Robert E. Lee and Me Read online

  I was born on July 3, but I wanted a birthday on the Fourth of July. A birthday on the Fourth would make me special, an all-American boy. By the time I turned ten, I found the event on July 3 to make me feel important. Ninety-nine years to the day before I was born, Robert E. Lee led the Army of Northern Virginia on the climactic attack at the Battle of Gettysburg. My birthdate had meaning because of its link to the most important battle in American history. The military historian in me would argue, no. Other American battles changed the course of the Civil War and American history even more than Gettysburg. Other battles may be more important, but they aren’t more famous.

  Gettysburg made me special by association. My birthday had meaning because of its link to my hero Robert E. Lee. To a boy growing up in Virginia, Lee was more than the greatest general of the Civil War, more than the greatest Virginian; Lee was the greatest human who ever lived. As a child, my view of Lee was closer to deity than man. On a scale of 1 to 10, I placed Lee at 11 and Jesus at 5, even though I went to church every Sunday. Why did I have such a reverential view of Lee? Every part of my life made Lee a deity and his belief in the Confederate cause noble. Southern and Confederate were, for me, interchangeable. Books, movies, songs, school names, street names, monuments, parents, and teachers all reinforced the idea that Lee and the Confederacy were worthy of worship.

  If my hero fought his most famous battle on my birthday, I needed to learn about it. So I did, flipping through my father’s copy of The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War.1 After a smashing victory at Chancellorsville in May 1863, Lee persuaded the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, to try another invasion of the North. He wanted to attack the will of the U.S. population by taking the fight into Pennsylvania. Lee tried the same strategy in Maryland a year earlier without success. But Lee was a fighter. If he could avoid the defense, he would. The only way to win the war, he believed, was to take the fight into enemy territory to show the northern states the hard hand of war already felt by Virginia. Then the northern people would grow tired of war and capitulate to southern independence. Victory did not mean beating the United States; it meant forcing the North to stop fighting.

  By 1863, what Lee wanted, Lee got. White southerners trusted him more than any other military or political leader because he had delivered. During the Seven Days’ Battles in June 1862, he had saved Richmond, defeating the U.S. general George McClellan with a furious if bloody assault. Victories at Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville had cemented his reputation as the most aggressive and successful soldier in gray. Even the tactical draw and strategic defeat at Antietam had not tarnished his reputation among white southerners.

  So north he went. The forward elements of his army met the U.S. Army at the crossroads in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 1. Neither side meant to fight a major battle here. After a series of inconclusive engagements on July 1, the new commanding general of the Army of the Potomac, George Meade, West Point class of 1835, wisely moved U.S. troops pouring into Gettysburg along a prominent ridgeline running north to south. The competent Meade created a formation that looked like a fishhook with the hook protecting his northern flank on Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill. To defend his southern flank, he used two more hills, Little Round Top and Big Round Top. It was a formidable position.

  Lee had not planned on a battle in this place, but he felt the bulk of Meade’s force had not yet arrived. The next day, July 2, Lee ordered his best corps commander, James Longstreet, West Point class of 1842, to attack the enemy’s southern flank. Lee’s reconnaissance had shown weakness there. The late afternoon assault turned into a ferocious melee at several places: the Devil’s Den, the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, and Little Round Top. I learned to revere those names as a child. Later in life, when I was an army officer and a West Point instructor, the battles within the battle at Gettysburg became sacred ground not just for me but for the entire army. The Confederate attack featured brutal hand-to-hand combat in the late afternoon heat, but it ended with U.S. forces still occupying the high ground.

  At West Point, our history department takes hundreds of cadets to Gettysburg every year. Cadets today have the same experience as other members of the Long Gray Line. Cadet George S. Patton Jr. walked the same ground in 1909 as did Cadets Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley in 1915. Several times a year, we line cadets up and have them walk the same ground that soldiers trod on that sweltering July day. Every time, the experience moves them, connecting them to the past in a way no book can.

