What Was the Continued Error of Lee s Enemies
Robert E. Lee: The enduring popularity of a warrior for slavery
By James C. Cobb
After President Dwight D. Eisenhower revealed on national television that one of the four "great Americans" whose pictures hung in his office was none other than Robert E. Lee, a thoroughly perplexed New York dentist reminded him that Lee had devoted "his best efforts to the destruction of the United States government" and confessed that since he could not see "how any American can include Robert E. Lee as a person to be emulated, why the president of the United States of America should do so is certainly beyond me." Eisenhower replied personally and without hesitation, explaining that Lee was, "in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. … selfless almost to a fault … noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history. From deep conviction I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee's caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul. Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities … we, in our own time of danger in a divided world, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained."Eisenhower was not the first president of the United States to express such reverence for Lee, nor would he be the last. Needless to say, the story of how anyone becomes a heroic role model to a nation that he has made war upon is likely to be a bit complicated, but in this case it is well worth telling simply for what it says about the extraordinary elasticity of historical symbols when they can be bent to the aims of a cohesive, purposeful set of interests in the present.
After the Civil War ended in 1865, white southerners borrowed the term "Lost Cause" from Sir Walter Scott's romantic depiction of the failed struggle for Scottish independence in 1746. For them, however, memorializing their recent and bitter defeat at the hands of the Yankees was no mere flight into escapist fantasy. Rather, it was part of a willful strategy, aimed at both restoring white supremacy in the South and regaining the economic and political power needed to insulate white southerners from any future northern interference in their racial affairs. Accordingly, the carefully constructed Lost Cause legend justified secession as a courageously principled act, glorified their society, and even transformed their defeat on the battlefield into a source of moral elevation. Lost Cause proponents presented slavery as a benign and civilizing institution and insisted that it certainly was not the reason behind secession. The former Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, became a moving force within the Southern Historical Society (SHS), composed primarily of prominent former Confederates intent on amassing a formidable arsenal of historical documentation "from which the defenders of our cause may draw any desired weapon."
Davis's beloved Southern Historical Society would prove critical to sacralizing the historical and personal reputation of Robert Edward Lee. As the son of a Revolutionary War hero whose 32 years of exemplary military service had actually earned him an invitation to lead the Union Army in suppressing the southern rebellion, Lee had known his own very personal Gethsemane before respectfully declining this offer, explaining that he could not bring himself to take up arms against his native state. In his role as Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee quickly earned the respect of comrades and foes alike. When it had finally become inescapably apparent that nothing was to be gained from fighting further, he had respectfully rejected Jefferson Davis's call for guerrilla tactics that would reduce his men to "mere bands of marauders" and serve only to inflict further suffering on civilians. In stark contrast to Davis's unbridled bitterness, Lee had advised his fellow southerners to "unite in honest efforts to obliterate the effects of the war" and endeavour to "promote harmony and good feeling." After the war, Lee humbly sequestered himself in relative obscurity as president of little Washington College until his death in 1870.
The 63-year-old Lee's death left his would-be canonizers free both to invoke him as they pleased and to ensure that his reputation remained immaculate by dispelling the lingering questions about his leadership at the Battle of Gettysburg, where Union forces dealt a devastating, irrecoverable blow to the armies of the Confederacy. Former subordinates like Generals Jubal A. Early and John B. Gordon (who was also something of a front man for Grady's New South campaign) deftly mobilized the Southern Historical Society's formidable "spin machine" to lay blame for the defeat squarely at the feet of General James Longstreet.
In a Gilded Age America rife with scandal and greed, such a selfless and incorruptible hero was not a hard sell. The New York Herald had already declared upon Lee's death that "here in the North we … have claimed him as one of ourselves" and "extolled his virtue as reflecting upon us." Frustrated and perplexed by such eulogies, former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass complained bitterly that he could scarcely find a northern newspaper "that is not filled with nauseating flatteries of the late Robert E. Lee," whose military accomplishments in the name of a "bad cause" seemed somehow to entitle him "to the highest place in heaven."
