Book report: Robert E. Lee & Me

Subtitled “A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause,” this work is by Ty Seidule, Brigadier General (retired), and the first Professor Emeritus of History at the United States Military Academy. Seidule had his “fifteen minutes of fame” back in 2015, when he gave a talk for PraegerU, a conservative online site which produces short videos. Entitled “Was the Civil War about Slavery?” it became the most watched history video . . . in history.

Spoiler alert: Yes, the Civil War was all about slavery. Seidule was shocked at both the popularity and the notoriety of this short video, which he thought rather obvious.

Seidule’s book builds on that experience to address the Lost Cause mythology of the American South. However, don’t expect a history book in the classic sense, or even a data-driven argument. Seidule adopted the personal-story-as-explanatory-history approach, very popular among authors today. Seidule’s personal history is as a young man who grew up in Alexandria, Virginia (a close-in suburb of Washington, DC, so close it was originally included in the District), a quintessentially southern town in the 1970’s.

In prose both fluid and florid, Seidule tells of growing up a privileged son on the south, taught to revere that ultimate southern gentleman, Robert E. Lee. During his youth, Virginia state history books still had outrageous depictions of plantation life complete with happy slaves and kindly masters! Alexandria especially tried to proclaim its Confederate heritage: the town was occupied on the first day–and for the duration of–the Civil War, so it literally named all its north-south streets after Confederate heroes.

BG(ret) Seidule notes he swallowed all these myths (State’s rights, contented slaves, chivalrous Confederates personally opposed to slavery but unwilling to end it) and fully believed them. Only as an adult and budding historian did he come to realize what a slanted version of history he had been fed, and he has dedicated himself to setting the record straight.

It should go without saying, but Seidule is absolutely right. The Civil War was about slavery. Slavery is uniquely horrendous at all times, and the behavior of post Reconstruction southern leaders in their successful attempts to rewrite history and enforce Jim Crow laws was egregious. Seidule is at his best uncovering the history he never learned about towns he lived in, like Alexandria and Monroe (Georgia), which was once known as “lynchtown.” He is at his weakest when he makes post hoc arguments about why things are without any footnote or reference. Here his book comes across with little force, more like an extended opinion piece in the New York Times magazine.

Further, Seidule relies on his righteous anger at being misled at key points. He does establish the fact that generations of southern children received similar brain-washing, which partially explains the staying power of the Lost Cause myth. But, he also recognizes most of this historical fiction ended by the 1980’s, so what we have now is . . . what? Street names? Statues? Today’s students in Northern Virginia (where I lived for thirty years) get barely a few hours of Civil War history, and are hard pressed to say anything intelligent about the war. Their ability to process the name of Lee highway or J.E.B Stuart high school as a public symbol of white supremacy is suspect.

Early in this work–in the Foreword, actually–Seidule relates the story of his involvement with a project to memorialize West Point alumni who died in combat. Seidule explains he opposed including those West Pointers who abandoned the country and the Constitution at the moment of greatest danger to join the Confederacy. He notes he was overruled by the Academic Board and even the Superintendent, before someone leaked the plan and public outrage led to his position (i.e., no Confederate names in the memorial) being adopted. So far, so good, and of course the Brigadier General was in the right.

But in the telling of the tale, Seidule says “I should have realized that the overwhelmingly [sic] white men around the table might have grown up with the same myths, really lies, about the Civil War.” He has no footnote, no evidence, just a bold-faced assertion of the private thoughts and beliefs of his follow officers. This is unfortunate.

How did he know? He never says. Was there not another possibility? As a professional historian, he knows there was. I attended West Point around the same time Seidule was at Washington & Lee. Cadets did indeed study Lee, the officers who abandoned the Union, and the issue of slavery in the Civil War. In Military Art classes, we examined in-depth Lee’s tactical and operational brilliance, and his manifest failings as a strategist. In ethics, while we examined the role of States in the early days of the Republic and the loyalties they entailed, we also firmly established that abandoning our oath in wartime was an act of treason. Some cadets found this hard to swallow, but I never heard anything else than that from the faculty.

Finally, in studying how wars end, we learned about the unique outcome of the American Civil War. Most such conflicts end only with reprisals, widespread destruction, and endemic hostility. The US Civil War was different: it ended with the successful re-integration of the seceding states. This was in no small part due to the guidance of President Lincoln, whose wartime Second Inaugural address said “with malice toward none except the damn rebels, with charity toward all except the racist traitors.” You know the italicized words ring false because they weren’t there. Lincoln told Congress his plans to pardon the Confederate soldiers upon conclusion of the war. President Andrew Johnson issued a conditional pardon shortly after the war, and he followed that up with an unconditional pardon on Christmas day, 1868. Thus began the process of re-integration of the Union, which was uniquely successful.

Seidule confuses this part of the historical record with the shameful failure of Reconstruction, the abandonment of the freedmen, the introduction of Jim Crow and the racism in both north and south that continued to the Civil Rights era. These things did follow, but they were not necessarily caused by the pardoning process, which worked. He suggests any reference (picture, naming, statue, etc,) to Lee is part and parcel of the Lost Cause mythology and therefor suspect. Seidule rightly holds dear to the US Constitution and the oath that he and I took to defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Yet that pardoning power is part of that same Constitution, and he rejects it. Here his anger at being misled gets the better of his argument.

Robert E. Lee was a great leader and a fine military officer. He was also a racist who personally benefited from, and directed the mistreatment of, slaves. He was at once refined AND cruel, educated AND ignorant, kind AND intolerant. The author is right to decry the fact he was led to believe only one side of history. Would that he had heeded that advice here.

My verdict: if you were led to believe only in the ‘sainthood’ of Robert E. Lee, this work is a powerful corrective. If you were ever exposed to the more complicated story of Lee and the South, you’ll find much of this book unsurprising.