil War general who defeated Lee in Smith’s own district had to rankle him.76 Changing the name to the old slave plantation allowed Smith to substitute a name more acceptable to the segregationists without naming it after another person. For FDR, the name meant nothing, but he pocketed a favor from an important Virginian, a member of the all-important Rules Committee.

Forrest’s wartime record against African American soldiers was equally awful. After a battle at Fort Pillow, near the Mississippi River, in April 1864, soldiers under Forrest’s command, and likely under his orders, massacred Black U.S. soldiers and Black women.

1940s. The first reason should have come to me immediately. The United States in 1940 was only a democracy for some of its citizens. President Franklin Roosevelt told the country we would fight for the Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

President Harry Truman ordered the military to desegregate in 1948. Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall, a North Carolinian, did his best to keep the service segregated, allowing states to maintain segregated National Guard units.

I found no document linking the Confederate battle streamers to integration, but my research has shown that if you scratch a Confederate monument, you find either white supremacy or a reaction against equal rights.

Were the names really chosen in the “spirit of reconciliation”? Yes, if the army had mentioned that the reconciliation was for whites only and reinforced Jim Crow apartheid.97

cemetery. But why would West Point reject the Confederates, especially Lee? And even more perplexing, why would they embrace Lee in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?

The Confederates chose slavery and treason over nation.

West Point memorialized Lee in reaction to the integration of African Americans and the move toward equal rights.

The military has trumpeted its role in bringing racial equality to America, but the history is far more complex and less flattering. Neither uniformed leadership nor Gray wanted to integrate the army. In fact, the previous secretary of the army, Kenneth Royall, had been forced into retirement because he would not integrate quickly enough.

Notice that belief in family and church is subordinate to belief in the Lost Cause. Worse than lack of family, worse than atheism, is ignorance of Robert E. Lee. Gray

Lee Barracks, perhaps the most visible memorial for cadets. Today, I’ve had many cadets tell me how uncomfortable they feel living in a building honoring Lee. The academy named all but one of its barracks in that year. Eisenhower, Bradley, Grant, MacArthur, Sherman, Scott, Pershing—the names represent the highest-ranking and most famous generals in American history.

I have no “smoking gun” that academy officials named Lee Barracks because of the tenfold increase in African Americans, but I keep finding Confederate memorialization whenever West Point increases integration.53

a nation” during “the War of the Rebellion.” They may need to explain why the Civil War is called “the War of the Rebellion.” They may need to explain why the war “freed a race and welded a nation.” Thanks to African American cadets, there is no Confederate memorial to explain.

No other enemy officer in American history was responsible for the deaths of more U.S. Army soldiers than Robert E. Lee.

Wrong. Much of his extended family wanted to stay in the Union. Not just in 1861, but for generations past.

Even Lee’s sister Anne Lee Marshall maintained her stand with the United States, and her son Louis fought in blue. In fact, neither Anne nor anyone else in that family ever talked to Lee again.38

Of those eight, seven remained loyal to their solemn oath to the U.S. Constitution. Only one colonel resigned to fight against the United States. Robert E. Lee. Put

Growing up in Virginia, I saw no monument to these brave and loyal men. I still don’t.

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

“Treason is Treason,” he said. Lee “flung away his loyalty for no better reason than a mistaken interpretation of noblesse oblige.”

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.

Mary Custis Lee spent more and more time ensconced in the comfort of Arlington House with its nearly two hundred enslaved people and less time with Lee at lonely frontier posts.

Because the price of enslaved people was at an all-time high in 1860, slavery would have continued for decades or longer. In 1840 the number of enslaved people stood at 2.5 million. By 1860 the number had grown to four million.

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.

A monument tells historians more about who emplaced it than it does the figure memorialized. While some memorials went up right after the war, especially in cemeteries, most Confederate monuments were built between 1890 and 1920, and those glorify white supremacy.

The rally brought together white nationalists to highlight various conspiracy theories and racist ideologies, but they chose Charlottesville because of Robert E. Lee.

Updike tried to “rub humanity’s face in the facts.”7 I have a convert’s zeal.