If I asked 100 people to generate a list of the 20 most interesting figures from American history, there would doubtless be a lot of variety. In America we have the benefit of being a young country that arrived on the scene at a fairly literate point in history, so we enjoy a high degree of knowledge about our historical figures, and we have a correspondingly wide variety of figures to choose from.
I’d be willing to bet, however, that if we asked 100 southerners to generate such a list, the name Robert E. Lee would pop up on at least 50% of them, maybe more.
It’s time to talk about Lee. Originally this was going to just be one post, but as I got into it I realized how complicated and long it would be, so we are gonna break this hushpuppy into more edible chunks. Here we go!
The Southern Man’s Ideal Grandfather
It’s hard to overstate the popularity that Robert E. Lee enjoys in southern culture. Most people living outside the south probably know Lee simply as the commander of the Confederate States Army during the Civil War. But to white southerners, his memory has achieved Chuck Norris-like proportions of respect. Lee enjoys a mystique I can only qualify as “The White Southern Man’s Ideal Grandfather.”
I used to be no different. Up until the last six or seven years, I (to my deep shame) held Lee in high regard. This thinking was the product of 1) an uncritical reading of American history 2) a simplified and sanitized portrayal of Lee in historical fiction such as The Killer Angels and 3) the more nebulous cultural forces acting upon me as a white southern man. None of that is an excuse, but it is a reason, and I think it’s important to distinguish between the two concepts.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I believe I’ve managed to distill Lee’s attractiveness to my demographic (southern white man with a passing interest in history) to a few basic points. In white southern culture, Robert E. Lee is:
A dignified man with a noble bearing
A skilled warrior with a compassionate heart
A man with a paternal, grandfatherly bearing (check that white beard)
A man highly respected, idolized even, by the troops who served him
A man with a deep love of, and connection to, his home soil (Virginia)
An intelligent, scrappy tactician who often won battles against superior forces (everybody loves an underdog)
A man with an abiding sense of duty
A deeply religious man. A “God-fear’n” man, as the old timers would say
A man who’s views around slavery were nuanced and better-than-average for the time
Sounds pretty great, right? I mean, this is catnip to a white southern dude.
Given this list, is it any surprise that Lee has been played by Martin Sheen and Robert Duvall in various movies? Both actors excel at the projection of quiet, humble dignity. The Duvall point is particularly worth remembering because there’s an entire generation of southerners with a love for Robert Duvall based entirely on his role in the Lonesome Dove TV miniseries. I suspect this goodwill has bled freely back and forth between Duvall and Robert E. Lee in a really fascinating and nebulous way in the south (this theory is, so far as I can tell, entirely original to me. It’s kind of insane, but I stand by it.)
Anyway, the last point in my list is especially crucial. There are a lot of primary source documents from the 1850’s and 60’s that indicate Lee thought of slavery as incompatible with the Christian faith to which he was committed. This is both 1) somewhat accurate and 2) a vast oversimplification of history that obscures some of Lee’s more reprehensible actions, words, and viewpoints.
But before we look at the darker side of Lee (which we will do in the next post), let’s examine how the (ahem) whitewashed version of Lee’s memory allows southerners to go on idolizing him, and by extension, excuse the racist government he came to serve.
The Problem of Loving Lee
It boils down to this extremely dangerous set of ideas that exist in the collective historical neurons of the southern man: Robert E. Lee led the Confederate Army not to preserve the institution of slavery but to preserve the sanctity of “state’s rights”, a “way of life,” and the “culture of the south.” He personally hated slavery, and the decision to resign his post in America’s army in order to fight for the south was agonizing for him. He led his army with great skill, won the respect of his men, and conducted the South’s surrender with as much dignity as possible. After the war he championed the cause of freed black people, opposed the erection of confederate monuments, and generally supported the peaceful assimilation of southern states back into the Union.
This set of ideas is dangerous because some of them are true, some of them are shaded truth, and some of them are lies. As most people understand, it’s super hard to pick one or two lies out of a collection of truths. As I said above, we will examine this set of ideas in more detail in the next post. But the subject of this post is what damage this set of ideas, when taken as a truthful whole, can cause.
What it boils down to is this: belief in Lee’s essential goodness makes it much, much easier to say things like “The Civil War wasn’t about slavery, it was about State’s rights.” After all, if a man as noble, thoughtful, and dignified as Robert E. Lee could support the cause of the south, how bad could that cause really be?