Journalists were hardly alone in helping to nationalize Lee's appeal. Popular historian James Ford Rhodes, an Ohioan, praised him unstintingly, as did no less a proper Bostonian than Charles Francis Adams II, who felt Lee's courage, wisdom and strength could only "reflect honor on our American manhood." No one put greater stock in American manhood than Theodore Roosevelt, who, with characteristic restraint, pronounced Lee "the very greatest of all the great captains that the English-speaking peoples have brought forth" and declared that his dignified acceptance of defeat helped "build the wonderful and mighty triumph of our national life, in which all his countrymen, north and south, share." A generation later, another President Roosevelt would simply laud him "as one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen."
Union veterans of the war, meanwhile, were encouraged to forget the bitter antagonisms that had fuelled the conflict itself and to respect, even embrace, their former enemies who had battled so courageously for a cause effectively ennobled simply by their steadfast dedication to it. What mattered now was not why each side had fought, but simply that each had fought honourably and well, a fact that should inspire feelings of brotherhood. When more than 53,000 of these old soldiers came together for the 50th anniversary of the Gettysburg in July 1913, it was not, as Virginia governor William Hodges Mann admonished the group, "to discuss what caused the war of 1861–65," but simply "to talk over the events of the battle here as man to man."
Woodrow Wilson, the first southern-born president since the Civil War (and also an ardent admirer of Lee), praised the gathering as the ideal opportunity "to celebrate … the end of all strife between the sections." In the wake of the affair, the National Tribune, a Union veterans' organ, eagerly hailed the "death of sectionalism" and the "obliterating of Mason and Dixon's line."
More than two generations later, Walker Percy, who had been thoroughly catechized in the Reconciliationist gospel as a youth, found it alive and pervasive as the nation began its official observance of the Civil War centennial. Contemporary writing about the war, Percy noted, "commemorates mainly the fighting. … Yet it is all very good-natured. … In the popular media the war is so friendly that the fighting is made to appear as a kind of sacrament of fire by which one side expresses its affection for the other."
The almost ostentatious magnanimity shown the Confederates during the centennial was especially striking because a century after emancipation, as Percy noted, "the embarrassing fact that the Negro is not treated as a man in the North or the South" was effectively "a ghost at the [centennial] feast." Sit-ins and freedom rides had already marked a more confrontational turn in the civil rights movement, and centennial officials hoped to avoid having their activities drawn into this conflict, either by segregationist demagogues invoking the idealized states' rights rhetoric of the Confederates or by black leaders likening their crusade to the struggle for emancipation.
As the nation entered what would become the most acutely dangerous years of the Cold War, national unity and morale clearly took precedence over the divisive issue of racial equality. All the more reason to use this occasion, as a Georgia centennial pamphlet put it, to "discern from our history what has made us the most powerful and united [nation] on the face of the earth." Naturally, if facing up to Cold War realities required a renewal of faith in American virtue, a Virginia centennial spokesman could think of no finer example than Robert E. Lee, "a man largely without hate, without fear and without pride, greed or selfish ambition."
As centennial activities wound down with an April 1965 reenactment of Lee's surrender at Appomattox, Congress was considering an aggressive new voting rights bill that would profoundly alter the dynamic of both southern and ultimately national politics. In addition to the sweeping changes in the political and economic status of many African-Americans that have marked the last half century, scholars have effectively toppled the historical pillars that once supported the old Reconciliationist temple, showing, for example, that slavery was not only the root cause of the Civil War but an incredibly brutal rather than benign institution. Moreover, contrary to Reconciliation lore, enslaved blacks had readily abandoned their old masters in great numbers as the Yankees approached and thus had played a critical role in their own emancipation, not to mention the outcome of the war. Fifty years ago, African Americans gained little traction in protesting their virtual exclusion both from the planning process for the Civil War centennial and from the core narrative that centennial officials were pushing. Suffice it to say, the sesquicentennial observance promises to be different.