  Cadets from 1909 to today continue to argue about July 3, 1863. On that day, the third day of the battle, Lee decided, against the advice of his most trusted lieutenants, to attack the middle of the U.S. line. The Army of the Potomac still held the fishhook formation on the high ground of Cemetery Ridge, and Meade guessed that Lee would attack the center, and attack he did. At 1:00 p.m. (or 1300 in military time) on July 3, ninety-nine years to the day before my birthday, Lee ordered 170 artillery guns to blast the U.S. forces to smithereens. One U.S. officer said the deafening sound reminded him of Niagara Falls. Most of the rounds went over the heads of the blue-uniformed soldiers as they hunkered down during the barrage.2

  Twenty-five minutes after the artillery bombardment began, Lee ordered 12,500 men in three divisions commanded by George Pickett, Johnston Pettigrew, and Isaac Trimble to attack. Line after line of Confederates marched toward Cemetery Ridge over small hills and a few fences. As I imagined the battle as a child, the flags snapped in the wind as the Confederates moved at a steady pace until the United States forces fired in earnest. Then, as if leaning into a gale-force wind, the soldiers in gray trudged slowly, bravely, inexorably up the hill.

  Straight into the maelstrom. The U.S. cannons fired on the Confederates from the flanks and from the front. First solid shot mowed the troops down like bowling balls from hell. Then came airburst rounds that took out even more soldiers before U.S. artillerymen opened up with canister, like a giant’s shotgun. Most Confederates charging forward could shoot only once before stopping and standing to reload. That allowed volley after volley of rifled musket fire to hit the exposed line of Confederate soldiers. A few gray-clad men reached the U.S. line, temporarily taking it until a ferocious counterattack retook the position. Today, that spot, marked by a monument, one of 1,328 monuments on the Gettysburg battlefield, shows the “High Water Mark of the Confederacy,” as if the tide of the southern slaveholders’ rebellion began its ebb toward defeat.3

  Pickett’s Charge, as the July 3 attack was later named, was an unmitigated disaster. More than sixty-five hundred Confederate soldiers were killed, captured, or wounded just on the third day. For the entire battle, Lee’s army lost forty-seven hundred killed, thirteen thousand wounded, and another fifty-eight hundred captured or missing. Officer losses were even more staggering. A third of Lee’s general officers were casualties. Finally, after a few days, Lee had no choice but to retreat back to Virginia. The U.S. Army defeated Lee strategically and mauled him tactically.4

  After Gettysburg, the Confederates never recovered their offensive ability, and Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia stayed on the defensive for the rest of the war. July 3 marked a turning point, along with the capture of Confederate forces at Vicksburg, Mississippi, by Ulysses S. Grant the next day, July 4, 1863. Robert E. Lee, the great hero of the Confederacy, suffered a stinging defeat by the Army of the Potomac.

  Yet, as a boy born in Virginia on July 3, I did not consider Pickett’s Charge a calamity or an egregious error of judgment. Rather, it allowed the whole world to see Lee’s nobility in defeat. I knew that Lee trooped the line, visiting the thousands of wounded soldiers, telling them it was his fault. He didn’t blame the soldiers or their officers. I learned that Lee, like a true gentleman, took personal responsibility.

  At an early age, I learned to revere a suicidal charge, which resulted in wholesale slaughter and complete defeat. Indeed, my culture gave more credit to Lee in defeat than to his opponent in victory. I
didn’t learn George Meade’s name until decades later. As a white southern boy, I knew only Lee because the entire narrative of the Civil War was a civics lesson and the right answer, no, the righteous answer was always Robert E. Lee and the Confederates. Nor was I the only boy who dreamed of Gettysburg. The novelist William Faulkner wrote that Pickett’s Charge captured the imagination of “every fourteen-year-old Southern boy.” Of course, he meant every white boy.5

  Lee would have won the battle “if only.” Gettysburg leads the military history league in identifying counterfactual scenarios. “If only” Lee’s cavalry commander J. E. B. Stuart had been available instead of gallivanting across the Pennsylvania countryside, he could have provided his commander with good reconnaissance and Lee would have won. “If only” the Confederate general Richard Ewell had followed Lee’s orders on day 1 to take Cemetery Hill “if practicable.” “If only” General James Longstreet had attacked earlier on day 2, not waiting until the late afternoon, Lee would have won. Or the craziest, “if only Stonewall Jackson were alive.” Jackson died after the Battle of Chancellorsville when a Confederate soldier mistook him for the enemy and shot him. When cadets asked me that question, “What would have happened if Stonewall Jackson had been at the Battle of Gettysburg?” I had a ready answer. The dead man would have smelled badly.6

