[ The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is
based in the fiction of a person who never existed.]
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THE MYTH OF THE KINDLY GENERAL LEE  
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Adam Serwer
June 4, 2017
The Atlantic
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_ The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is
based in the fiction of a person who never existed. _

, Ryan Melgar

 

_Note:  With yesterday's removal of General Lee's statue in Richmond,
Virginia, this story from 2017 acquires new contemporary meaning._

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E.
Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he
actually possessed.

Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the
Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead
of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the
country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery. This year, the
removal of Lee’s statue in New Orleans has inspired a new round of
commentary about Lee, not to mention protests on his behalf by white
supremacists.

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant
strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored
tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and
historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his
ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a
conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized
North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic
error.

But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be
responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in
defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as
property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of
a 150-year-old propaganda campaign
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to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate
cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as
the historian David Blight writes
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it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow
system.”

There are unwitting victims of this campaign—those who lack the
knowledge to separate history from sentiment. Then there are those
whose reverence for Lee relies on replacing the actual Lee with a
mythical figure who never truly existed.

In the _Richmond Times Dispatch_, R. David Cox wrote that
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white supremacist protesters to invoke his name violates Lee’s most
fundamental convictions.” In the conservative
publication _Townhall_, Jack Kerwick concluded
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the finest human beings that has ever walked the Earth.” John Daniel
Davidson, in an essay for _The Federalist_, opposed the removal of
the Lee statute
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part on the grounds that Lee “arguably did more than anyone to unite
the country after the war and bind up its wounds.” Praise for Lee of
this sort has flowed forth from past historians and presidents alike.

This is too divorced from Lee’s actual life to even be classed as
fan fiction; it is simply historical illiteracy.

White supremacy does not “violate” Lee’s “most fundamental
convictions.” White supremacy was one of Lee’s most fundamental
convictions.

Lee was a slave owner—his own views on slavery were explicated in an
1856 letter that is often misquoted to give the impression that Lee
was some kind of abolitionist. In the letter, he describes slavery as
“a moral & political evil,” but goes on to explain that
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I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black
race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the
latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are
immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially &
physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary
for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to
better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known &
ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner
result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the
storms & tempests of fiery Controversy.

The argument here is that slavery is bad for white people, good for
black people, and most important, better than abolitionism;
emancipation must wait for divine intervention. That black people
might not want to be slaves does not enter into the equation; their
opinion on the subject of their own bondage is not even an
afterthought to Lee.

Lee’s cruelty as a slave master was not confined to physical
punishment. In _Reading the Man_, the historian Elizabeth Brown
Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his writings, Pryor writes that
“Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting
slave families” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that
“by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some
of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation
of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects
of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the
worst man I ever see.”

The trauma of rupturing families lasted lifetimes for the
enslaved—it was, as my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates described it, “a
kind of murder
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After the war, thousands of the emancipated searched desperately for
kin lost to the market for human flesh, fruitlessly for most.
In _Reconstruction_, the historian Eric Foner quotes a Freedmen’s
Bureau agent who notes of the emancipated, “In their eyes, the work
of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been
dispersed by slavery were reunited.”

Lee’s heavy hand on the Arlington, Virginia, plantation, Pryor
writes, nearly led to a slave revolt, in part because the enslaved had
been expected to be freed upon their previous master’s death, and
Lee had engaged in a dubious legal interpretation of his will in order
to keep them as his property, one that lasted until a Virginia court
forced him to free them.

When two of his slaves escaped
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were recaptured, Lee either beat them himself or ordered the overseer
to “lay it on well.” Wesley Norris, one of the slaves who was
whipped, recalled that “not satisfied with simply lacerating our
naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our
backs with brine, which was done.”

Every state that seceded mentioned slavery as the cause in their
declarations of secession. Lee’s beloved Virginia was no different,
accusing the federal government of “perverting” its powers “not
only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of
the Southern Slaveholding States.” Lee’s decision to fight for the
South can only be described as a choice to fight for the continued
existence of human bondage in America—even though for the Union, it
was not at first a war for emancipation.

During the invasion of Pennsylvania, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia
enslaved free black Americans and brought them back to the South as
property. Pryor writes that “evidence links virtually every infantry
and cavalry unit in Lee’s army” to the abduction of free black
Americans, “with the activity under the supervision of senior
officers.”

Soldiers under Lee’s command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864
massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender. Then, in a
spectacle hatched by Lee’s senior corps commander, A. P. Hill, the
Confederates paraded the Union survivors through the streets of
Petersburg to the slurs and jeers of the southern crowd. Lee never
discouraged such behavior. As the historian Richard Slotkin wrote
in _No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater_, “his silence was
permissive.”

The presence of black soldiers on the field of battle shattered every
myth that the South’s slave empire was built on: the happy docility
of slaves, their intellectual inferiority, their cowardice, their
inability to compete with white people. As Pryor writes, “fighting
against brave and competent African Americans challenged every
underlying tenet of southern society.” The Confederate response to
this challenge was to visit every possible atrocity and cruelty upon
black soldiers whenever possible, from enslavement to execution.

As the historian James McPherson recounts in _Battle Cry of Freedom_,
in October of that same year, Lee proposed an exchange of prisoners
with the Union general Ulysses S. Grant. “Grant agreed, on condition
that black soldiers be exchanged ‘the same as white soldiers.’”
Lee’s response was that “negroes belonging to our citizens are not
considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my
proposition.” Because slavery was the cause for which Lee fought, he
could hardly be expected to easily concede, even at the cost of the
freedom of his own men, that black people could be treated as soldiers
and not things. Grant refused the offer, telling Lee that
“government is bound to secure to all persons received into her
armies the rights due to soldiers.” Despite its desperate need for
soldiers, the Confederacy did not relent from this position until a
few months before Lee’s surrender.