One of the greatest breakthroughs accompanying the destruction of discriminatory "Jim Crow" laws was registered in opinion surveys, which since the late 1960s have consistently shown blacks about as likely as whites to identify themselves as southerners. This does not mean, however, that the two always agree on how that identity should be represented. Championing efforts to remove the Confederate insignia from the Georgia state flag, Atlanta journalist John Head made it clear in 1993 that "the South is my home [and] I am a Southerner," but he would not accept "the Confederate battle flag as an emblem in which all Georgians can take pride." Some fifteen years later, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey sounded much like Head when she insisted, "There are other Souths beyond the white Confederate South. … My South didn't lose the war. We won."
Trethewey's dichotomy might be just as applicable to the civil rights movement, of course, and Lee's decision to choose the wrong side of one of America's greatest moral crusades ultimately consigned him, by default at least, to the wrong side of the other. Ulysses S. Grant could respect his vanquished counterpart "who had … suffered so much for a cause," even though he felt constrained to add, "that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse." Not surprisingly, separating man and cause is far trickier today than it was in 1865. Defenders who are quick to point out Lee's dislike of slavery are not always so swift to note that he actually described it as "a greater evil to the white man than to the black race" or that he believed "the painful discipline" inflicted on the slaves was "necessary for their instruction as a race." Such a view may have distinguished him but little from the majority of northern whites at the time, but it was Lee, after all, who commanded a massive military effort that, if successful, would surely have extended the life span of slavery regardless of the broad moral or economic currents that had already begun to cut against it.
Yet, for all these associations with unsavoury actors and hurtful causes, not to mention the determined efforts of a bevy of historians obsessed with finding fault, a 1996 survey indicating that he was still admired by 64% of respondents in the South and 60% of those outside it suggests that, for many Americans, Robert E. Lee remains something of a Teflon icon. Even a reviewer who criticized a National Endowment for the Humanities-supported January 2011 PBS documentary on Lee for taking it too easy on "a slavery apologist" whose "Old Dominion snobbery and sense of honour" had led him to "back the wrong side for the wrong reasons" had to admit the subject of the film himself was "a whole lotta man." Not everyone, of course, is willing to grant Lee such benefit of the doubt, particularly African-Americans troubled by Lee's actual and figurative connections with the persecution of their forebears. Understandably, they would prefer to see other, more affirmative icons front and centre.
Such recognition is essential if the South's (and thus, the nation's) history is to be presented both accurately and comprehensively. However, when Trethewey insists that "my South didn't lose the war," she points not to the separate pasts of blacks and whites so much as to the way in which, at critical times, they simply experienced a common past quite differently. Doing full justice to such a past makes stark juxtapositions and contrasts inevitable. It is not necessarily a bad thing that the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Site shares top billing as an Atlanta tourist attraction with the massive images of Lee, Davis, and Stonewall Jackson carved into nearby Stone Mountain, or even that Virginia celebrates Lee-Jackson Day on the Friday preceding the Monday observance of Rev. King's birthday. After all, "We Shall Overcome" never seems more stirring and powerful than when it is performed in places like Birmingham or Selma, where it is still very easy to remember what actually had to be overcome.
Finally, there is surely polarization enough over the far more substantive and urgent concerns of a needful present without incessant quarreling over how the past is represented. When an Annapolis councilman called for the former slave port to issue an official apology for the "perpetual pain, distrust and bitterness" that slavery inflicted on black people, a constituent allowed that she would "prefer that the aldermen have a resolution to atone for the lack of a decent middle school curriculum in Anne Arundel County."
For all his apparent personal virtues, there is no denying Robert E. Lee's direct connection with the cause of slavery or his symbolic appropriation by those who succeeded in replacing slavery with Jim Crow. Unfortunately, although it might make for good political melodrama and perhaps even gladden the departed soul of Frederick Douglass, stripping Lee's name from a school is unlikely to reduce overcrowding in its classrooms, upgrade its computer or science labs or end drug trafficking in its corridors. If it would, ironically enough, Lee — at least the one Dwight Eisenhower saw in the portrait on his wall — would likely be the first to join Douglass in endorsing the move.
Reprinted in condensed form from the July/August 2011 issue of Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a U.S. federal agency.
Source: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/robert-e-lee-the-enduring-popularity-of-a-warrior-for-slavery
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