Derek Cook > Recent Status Updates

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.

As a kid growing up, I never heard about Lee’s devastating defeat only days before Appomattox, and for good reason. Surrender showed Lee’s character to save his men and the South when in reality his army had no supplies and dwindling numbers…he refused Grant’s overture of surrender until his entire army was surrounded on all sides…surrendering only because Grant whipped him.”

During Custis’ (Lee’s father in law) time running Arlington, he recognized marriages and kept families together, never selling them or hiring them out. By 1860, Lee had used the hiring system to such a degree that only one enslaved family remained together…he separated husbands, wives, and children and hired them out across Virginia to make more money…he could have chosen to sell land to pay the debts.

Officers like Braxton Bragg and Jefferson Davis left the army to seek their fortunes with enslaved labor farms, but Lee was the only senior officer who was actually in charge of hundreds of enslaved workers and in the US Army in 1861. By the time he chose secession, Lee identified far more with the southern slaveholding class than he did with his fellow officers.

Lee left for the same reason the southern states seceded. The southern states went to war to protect and expand chattel slavery because they felt threatened by Lincoln’s election. Lee said in 1861 “the South, IMO, has been aggrieved by the acts of the North, as you say. I feel the aggression and am willing to take every proper step for redress.”
What acts “aggrieved” Lee? The threat to end slavery.

“…88% off long-serving Regular Army colonels from Virginia stayed with the United States (all except one - Robert E Lee)…Lee was an outlier. Most officers of his experience and rank remained with the US. Growing up in Virginia, I saw no monument to these brave and loyal men. I still don’t.”

No other enemy officer in American history was responsible for the deaths of more US Army soldiers than Robert E Lee…in the last year of the war, Lee’s army killed or wounded 127,000 US Army soldiers.

“Until April 20, 1861, Lee would have to be reckoned among the best soldiers in the US Army. Before the war, Winfield Scott called him “the greatest military genius in America.” Lee’s career before 1861 wasn’t what I revered, however. As a child growing up in Virginia, I worshipped Lee the Confederate general.”

“At the United States Military Academy, it’s an easy call. Robert E. Lee resigned his commission, fought against his country, killed US Army soldiers, and violated Article III, Section 3 of the US Constitution. Lee committed treason.”

West Point named all the barracks after US four- or five-star generals - except one…[Lee’s] highest rank in the US Army was colonel. In 1970, why would the United States Military Academy name a barrack after either a US Army colonel or an enemy general who resigned his commission to fight against his country?…the naming came less than a year after the largest class of African Americans entered the academy.”

“West Point named Lee Road and Lee Gate to honor a Confederate who fought against his country. The timing, during the tenure of the first African American cadet at West Point in the 20th century, pointed me to the conclusion I would reach again and again. West Point memorialized Lee in reaction to the integration of African Americans and the move toward equal rights.”

“West Point might have more monuments to Lee than my alma mater, Washington and Lee University. How did this happen? I asked, but no one knew or cared. As a historian, I knew how to solve the problem. I went to the archives, and there spent the next several years trying to understand when and why West Point honored Lee. And that process changed me…the facts changed me.”

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…were not fully human. The US Army gives its highest honor to unrepentant white supremacists.

“Charles Francis Adams Jr. told his Virginia audience that he had not always believed in the inferiority of African Americans. Before and during the Civil War, he felt that Black people were “brothers” and “God’s image carved in ebony.” Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species changed his view…Adams used scientific racism to doom AAs to second-class citizenship, a servant class in perpetuity.”

“How the hell could I feel aggrieved as a middle-aged white man? I didn’t suffer. In fact, I had more in common with the lynchers than with the victims. No, the lies and silence I grew up with can’t compare with the pain of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and oppression, but the damage done to everyone who grew up in a racial hierarchy is still real.”

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.

“White southerners continue to focus on a four-year period when they fought a rebellion to create a slave republic and lost badly.”

“Young white men in the South often had their first sexual experience with an enslaved woman. Rape was a part of the culture. Because enslavement passed from mother to child, the children of white men born to enslaved women remained enslaved. Think of that for a minute. The white men of the South had no issues with enslaving their own children and living near them for their whole lives.”

The names we give the war itself and those who fought it matter. Our shared understanding of the war comes from the language we use. For decades, as a child, an army officer, and a historian, I called the side wearing the dark blue, almost blue-black, uniform, the Union army. I refuse to use that terminology an longer….the boys in blue fought in the US Army for the United States of America…against a rebel force.