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

“It’s not as if the enduring myths of the Confederacy are perpetuated by evil people. An extremist fringe does continue to bray loudly. But most of the myths and misperceptions have become part of a code that has been used, reused, and built upon to such an extent that untangling the myths requires concerted effort. The myths became the American legend and reinforced racism, forming a destructive legacy our nation deals with daily.”

Seidule is careful to distinguish the racist ideas underlying the Lost Cause and the personal beliefs of those who espouse certain aspects of the myth. Admiring Robert E. Lee or other aspects of Confederate history does not necessarily make someone a racist because they have inherited an immense cultural legacy that has come to inform much of Southern identity, regardless of one’s views on race. To investigate the racist origins and effects of many of these myths is not the same as denouncing a vast group of people as racists.

“I never thought of Gettysburg as Meade defeating Lee. Instead, Gettysburg was an opportunity to showcase Lee’s true character, his standing as a gentleman, under the most arduous of circumstances.”

Gettysburg was a colossal defeat for the Confederacy, and Lee’s order to charge against the center of Meade’s line was a strategic blunder from which his army never recovered. In the Lost Cause mythology, however, military defeats were represented as tragic victories for Southern honor and martial character. This valorization of the Confederacy, and the dismissal of US forces, was originally meant to delegitimize Reconstruction-era efforts to eradicate the last vestiges of the plantation system and secure equal rights for the formerly enslaved. The principles which drove secession were still to dominate Southern society, regardless of what occurred on the battlefield.

“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. [Margaret] Mitchell [author of Gone with the Wind] couldn’t settle on just one reason, so she picked every reason except the defense of slavery. For her the protection of the land and the Southern way of life coalesced into a romantic, almost mystically righteous defense of freedom.”

Gone with the Wind is by far the most celebrated work of literature (and film) about the Civil War, and it is saturated with Lost Cause mythology. Seidule does not mention this, but the opening sequence of the film mourns the loss of a “pretty world” where “gallantry took its last bow,” a “dream remembered” (“Gone with the Wind (1939) Title Sequence.” Youtube.com). The utter destruction of the Southern infrastructure during the war made it easier for Mitchell and others to construct a wholly imagined past consisting of archetypical “Knights and their ladies fair,” justifying the reimposition of a racial hierarchy (“Gone with the Wind (1939) Title Sequence.” Youtube.com).

“The former Confederates succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in changing the narrative of the Civil War. Lee’s biographer Douglass Southall Freeman wrote to Pulitzer Prize-winning Southern novelist Ellen Glasgow, ‘We Southerners had one consolation. If our fathers lost the war, you and Margaret Mitchell…have won the peace.’”

As Seidule points out, Gone with the Wind is still one of America’s favorite pieces of fiction, and the film enjoyed success even beyond modern blockbusters. It did not achieve such cultural influence merely by catering to Southern grievances. It created a fully realized and compelling world of high drama and larger-than-life characters that could resonate with a diverse audience. Since most people do not study the Civil War, or even have particularly strong feelings about it (especially since Mitchell published the novel in 1936, after nearly all of its participants had died) the fiction proved more powerful than the historical record. Although many people reading the novel or watching the film do not recognize its racist tropes, much less share them, the prominence of Gone with the Wind still helps to justify a white supremacist reading of history.

“I couldn’t imagine describing myself as anything other than a Southern gentleman, except maybe a Virginia gentleman, a slightly higher caste. When my new girlfriend questioned my Southernness, my identity, I sulked.”

Just as many Southerners resisted Seidule’s argument on the centrality of slavery to the Civil War because it offended their sense of themselves, so too was Seidule oversensitive to perceived threats against his Southern identity. He chafed at his future wife’s suggestion that Alexandria is not really Southern, and so neither is he. At the time, he saw this as an affront to what he regarded as his gentlemanly honor. Later he would learn that this supposedly chivalric ideal mainly served to whitewash the memory of the Confederacy and justify the continued subjugation of Black citizens.