  Of course, I never heard the same “if only” for the U.S. side. If only George Meade had counterattacked the day after Pickett’s Charge, he might have defeated Lee’s army and ended the war. Defeat makes one look more toward the “might have been.” Yet I never thought of Gettysburg as Meade defeating Lee. Instead, Gettysburg was an opportunity to showcase Lee’s true character, his standing as a gentleman, under the most arduous of circumstances.

  Lee, I thought, showed his true character on my birthday. Every year people would remark that my birthday was so close to July 4. Too bad, they said. But I had my retort; I was born on the climactic third day of the Battle of Gettysburg. Pickett’s Charge. The day Robert E. Lee showed the world how to deal with tragedy. Why did I think so highly of Lee and the Confederates? Good question. I’ve been searching for that answer for years. As I combed through the detritus of my life, I remembered the cultural influences of my childhood. No wonder I grew up revering Lee and the Confederates. My culture worshipped them.

  As a child, I learned the words to “Dixie,” the Confederate anthem, before I learned the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” To this day, if I hear the first three bars of Dixie, I fight desperately not to sing along in my head, “I wish I was in the land of cotton, / Old times there are not forgotten, / Look away, look away, look away, Dixie Land.” The song is an ode to the better times of the slave era. Horrible.

  In the Seidule house, we had prints of the great Virginia Confederate commanders Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson wearing their gray uniforms. Both men were educators, like my dad, a high school history teacher. Lee served as superintendent at West Point and then president of Washington College. Jackson taught at the Virginia Military Institute.

  The painting I remember most vividly was a 1917 watercolor that hung above the mantel. My dad found it cleaning out the dorms at the school where he taught and coached in the early 1960s. He still has it. Actually, when I asked him about it, he sent it to me. I’m looking at it as I write this sentence, and it troubles me. It features the four flags of the Confederacy with “C.S.A.” painted vertically near the middle top and “Dixie” at the bottom.

  The first flag of the Confederacy is closest to the “C.S.A.” on the right. The historian John Coski writes that the initial flag committee wanted it to resemble the American flag. The Confederate Stars and Bars, as it was named, had a red stripe on the top and bottom and a white stripe in the middle. A blue square featured seven stars for the original secessionist states.7

  After the Battle of Bull Run, Confederate commanders complained that the committee did its job too well. Soldiers couldn’t differentiate the United States and Confederate flags on the battlefield. In January 1862, George W. Bagby, a Virginia writer, spoke for many when he wrote, “The present [flag] is universally hated. It resembles the Yankee flag, and that is enough to make it unutterably detestable.”8

  The second flag, next to the Stars and Bars, was called the Stainless Banner. William T. Thompson, a Savannah editor, described the flag accurately as “The White Man’s Flag.” It featured the Confederate Battle Flag in the corner of an all-white flag. Thompson’s description of the flag underscored the purpose of the war. “As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause.”9 Yes, the Confederacy proclaimed its racism proudly.

  The Stainless Banner, like the Stars and Bars, failed the battlefield test. Some commanders said it resembled the flag of truce—or surrender—too well. Others complained that the white background showed the grime of the campaign trail, turning from white to putty to brown. In 1864, a Confederate major reported that the Stainless Banner was “very easily soiled from its excessive whiteness.”10

  The third and final national flag of the Confederacy was the Blood-Stained Banner, adopted only a month before the end of the war. It featured a thick vertical stripe at the end of the flag, like the red stripe of the French Revolution. Otherwise, it retained the Stainless Banner design. One politician reported that the flag “would be chiefly white and red, with as little as possible of the Yankee blue.”11

  The fourth flag on my dad’s painting was the Confederate Battle Flag. The flag that has caused so much trouble in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Battle Flag served as the flag for Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia for the entire war, but it was never the flag adopted by the Confederacy. After the war, the United Confederate Veterans adopted the flag for its use, and it became the rebel flag, the Southern Cross, the Dixie flag, or most commonly the Confederate flag.

