Robert E. Lee Never Deserved Your Respect

I recently posted about the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, and I found that I still had more to say that directly related to current events. The very reason I started this blog was in response to the growing calls for the removal of Confederate monuments in the South, and the frankly amazing fact that many were indeed taken down. None mattered more symbolically than the statue of General Robert E. Lee in New Orleans. His monument was one of the most hotly contested, and was subsequently the most satisfying of the removals when he was finally lowered from his pedestal, literally and figuratively. It really was a remarkable occasion, made more so by Mayor Mitch Landrieu's moving speech about the historical significance of the event; it's a major step forward to right the wrongs of the past.

I wish I could have been there, because years before the widespread calls for Confederate monument removals, Robert E. Lee was on my $#%& list. Unlike many other Civil War historians, even out of the ones that have no qualms labeling the Confederacy for what it was— an Empire of Slavery— there still remains a professional and personal admiration for Lee. They cite the integrity and pride of his Christian character and his brilliant tactics on the battlefield as justifications for their respect. Even as a kid, I never bought it. In fact, I remember on my tour of the Capitol Building shouting in offense at seeing a statue of Lee (in his rebel uniform no less!) sitting at a prominent spot in one of the halls. True, he was no John C. Calhoun or Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, but despite setting the bar so low, I never believed that somehow Lee was some sort of good guy in a terrible system.

I didn't know how right I was.

Credit to the author for this one (FYI Lee is on the left, Ulysses S. Grant is on the right)

In an outstanding and personally vindictive piece for the Atlantic, Adam Serwer exposes Lee for the man he really was, what he stood for, and how much damage he did. His popular image is mostly fiction, generally maximizing his good traits and minimizing his bad ones, but also, in Mitch Landieu's words, propels "lies by omission" by his defenders for over 150 years. Here are a few highlights:

• Before anything else should come the evaluation of Lee through a military perspective. While he is rightly considered to be a master tactician, his strategic decision to wage a conventional war against the industrial-powered North was a disastrous move that escalated the war and brought death and destruction to the South. Even tactically, he was still capable of colossal mistakes. His stubbornness at Gettysburg, namely Pickett's Charge lost him the battle and set the stage for the collapse of the Confederacy.

• Though not a rabid slave-owner, Lee was anything but benevolent. He was still by all means a white supremacist who paternalistically saw slavery as good for black people, and only Christ could free them. He split slave families and oversaw or personally beat slaves who tried to escape. 

• His army enslaved free blacks and executed captured black Union soldiers. He refused to conduct a prisoner exchange with Union General Ulysses S. Grant if black soldiers were on the table, despite his dire shortage of troops. 

• The one aspect of Lee I previously respected was the dignified surrender of his army to General Grant. This in effect prevented a Southern insurgency from spawning and contributed to the reunification of nation. Now I have none. After Appomattox Court House, Grant felt his former rival fell short in trying to sow seeds of peace, and saw Lee's conduct as a "forced acquiescence." This helped give way to the Lost Cause myth which was the foundation of Jim Crow. 

• Even as president of Washington College, Lee oversaw a chapter of the KKK formed at the university and turned the other way when white students committed crimes against blacks in the area, including several lynchings. Though he never formally endorsed the KKK, he never spoke against it either, and there's good evidence to suggest he tacitly approved of it by suggesting the South could give way to violence if it did not name the peace terms. 

As Serwer notes, the only fitting monument to Lee is the Arlington national military cemetery that's on his former land, which the federal government had seized. White supremacists are the only ones that have reason to admire him. That makes him nothing more than a disgrace to America and its history. Hopefully now his myth will finally start to die and the truth will come to stand in his place.