The myth of Lee
What is this nonsense about Robert E. Lee, anyway?
It’s a stupid myth created to glorify the slave-owning South. That’s all. It’s not complicated.
Adam Serwer in The Atlantic two years ago:
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.
The “Christian” part is true.
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 designed 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 historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”
And it’s what generations of white people, southern and northern, grew up on. As I mentioned earlier, it’s Thomas Dixon to D. W. Griffith to Margaret Mitchell to that godawful movie. And it’s far from over.
In the Richmond Times Dispatch, R. David Cox wrote that “For white supremacist protesters to invoke his name violates Lee’s most fundamental convictions.” In the conservative publication Townhall, Jack Kerwick concluded that Lee was “among 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 in 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 slaveowner who talked pious bullshit about how slavery was a great thing for the slaves because it was, like, educational.
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.
Which was very convenient for a guy who made money from their coerced unpaid labor.
Lee’s cruelty as a slavemaster 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.”
Keep that firmly in mind when you hear Trump and his fans burbling about the greatness of Lee.
When two of his slaves escaped and 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.”
To be clear (I read the full passage by Norris somewhere else a couple of hours ago, I forget where), the slaves were whipped until their backs were raw, and then brine was rubbed into the raw flesh. That’s Trump’s precious Great General.
During his invasion of Pennsylvania, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia enslaved free blacks and brought them back to the South as property. Pryor writes that “evidence links virtually every infantry and cavalry unit in Lee’s army” with the abduction of free black Americans, “with the activity under the supervision of senior officers.”
He not only owned slaves, he not only tortured slaves, he not only tore up slave families, he also kidnapped free black people into slavery. That’s Trump’s precious Great General.
Can one honorably serve an evil cause? A question applicable to the more than the American Civil War.
You can honourably serve an evil cause but then you’ve gone fully into Noble Demon territory. You’re still evil but you have rules and restrictions of a sort perhaps going into Even Evil Has Standards.
No, I don’t think you can, except in a very narrow sense, so narrow that it doesn’t mean much.
You can follow rules while serving an evil cause. You can be polite to colleagues while serving an evil cause. You can keep your linen spotlessly clean while serving an evil cause. It sort of doesn’t mean much, does it. Smacks of “Hitler loved dogs.”
When the evil is as big as slavery, or genocide, or colonial conquest, or “honor” killings, to name a few examples, then how “honorably” one commits the evil seems beside the point.
JFC Fuller, in his The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant, wrote that Lee could exploit the errors of his early opponents, but couldn’t even figure out Meade, an ordinary general.
@OB:
You’re right of course; it’s that narrowest definition I was thinking of…
Colin Day, #4; In his How The South Could Have Won The Civil War, Bevin Alexander shows that whilst Lee was possibly unsurpassed as a battlefield commander, he was a lousy tactician when it came to war in general. He never looked beyond the next battle, and when it came to battles his only method was to attack the enemy wherever they were, no matter how superior in number and equipment they were, and no matter how well they were positioned.
Jackson, on the other hand, was a brilliant tactician whose plans could possibly have won the war for the South several times. Fortunately for the North, Lee had the ear of Jefferson Davies and both men failed to act on Jackson’s recommendations.
The book is a very interesting read, but it is almost entirely focused on the military side of the war and its chief players, with very little mention of the causes or of the attitudes of the leaders beyond military matters.
Acolyte of Sagan #6, No, Lee was quite capable of defending, as he did at Fredericksburg.
Colin, I may have somewhat over-summarized there. Yes, Lee could mount a defence – part of his talent as a battlefield commander, I suppose – but if the way he is portrayed in the book is accurate, he seemed to view war only in terms of engaging directly with the enemy on a battle-by-battle basis.
There is one incident in the book that sums up Lee’s thinking. It’s been a while since I read the book so I can’t recall the details (and the book’s in the loft among about a thousand others, so finding it would take a while) but basically the Union had amassed a huge force on high ground, easily defended and with a commanding view of the surrounding area, so a direct attack on the position would obviously come at great cost to the Confederate army.
Jackson approached Lee with a plan to avoid fighting the Union army in such vulnerable circumstances, split the Confederate troops into several smaller groups, move them around the Union position into better-defended positions and force the Union army to divide, drawing them into attacking instead (a simplified summary, but it was a good plan that could have wiped out half the Union army at a stroke). Lee’s response was blunt. Pointing in the direction of the Union position, he simply said ‘No. There is where the enemy is, and there is where we will meet them’. That decision cost the South dearly, but it was the way Lee continued to operate throughout the war..
Why does everyone forget about the western campaign. The south lost New Orleans(one of its wealthiest cities) in about a year.
See, I don’t get why anyone is even interested in how skilled Lee was at military work. People who aren’t in the military, at least. Technical specialists, ok, but the general public? It seems supremely irrelevant, like focusing on the architecture of Auschwitz.
I don’t get it, either. I’ve mentioned McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom”, a history of the Civil War, before; many reviews had complained about the “boring” first half about politics before getting into the “exciting” second half about the war. I loved the first half, but found the second half so tedious I never bothered finishing it. The widespread fascination with military matters is something I do not share.
But Ophelia, we’ve all seen countless war movies throughout our lives. That enables us all to identify as technical specialists…
Well wargamers are interested, naturally… it gets a bit harder once you’ve finally gotten “Confederacy is basically Nazi Germany” through your thick skull. That’s been my experience anyways.
My point about Lee was simply that he wasn’t a great general as his cheerleaders claim, but was in fact quite inept and ironically was one of the major reasons the South lost.
Why he is still so revered is a mystery to me, particularly when one remembers that Trump, one of Lees biggest fans, claims that no-one remembers who came second.
My interest in the war itself extends only as far as the discovery of how close the North was to losing on several occasions, and had it not been for Lees stubborn refusal to listen to good advice, and his insistence of fighting wars the traditional, old-fashioned way, the outcome could easily have been so unthinkably different.
You mean like Trump, who won fewer votes than his opponent? Oh, right, he got to take the prize anyway, so he gets to rewrite history as he wishes – the bigliest inaugural, the bigliest vote count, the bigliest man…
When I was living in (extremely close) proximity to the south, so close in fact that the state I was living in (Oklahoma) seemed to believe itself a state of the old south, one thing that struck me was how in so many ways it seems like the south won the war in many ways that count. Not in actual victory, mind you, but in the constant promoting of how we need to pander to the south in every election, in everything, because they are…nice.
They are not nice. They are polite. They are hospitable. They ooze charm. That is not the way I define “nice”. But of course there are many nice people there, just like everywhere else.