Robert E. Lee and Me Read online

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  For Shari

  Who taught me how to tell the truth

  Introduction

  In the summer of 2015, PragerU, a conservative website specializing in short videos, published a five-minute lecture I wrote and recorded titled “Was the Civil War About Slavery?” In the first thirty seconds of the video I answered the question.

  “Many people don’t want to believe that the citizens of the southern states were willing to fight and die to preserve the morally repugnant institution of slavery. There has to be another reason, we are told. Well, there isn’t. The evidence is clear and overwhelming. Slavery was, by a wide margin, the single most important cause of the Civil War.”

  Virtually every American historian would fully subscribe to the proposition that the southern states seceded to preserve slavery, precipitating the Civil War. Yet the video went viral immediately, trending on Facebook and Twitter. The first night I kept checking the views and the comments. I couldn’t believe it. My history lecture had gone viral. In twenty-four hours, more than a million people had watched it. At the end of the week, it had five million views. Today, it has had thirty million views, making it one of the most watched history lectures—in history.

  I’m not the first person to state the obvious: that slavery caused the Civil War. The video didn’t go viral because my argument was brilliant or because the swooping graphics that accompanied the video were so effective. I think it attracted so many views for two reasons.

  Timing matters. While I wrote and recorded the video in early 2015, it debuted in August, only two months after a white supremacist massacred Black churchgoers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. After the despicable slaughter, a picture of the young murderer appeared with a Confederate flag accompanying his racist manifesto. The nation started talking about the obvious links between the Confederate flag and white supremacy. In July, South Carolina took down the Confederate flag that had flown on the state capitol since the early 1960s. Walmart stopped selling the flag, and Apple removed mobile apps featuring the flag. At least five manufacturers stopped making the Confederate flag altogether. The Civil War and what it meant was a national story, and because it affected so many communities, the story lasted far longer than the normal news cycle.

  The second reason the video became popular was me. I told the American people that the Civil War was about slavery while wearing the blue uniform of a U.S. Army officer, with the eagles of a full colonel and a complement of medals earned over the course of a thirty-year career. Additionally, scrolling along the bottom of the video was my job title—Head, Department of History, United States Military Academy, West Point.

  Few people watched the video passively. Hundreds of thousands shared it with their friends, and another hundred thousand left responses. The majority of the comments were negative. Plenty of people left responses trolling my looks, which my son delighted in sharing with me. But tens of thousands of other comments ranged from the angry to the deranged to the violent. I had a public email account, and hundreds of people wrote directly to me. Some people told me that I had caved in to pressure to accept the politically correct government position. Some tried to argue with me based on their reading of history. The Civil War was really about—pick one or more—states’ rights, tariffs, economics, Lincoln’s racism, government overreach, and on and on.

  Despite my southern roots, online responses labeled me a Yankee. Two people sent an email to my West Point address threatening to kill me, to kill an army officer, over history. I couldn’t believe it. Those threats seemed serious enough that I contacted the Criminal Investigation Division at West Point, which then passed the emails on to the FBI. Now more than five years after that video came out, I still receive hate emails about a short video on a subject that occurred more than 150 years ago.

  The historian David Blight wrote that the Civil War is like “the giant sleeping dragon of American history ever ready to rise up when we do not expect it and strike us with unbearable fire.”1 I poked the Civil War beast, and it singed me. History is dangerous. It forms our identity, our shared story. If someone challenges a sacred myth, the reaction can be ferocious.

  Yet I also heard many positive comments. High school teachers wrote to me that they use the video in their classes. Professors, particularly in the South, told me the video was effective because my credentials as an army officer and West Point professor disarmed those unwilling to accept the academic consensus.

  I should have realized the video would garner controversy. Speaking to smaller audiences, I routinely encountered disbelief and hostility. Before the video came out in 2015, I had lectured on the topic of the Civil War for years. After I finished a talk in Atlanta on West Point’s memory of Robert E. Lee titled “Gentleman or Traitor,” a distinguished-looking man raised his hand and asked with the most mellifluous baritone, “Colonel, you have provided no evidence that the War Between the States had anything at all to do with slavery.”

  Yet I had spent the first five minutes recounting the Confederate secessionists’ own words declaring their independence to protect and expand slavery. Nothing I could say would refute his upbringing, his feelings, and his history. Then I realized evidence didn’t matter; he had chosen his own facts based on his culture. Despite the overwhelming evidence historians have gathered and my own passion to explain the cause of the Civil War and the violent segregation that followed it, I could convince no one.