A Side Note
As a brief aside, the answer is: really, really, really bad. We can arrive at this conclusion by simply examining the Confederacy’s founding document, although in reality it often doesn’t play out that elegantly in conversation. Here’s how it generally looks.
Southern Guy: The Civil War was about states rights, not slavery.
You: Okay. Fair enough. But the specific right they were fighting for was…the right to own slaves.
Southern Guy: It was about a way of life. An economic system.
You: A way of life and economic system built entirely around the free labor of slaves.
Southern Guy: Okay, but the Confederate government just wanted to be left alone. Those states didn’t want the federal government telling them what to do.
You: Right...telling them not to own slaves. Look - slavery was literally enshrined in the Confederate Constitution. There’s a line in that document that forever protects the right of white people to own black people as property. (sec 9, article 4 - No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.) In fact, this “right” appears in the Confederate Constitution well before the right to bear arms.
Southern Guy: yeah...but...not every southerner owned slaves!
And so on.
Putting aside the frustration inherent in this goal-post-shifting conversation (the percentage of southerners who owned slaves has nothing to do with the goals inherent in the cause), I think it’s worth zooming in on this idea of the right to own slaves appearing before the right to bear arms in the Confederacy's founding document.
You’d think it would make any red-blooded southern man’s head explode. Many southerners point to the 2nd amendment’s placement in the Bill of Rights as an indication of its sacred importance. By that (admittedly arguable) logic, it follows that the framers of the Confederate Constitution considered the right to own human beings more important than the right to bear arms (or any other number of Bill of Rights-esque points which follow). Upon the most basic historical investigation, it becomes utterly impossible to argue that the Confederacy fought a war for anything other than the solidification (and expansion) of slavery as an institution (though of course historians and lay people have been trying to do just that for 150 years). Hell, we haven’t even touched the actual Articles of Secession (guess what? They mostly have to do with slavery).
But, alas, logic and historical fact is almost always superseded by the fragility of white southern male ego in these cases. Is there any human specimen on this planet more delicate and touchy than a white southern man? I haven’t met one. These “what was the Civil War about” conversations often devolve into a mire of shifting goal-posts, straw man arguments, and ad hominem attacks. Eventually everyone just agrees to move on, and Bud Light is consumed. And nothing changes. As always, nothing changes.
An Inconvenient (John Wilkes) Booth
Some southern men just want, nay, need, to hold a worldview that the cause of the South during the Civil War wasn’t entirely about owning human beings - and they will ignore actual real history in order to go on believing it. They have to believe this because their fragility and privilege will not allow them to face a world in which their ancestors were on the wrong side of history. In America, we are always the good guys, right? Even when we fight each other.
I find everything about this sad, and horrible, and infuriating. I’m ashamed that I used to buy into all this “state’s rights” hogwash (and I got the highest possible score on my AP US History Test in high school. I read unassigned chapters in my textbook for fun.)
The fact that as of 2011, 48 percent of Americans believed the same thing doesn’t make it any better.
I’m horrified that such belief is a gateway into schools of thought that allow southerners to wash their hands of the systemic racism and systems of oppression that are a direct result of slavery. For a group of people so concerned with “preserving history” through Confederate monuments, we seem remarkably uninclined to face our history’s dark reality.
I’m infuriated that this “I’m not on the wrong side of history” concept continues to rear its ugly head today, in human rights topics ranging from LGTBQ issues to the Black Lives Matter movement. One wonders what contortions our southern grandchildren will put themselves through to excuse the current reprehensible beliefs that are so common in southern white culture. Will they, perhaps, find a contemporary Lee-esque figure with just enough dignity and complication and muddled beliefs to excuse our current inexcusable behavior?
Will they, wrongly, say of us that we didn’t know any better? That we were the product of our times? That our misdeeds are excused by the cultural forces that surround us?
As I’ll elaborate in the next post, I reject this notion of history, particularly when examining history that is only a few hundred years old. I will expect my great-great-grandchildren to hold me to the same standard I’m going to hold Lee to in the next post. Spoiler alert - he isn’t going to hold up very well.
Next Time:
Why history podcaster Dan Carlin is hesitant to make ethical judgments of historical figures (and why I think this is only a partially correct approach)
We examine some primary source documents to try and untangle Robert E. Lee’s view on the institution of slavery
How Lee used the notion of “duty to state” to supersede his real duty (to that of his fellow man)
Why you shouldn’t let your elderly relatives off the hook for racist ideas
And more!