“Alexandria has more than twice as many things named for Confederates as the next leading Virginia city, the capital of the Confederacy, Richmond. My hometown wanted to prove it was Southern and against Civil Rights. No better way to prove its white Southern bona fides than by memorializing its hometown heroes, Robert E. Lee and other Confederates.”

Here Seidule comes to two distressing conclusions about his hometown of Alexandria. The first is that its memorialization of the Confederacy was mostly a backlash against civil rights. Second, and relatedly, Alexandria was desperate to prove its Southern qualities precisely because it is so close to Washington, DC, and spent the war under Federal control. Its Southern past is a reinvention of its own history in order to perpetuate a racist social order.

“While the books created an imaginary past, the legislature set its eyes firmly on present difficulties. In 1954, while the authors wrote, the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, outlawing school segregation. The Democratic Byrd machine’s reaction was to lead not only Virginia but the entire white South in a ‘Massive Resistance’ campaign against integration. The textbook’s treatment of the Civil War offered contemporary lessons to all Virginia’s children—Black and white. In the antebellum era, they argued, slavery was positive for both master and slave. In the 1950s, segregation was also a net positive for both races.”

Seidule shows how the interpretation of the past derives from the concerns of the present. Reverence for the Confederacy was not simply a tradition passed on among generations or admiration for the bravery of Southern soldiers in the Civil War. It waxed or waned in accordance with political necessity. In this case, the seemingly hopeless fight to stave off school integration under federal pressure found a precedent in the Confederacy’s equally futile bid for independence, and thereby inspire contemporary Virginians to mimic their ancestors in fighting in proud defiance of the long odds.

“Georgia’s leaders worried about the effect [of public protest] on their bottom line. While they remained ardent segregationists, Jim Crow violence was bad for business. The Georgian legislature created a commission to study the problem. The Sibley Commission found more than 60 percent of white Georgians wanted pure segregation, but the commission listened to the businessmen and recommended tokenism.”

Seidule’s history notes how adaptive white supremacy can be under pressure. After Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, the federal government was determined to enforce integration of schools, and direct attempts to resist had failed. In education, housing, and business, Monroe was like many Southern towns that found more subtle ways to maintain the subordinate status of their Black citizens while remaining within the letter of the law. Taking “token” steps to address individual grievances, without dealing with the underlying structures, would allow racist institutions to survive the formal imposition of legal equality.

“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.’”

Defenders of Confederate imagery often claim that symbols such as the Battle Flag represent respect for Southern heritage, or those who gave their lives in defense of their home states. Seidule corrects this by pointing out that much public veneration of Confederate symbols came long after the war, and was in direct response to efforts to secure the rights of Black Americans. The “Confederate Battle Flag” was in fact the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, and it was only much later that it became a universal symbol of the Lost Cause, as several Southern states were resisting federal pressure to integrate schools and public facilities.

“Police ruled the shooting [of an unarmed, naked Black man] justifiable homicide, and the man who shot [James] Gober was never arrested. Black residents continued to protest. Nineteen seventy-two was not 1946. When people have no political outlet nor means of changing a racist society, rioting is their only voice. During the rioting that followed the murder, fifteen vacant homes and two old buildings burned in Social Circle, but no white people suffered any injuries or much property damage.”

In recent years, police killing of an unarmed Black person has sometimes led to rioting, and there is fierce debate over whether violence is ever justifiable as a method of political protest. Here, Seidule states his belief that when people feel desperate enough, rioting can be legitimate. His clarification that there were no serious injuries or property damage, at least among white people, that white people have little cause to criticize riots when they do not affect them or their communities.

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

Seidule frequently refers to Lee as an object of reverence, and the Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee University is the cathedral. As Seidule notes, following Lee’s death, the chapel removed all Christian imagery and replaced it representations of Lee, even in exact locations where an Episcopal church (Lee’s domination) would feature symbols of Christ. The chapel is literally a place to worship Lee.