  One issue provided me with a clear example of my ineffectiveness in using evidence-based arguments. I chaired West Point’s Memorialization Committee for years. In 2011, our graduates clamored for a memorial to recognize the West Point graduates killed fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. After ten years of war, West Point had no single memorial to the hundred graduates killed in wars since 9/11. Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq had taken a terrible toll on West Pointers. In addition to those killed in action, captains and majors teaching with me in the history department suffered from traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress, and amputations from their wartime service. The community needed a way to recognize its losses and its heroes.

  The committee I led recommended that we repurpose an existing room in Cullum Hall and place the names of more than fifteen hundred West Point graduates who gave the last full measure of devotion to the nation from the War of 1812 through the Global War on Terror. Our leadership supported the plan, and soon we had money, a design, and a time line, but one crucial decision had not been made. Which names would be included in the new Memorial Room? One war presented a problem. Specifically, would West Point graduates who died for the Confederate States of America be included in our new Memorial Room?

  I believed that we should exclude them. After all, they died fighting against the United States. I argued stridently that West Point should honor only those who fought for the Constitution we swear to support and defend. West Point’s motto of “Duty, Honor, Count
ry” (especially country) would seem to argue forcefully for exclusion of those dedicated to the country’s destruction.

  At the time of the Civil War, many of those Confederate graduates of West Point formally resigned from the army to accept positions with the enemy. Then they killed U.S. Army soldiers. Even worse, they abandoned the United States of America to fight for a new nation dedicated to one overarching principle. The Confederate States of America’s core reason for being, as defined in their constitution, was to protect and expand chattel slavery, forever.

  If that wasn’t enough, I described the history of our Memorial Hall. The building’s namesake, a former superintendent, George Washington Cullum, provided the money for the hall in his will. Cullum was an ardent anti-Confederate who wrote that he would never “give even the semblance of approval of [West Point graduates] taking up arms against the flag under which they were educated.” Robert E. Lee, especially, but others too, argued Cullum, “forgot the flag under which they were educated, to follow false gods.”2 In Cullum’s will, which became federal law, he demanded that no “unworthy subjects” grace his building.3 The “unworthy” were Confederates. To ensure compliance, the law required a two-thirds vote of West Point’s Academic Board, a governance committee dating to 1817. I thought history and law provided a slam-dunk argument. Excluding the Confederates was right and righteous.

  With passion and a barrage of facts, I tried to convince our leaders that Confederates should be excluded, but I failed—convincingly. Our superintendent said we should bring people together rather than highlighting our differences, an admirable thought in most cases. He compared the issue of placing Confederate graduates in our Memorial Room with the current conflict in the Middle East. He said we don’t want to be like the Sunni and the Shia arguing and warring for centuries. Instead, we should forgive and get along. Another superintendent gave me exactly the same argument several years later. Each side deserved equal billing.

  My bosses meant well. They hoped to bring people together, but the American Civil War and the conflict between Sunni and Shia throughout the world are not analogous. Another senior leader told me the issue of Confederates in our Memorial Room had nothing to do with race. Naïvely, I thought I could convince people with well-honed, fact-based historical arguments. Yet I failed miserably to convince anyone that the Confederates did not represent the values of the Military Academy. The Academic Board, our governance body, voted to include the Confederate names. I lost.

  From my own experience, I should have realized that the overwhelmingly white men around the table might have grown up with the same myths, really lies, about the Civil War that I did. If I had asked, they could probably have recited the Lost Cause myths: the Civil War was about states’ rights, not slavery; enslaved people were loyal; slavery would have ended soon after the war anyway; both sides fought bravely; the North won because of greater resources; and Robert E. Lee was a great warrior who opposed slavery. I should have felt more sympathy for people around the table. The Civil War was “our felt history,” as the great Southern poet Robert Penn Warren called it.4 Army officers grew up with the Civil War. They felt they knew the history. I was trying to upset their understanding not just of history but of their own identity.

  As a soldier, I’m part of an obedience-based organization. I follow orders, and our committee began to put together the list of fifteen hundred names including the Confederate war dead. Then someone (not me!) passed the information about Confederate inclusion to an African American graduate of West Point. Outraged, the alumnus demanded to see all the voting records through a Freedom of Information Act request. The threat of negative publicity caused the superintendent to change his mind. After another meeting, we voted to exclude the Confederates.

  Now two generals really disliked me for putting them through this treacherous history lesson. Our senior leaders couldn’t believe an issue that happened more than 150 years ago would be the most controversial decision they made that year or that they would have to change their decision so quickly.

  Everyone knew my passion for excluding Confederates, but no one knew why. One high-ranking officer asked me incredulously, “You went to Washington and Lee University. Why does a southern boy like you care so much about this subject?” I told him about the history, bludgeoning him with evidence, but he left our conversation unconvinced.