After the war, Lee did advise defeated southerners not to rise up
against the North. Lee might have become a rebel once more, and urged
the South to resume fighting—as many of his former comrades wanted
him to. But even in this task Grant, in 1866, regarded his former
rival as falling short
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saying that Lee was “setting an example of forced acquiescence so
grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized.”

Nor did Lee’s defeat lead to an embrace of racial egalitarianism.
The war was not about slavery, Lee insisted later, but if it were
about slavery, it was only out of Christian devotion that white
southerners fought to keep black people enslaved. Lee told a _New
York Herald_ reporter, in the midst of arguing in favor of somehow
removing black people from the South (“disposed of,” in his
words), “that unless some humane course is adopted, based on wisdom
and Christian principles, you do a gross wrong and injustice to the
whole negro race in setting them free. And it is only this
consideration that has led the wisdom, intelligence and Christianity
of the South to support and defend the institution up to this time.”

Lee had beaten or ordered his own slaves to be beaten for the crime of
wanting to be free; he fought for the preservation of slavery; his
army kidnapped free black people at gunpoint and made them
unfree—but all of this, he insisted, had occurred only because of
the great Christian love the South held for black Americans. Here we
truly understand Frederick Douglass’s admonition that “between the
Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize
the widest possible difference.”

Privately, according to the correspondence collected by his own
family, Lee counseled others to hire white labor instead of the
freedmen, observing “that wherever you find the negro, everything is
going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see
everything around him improving.”

In another letter, Lee wrote, “You will never prosper with blacks,
and it is abhorrent to a reflecting mind to be supporting and
cherishing those who are plotting and working for your injury, and all
of whose sympathies and associations are antagonistic to yours. I wish
them no evil in the world—on the contrary, will do them every good
in my power, and know that they are misled by those to whom they have
given their confidence; but our material, social, and political
interests are naturally with the whites.”

Publicly, Lee argued against the enfranchisement of black Americans,
and raged against Republican efforts to enforce racial equality in the
South. Lee told Congress that black people lacked the intellectual
capacity of white people and “could not vote intelligently,” and
that granting them suffrage would “excite unfriendly feelings
between the two races.” Lee explained that “the negroes have
neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are
necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.” To the
extent that Lee believed in reconciliation, it was among white people,
and only on the precondition that black people would be denied
political power and therefore the ability to shape their own fate.

Lee is not remembered as an educator, but his life as president of
Washington College (later Washington and Lee) is tainted as well.
According to Pryor, students at Washington formed their own chapter of
the Ku Klux Klan, and were known by the local Freedmen’s Bureau to
attempt to abduct and rape black schoolgirls from the nearby black
schools.

There were at least two attempted lynchings by Washington students
during Lee’s tenure, and Pryor writes that “the number of
accusations against Washington College boys indicates that he either
punished the racial harassment more laxly than other misdemeanors, or
turned a blind eye to it,” adding that he “did not exercise the
near imperial control he had at the school, as he did for more trivial
matters, such as when the boys threatened to take unofficial Christmas
holidays.” In short, Lee was as indifferent to crimes of violence
toward black people carried out by his students as he was when they
were carried out by his soldiers.

Lee died in 1870, as Democrats and ex-Confederates were commencing a
wave of terrorist violence that would ultimately reimpose their
domination over the southern states. The KKK was founded in 1866;
there is no evidence Lee ever spoke up against it. On the contrary, he
darkly intimated in his interview with the _Herald_ that the South
might be moved to violence again if peace did not proceed on its
terms. That was prescient.

Lee is a pivotal figure in American history worthy of study. Neither
the man who really existed, nor the fictionalized tragic hero of the
Lost Cause, is a hero worthy of a statue in a place of honor. As one
Union veteran angrily put it in 1903 when Pennsylvania
was considering placing a statue
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Lee at Gettysburg, “If you want historical accuracy as your excuse,
then place upon this field a statue of Lee holding in his hand the
banner under which he fought, bearing the legend: ‘We wage this war
against a government conceived in liberty and dedicated to
humanity.’” The most fitting monument to Lee is the national
military cemetery the federal government placed on the grounds of his
former home in Arlington.

To describe this man as an American hero requires ignoring the immense
suffering for which he was personally responsible, both on and off the
battlefield. It requires ignoring his participation in the industry of
human bondage, his betrayal of his country in defense of that
institution, the battlefields scattered with the lifeless bodies of
men who followed his orders and those they killed, his hostility
toward the rights of the freedmen and his indifference to his own
students waging a campaign of terror against the newly emancipated. It
requires reducing the sum of human virtue to a sense of decorum and
the ability to convey gravitas in a gray uniform.

There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one
thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s
disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army
to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against
white-supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of
Longstreet in New Orleans.*
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was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet
was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest
Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6-foot-2-inch
Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue
hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey.
It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered
as a disgrace.

The white supremacists who have protested on Lee’s behalf are not
betraying his legacy. In fact, they have every reason to admire him.
Lee, whose devotion to white supremacy outshone his loyalty to his
country, is the embodiment of everything they stand for. Tribe and
race over country is the core of white nationalism, and racists can
embrace Lee in good conscience.

The question is why anyone else would.

_Adam Serwer [[link removed]] is a
staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics._

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