“Prussia had similarities to the Old South. Like Mary Lee’s slave-owning planter class, Prussia’s landed aristocracy, called Junkers, owned vast estates worked by peasants with few rights. The Junkers also had a well-earned reputation as fierce warriors. Perhaps Mary Lee saw similarities between the Custis-Lee family, once the South’s landed aristocratic warriors, and the Prussian Junkers. 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.”

The “Recumbent Lee” statue in the Lee Chapel is the preeminent memorial to Lee, often but erroneously thought to contain his remains. Investigating its origins, Seidule finds that the sculptor modeled it off of Kaiser Wilhelm Friedrich of Prussia, who suffered a terrible defeat against Napoleon at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt in 1806. By 1870, the year of Lee’s death, Prussia had reemerged to achieve the reunification of Germany and would soon inflict a humiliating defeat against France. The similarities of the statues suggest that Lee’s cause has triumphed, this time in the battle of ideas.

“At eighteen, I could barely imagine life after graduation, much less a military career. The army provided me with a way to stay in school, my school, Washington and Lee University.”

There is an ironic twist to Seidule’s life. He joined the army solely to help subsidize his dream of becoming a Southern gentleman, but once he joined the army, he began a long education that convinced him to abandon this vision of Southern gentility as a vestige of white supremacy, and instead embrace the ethos of the army which, at its finest, is an inclusive organization that has helped to free people in America and around the world.

“Two of the three large army posts in my home state of Georgia remain named for secessionists who never served in the US Army but who did kill US 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 population, were not fully human. The US Army gives its highest honor to unrepentant white supremacists.”

Most people probably do not think very much about the origins of military base names, and even upon learning that one or another bears the name of a Confederate figure, may dismiss it as a gesture of respect for someone who was, after all, American, and in many cases who served bravely in combat. Seidule dives deeply into the biographies of these figures to show that their alignment with a white supremacist cause was not incidental, or motivated by one’s loyalty to their home state. They took arms against their fellow Americans, and killed US soldiers, with the express purpose of defending slavery. No foreigner who did such things would receive such benefits, so someone should not be eligible for them simply because they are American.

“After the US Army had defeated the Spaniards in a ‘splendid little war,’ McKinley went on an extended victory lap to sell the peace treaty and persuade the white South to support his vision of territorial expansion, an empire in the Caribbean and the Philippines. During a speech in Atlanta, he highlighted the war’s ‘magical healing, which has closed ancient wounds and effaced their scars…sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we feel for each other.’”

Often in history, leaders have started wars to distract from domestic problems. McKinley may not have provoked the war with Spain to assuage sectional divisions, but he certainly welcomed them as an effect of an unexpectedly easy victory that dropped a swath of colonial possessions in America’s lap. Empire helped to solidify racism at home, as Southerners rejoined the armed forces in exchange for a hands-off policy regarding Jim Crow. Northerners and Southerners then found common cause in exercising dominion over Puerto Ricans and Filipinos.

“The army finds Civil War history too dangerous and would prefer to punt the issue to politicians. For most of its history, real change came to the army when politicians and the nation demanded it. Until then, historians and especially retired officers need to tell the American people and our soldiers that we. Honor men who fought to destroy the United States to perpetuate slavery. The facts, I hope, I believe, will result in change. Never underestimate the ability of Americans to do the right thing—eventually.”

The army is firmly committed to the principle of its own subordination to civilian leadership. In many cases, this is highly beneficial, but when it comes to Confederate memorialization, Seidule believes that they are citing that principle insincerely in order to punt on a controversial topic. The Defense Department was responsible for naming bases in the first place, and so they should have the courage to undo their own mistakes and turn their back on white supremacy rather than let politicians do the heavy lifting for them.

“In class, I focused on how officers planned and executed the campaigns of war. We focused on the levels of war: strategy, operations, tactics, and the ‘Face of Battle,’ how soldiers experienced war at the tip of the bayonet. The smell of gunpowder seduced me again. I didn’t focus on why the two sides fought. I focused on the ‘great captains of military history,’ like Lee and Jackson.”