  When I told my wife that no one listened to me, she figured out the problem immediately. “No one understands why this issue is so important for you,” she said. “You’re hiding your background.”

  She was right. I didn’t share my own guilt and my own shame of growing up believing a series of lies about the Civil War and its legacy. The same lies that have infected our nation. To convince my colleagues, to convince anyone, I had to change my narrative. In subsequent conversations, in new lectures, in new books, in this book, I must tell my story as honestly as possible, even though it reveals a racist past, my own racist past. Telling my story might provide a path to understanding why the facts of the Civil War remained buried beneath layer after layer of myth and even outright lies, and why they continue to spark debate in this country.

  The old myths are under attack after the massacre in Charleston in 2015, after the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville in 2017, after the chilling murder of George Floyd, after the toppling of statues and monuments across the country. Many people don’t understand why these monuments are so problematic. Neither did I. The power of white southern culture and white southern history—actually not history, myth—shaped my understanding of the Civil War almost from infancy, true, but it shaped something more important than my view of the past. The white southern myths created my identity.

  The problem is that the myths I learned were just flat-out, fundamentally wrong. And not just wrong in a moral sense, as if that weren’t significant enough, but wrong factually, whether through deception, denial, or willful ignorance. The myths and lies I learned promoted a form of racial hierarchy and white supremacy.

  I use the word “lie” deliberately. The linguist Geoffrey Nunberg said that the English language “has a rich vocabulary for describing statements that fall short of the truth,” including untruth, bogus, baseless, groundless, falsehood, debunked, unverified, and dishonest. Nunberg argued that a “certain moral opprobrium attaches to [lie], a reprehensibility of motive.” Because the myths I grew up with have caused such lasting damage, because they furthered white supremacy, they deserve “moral opprobrium.” I feel comfortable using the term “lies.”5

  As a nation how can we know where we want to go if we don’t know where we’ve been? The same holds true for me personally. I can’t excise the racism out of me without understanding where it came from. Telling my story—as a southerner, a soldier, and a scholar—might help. It’s not as if the enduring myths of the Confederacy are perpetuated by evil people. An extremist fringe does continue to bray loudly. But most of the myths and misperceptions have become part of a code that has been used, reused, and built upon to such an extent that untangling the myths requires concerted effort. The myths became the American legend and reinforced racism, forming a destructive legacy our nation deals with daily.6

  Every place in my life reinforced the myths of the Civil War. But when I finally looked deeply at the history and my history, the evidence became overwhelming. I grew up with a lie, a series of lies. Now, as a historian and a retired U.S. Army officer, I must do my best to tell the truth about the Civil War, and the best way to do that is to show my own dangerous history.

  In so many unfortunate ways, my life and career have traveled the roads of Civil War history. Actually, more than Civil War history, it’s the history of white supremacy. In telling my story, I hope to shed a different light on American history that many of us would sooner ignore: the histories of slavery, of Reconstruction, of segregation, of lynching, of corrupt economic systems, of the painful process of desegregation, and of the myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.

&nb
sp; One of the foundations of the Lost Cause myth was the near deification of Robert E. Lee as the perfect example of an educated Christian gentleman. A Marble Man without sin. Much of my life led me to glorify Robert E. Lee and Confederate soldiers. My first book, my first movie, my hometown, my college, even the U.S. Army and West Point honored Lee and his cause. I hope this book exposes the lies I grew up believing and why it took so long for me to see the evidence, the facts, that I now see so clearly.

  Eleven southern states seceded to protect and expand an African American slave labor system. Unwilling to accept the results of a fair, democratic election, they illegally seized U.S. territory, violently. Together, they formed a new “Confederacy,” in contravention of the U.S. Constitution.7 Then West Point graduates like Robert E. Lee resigned their commissions, abrogating an oath sworn to God to defend the United States. During the bloodiest war in American history, Lee and his comrades killed more U.S. Army soldiers than any other enemy, ever. And they did it for the worst reason possible: to create a nation dedicated to exploit enslaved men, women, and children, forever.

  As a retired U.S. Army officer and as a historian, I consider the issue simple. My former hero, Robert E. Lee, committed treason to preserve slavery. After the Civil War, former Confederates, their children, and their grandchildren created a series of myths and lies to hide that essential truth and sustain a racial hierarchy dedicated to white political power reinforced by violence.8 But for decades, I believed the Confederates and Lee were romantic warriors for a doomed but noble cause. As a soldier, a scholar, and a southerner, I believe that American history demands, at least from me, a reckoning.

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  My Childhood: Raised on a White Southern Myth