  Most importantly, it was the flag of white supremacy. The Mississippi legislature put the Confederate Battle Flag on their state flag in 1894 after the white supremacists took over and rewrote the state’s constitution in 1890. However, it became most popular after World War II when the Dixiecrat party under Strom Thurmond used it. The flag became a symbol of resistance to integration and equal rights. Georgia placed the Confederate Battle Flag on the state flag in 1956 to protest racial integration.

  John Coski argued that more people used the Confederate Battle Flag between World War II and the early 1970s than ever fought under it from 1861 to 1865.12 Today, the Confederate Battle Flag continues to serve as a marker of white supremacy movements in the United States and around the world. And I had it in my house along with the Stainless Banner and the Blood-Stained Banner for my entire childhood.

  * * *

  THE PAINTING WAS hardly the only Confederate Battle Flag in the Seidule house. The flag was featured on the cover of my first and favorite chapter book, Meet Robert E. Lee by George Swift Trow. I still have it. On the cover, General Lee looks resplendent, wearing his silver-gray Confederate uniform with above-the-knee leather boots. In his gloved left hand, he carries a campaign hat to show his mane of gray hair with a full manly beard, giving him a regal look. In his right hand, he gently cradles his sword perpendicular to his body like a ceremonial mace. The same sword he will offer to surrender at Appomattox Courthouse to end the war. Around his waist, he wears a gold sash. Decades later I would see that sash again. The West Point Museum has it in its collection, and I’ve had the curators display it for my students.13

  With his hat in one hand and a sword in the other, Lee has no free hand to guide Traveller, his trusty war steed. The “great gray horse” has such intelligent eyes it seems to be reading Lee’s thoughts and walks gracefully toward the reader. A hand on the reins would insult the horse, I thought. Lee sits ramrod straight in the saddle, gazing into the future with determination, as if thinking about his next brilliant plan. Framing Lee is a gigantic flag of the Army o
f Northern Virginia, the Confederate Battle Flag, far out of proportion to the actual scene. The flag is twice, maybe three times the size of the proud, if mangy Confederate soldier who carries it behind Lee. A long line of gray-clad soldiers follows Lee, leaving a burning house in the far distance across a hellish landscape pockmarked with shell craters and littered with branchless trees. The awful setting makes Lee look even better by comparison. Despite the trauma of war, the general looks every bit the gallant warrior, fighting for a glorious cause, a military god on loan from Mount Olympus.

  Yet the top right corner of the book’s cover features a smiling orange cartoon lion with a book balanced on his head, climbing podiumlike stairs. Meet Robert E. Lee, published in 1969, is a “Step-Up Book.” Random House, the publisher, explains the purpose of the Step-Up Books on the first page, next to another dignified drawing of Lee. “Educators Love Step-Up Books. So Do Children.” And there’s proof. Steve Meyer, a second-grade pupil from Chicago, tells us, “I love them.” Random House explains, “The subject matter has been carefully chosen to appeal to young readers who want to find out about the world for themselves.”

  The publisher understood me. I read Meet Robert E. Lee again and again as a child. It confirmed that Lee was the greatest general of the Civil War, the greatest American, the greatest man who ever lived. Meet Robert E. Lee led me to revere Lee and see the Confederate cause as noble, but it also had a clear message on how to view African Americans. The book had twenty-four drawings, but only two featured African Americans. The first was an enslaved wagon driver transporting a three-year-old Lee and his family from their ancestral home at Stratford, Virginia, to my hometown of Alexandria. The other drawing showed African Americans, under the leadership of the abolitionist John Brown with his Old Testament beard in full fury, killing U.S. marines during the failed raid on Harpers Ferry Arsenal in modern West Virginia. Commanding the force that crushed Brown’s 1859 raid was Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee. Brown’s raid scared the bejesus out of the white slaveholders in the South because it promised a slave rebellion. The book portrayed African Americans as either docile slaves or hell-bent insurrectionists trying to kill the great Robert E. Lee.