There is nothing objectionable in a neutral treatment of the military campaigns of two sides in a war, even when one side is morally in the wrong. What bothers Seidule in retrospect is that the study of military campaigns is incomplete without proper consideration of the political causes which prompted the war in the first place, and most likely had a profound influence on its conduct. There is much more to war than victory on the battlefield.

“If there’s one thing that West Point feared in 1861 or today, it’s upsetting politicians. Most schools generate money through tuition, endowment, alumni giving, research, and state and federal funding. The service academies receive all their funding from the federal government, a precarious position. During the budget fights in 2013 called sequestration, West Point had to furlough its civilian workforce for two weeks. The Civil War, however, proved an existential threat.”

Seidule points out how much politics change over time, and how with each swing of the pendulum, the army must find ways to please those in power. During the Civil War, the army was desperate to wash away the stain of its defectors to the Confederacy. A century and a half later, West Point now has to enshrine the memory of the very same people it once had to repudiate, now that the long-faded agony of secession and war has transformed into the romantic myth of the Lost Cause.

“When I give a tour of West Point, that’s my trivia question. Which barracks is named for a colonel? The answer is Lee barracks. He served as superintendent as a lieutenant colonel. His highest rank in the US Army was colonel. In 1970, why would the United States [emphasis in original] Military Academy name a barrack after either a US Army colonel or an enemy general who resigned his commission to fight against his country.”

A few years into Seidule’s permanent faculty position at West Point, he began to notice that memorials to Lee were everywhere on campus—even more than at Washington and Lee University. This inspired him to ask why. His investigation set him on course to examine and change his own personal investments in Lost Cause memorialization. Regarding the school naming a barrack after Lee in 1970, Seidule notes that it occurred one year after the largest ever contingent of Black cadets.

“Lee the military commander was first-rate. Daring and innovative, he intimidated and defeated opponents like George McClellan, Ambrose Burnside, and Joseph Hooker. He honed the Army of Northern Virginia into a formidable fighting force. The US political leadership understood Lee’s importance to the entire Southern cause and fixated on defeating him.”

Credit must be given where credit is due. Lee faced superior manpower and resources while overseeing a newly created army with a makeshift chain of command and a proud resistance to any centralized authority, Northern or Southern. Conceding military skill need not make Lee something that he was not, or erase the less admirable aspects of his character.

“Lee’s strategy failed primarily because US strategy and leadership were even better. The US cause was also better. As the war continued, the United States gained forces from emancipated African Americans, while the South lost their enslaved works. Lee lost because his opponent was better and the Southern cause was awful.”

Admiration for Lee’s military qualities tends to focus on his material disadvantages, which were real but do not tell the whole story. Lee also had the advantage of mostly fighting on defense, against an enemy that had to achieve a decisive victory, while the Confederacy had only not to lose. Respect for Lee, however justified in certain respects, has diminished the reputation of Grant and other US commanders who dealt with different challenges like coordinating the operations of distinct armies, sustaining massive supply lines, and guarding their rear against a hostile population. They are no less deserving of plaudits, and they won in the service of a morally superior cause.

“I chose to serve so long because of my abiding belief in the United States of America. I was willing to fight and if necessary die for my country. Despite detailing the systemic racism throughout the history of this country, I believe in the promise of America. As a US Army soldier, I believe the Constitution is worth defending. I love my country.”

Those who oppose the teaching of America’s racist history claim that to do so would undermine faith in the nation and its founding principles. Seidule counters that his more thorough knowledge of American history, even its darkest aspects, has only strengthened his belief that the US can learn from its mistakes, but only with honest introspection. Seidule would prefer to love the flawed country of reality than a mirage of moral perfection.

“History forms an important part of a person’s identity. By saying directly that Southern citizens had fought to preserve and expand slavery, I had attacked a cherished myth.”

This line summarizes Seidule’s central problem. Facts do not necessarily persuade when they infringe upon a person’s deeply felt sense of themselves. Consequently, his opinion on events of over 150 years ago led to a massive response, including death threats.