When Ty Seidule was a little boy, he thought Robert E. Lee was greater than Jesus Christ.
It was easy, growing up in Arlington, Virginia, Lee’s hometown. Seidule kept his faith through graduation from a private, segregated academy in Georgia and through four years at Washington and Lee University, where “Marse Robert” is entombed and his recumbent statue lies in the university chapel, in the space normally reserved for an altar.
Seidule went on to 36 years in the U.S. Army, rising to the rank of brigadier general. He would later earn a Ph.D. in history and return to teach at West Point.
And there, in the shadow of barracks named for Lee, he lost his faith.
He describes his intellectual odyssey in “Robert E. Lee and Me,” a memoir of how America’s past has been remembered, mis-remembered and, occasionally, deliberately clouded.
Seidule briefly gained viral fame in 2015, when he delivered a lecture (in full-dress uniform) on Facebook and other platforms, arguing that the Civil War was fought about slavery, period. Forget all that stuff about state’s rights. Founders of the Confederacy were frank, at the time, that they seceded to preserve a slave economy and expand it if possible. The Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, declared that “the cornerstone” of the new Confederacy “rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” The Confederacy’s second national flag, the so-called “Stainless Banner” (occasionally mistaken for a white surrender flag), was white for a purpose.
What happened?
Following more than 60 years of scholarship, Seidule argues that postwar Southerners, such as Jubal Early and Thomas Nelson Page, propounded a myth of the Glorious Last Cause: that slavery was just, most slave owners were kindly, most slaves were childlike and contented, and any problems were the result of a few bad apples, such as the O’Haras’ nasty overseer in “Gone With the Wind” or that troublemaker John Brown.
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That image was perpetuated on the big screen by the 1939 “Gone With the Wind” and Disney’s “Song of the South.”
Central to that Lost Cause myth was the image of Lee, the perfect human, the greatest general, not just in American history but ever. Lee, we’re told, hated slavery but could not fight against his home state. Defeated only by overwhelming firepower, he turned to peace and preached reconciliation.
According to Seidule, it ain’t necessarily so. Eight Virginians held the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army in 1861; only Lee resigned and fought for the Confederacy. Why? Well, he owned slaves through his wife. From 1857 to 1861, he was virtually on full-time leave, managing the estate of his late father-in-law, including three plantations. In that positions, he ordered slaves whipped and broke up families by sale. The revenues made him a millionaire in antebellum terms, with an income far exceeding his Army pay.
Seidule is still impressed by Lee’s generalship, although “the Marble Man” did make mistakes, notably Pickett’s Charge. Arch-Confederates have always tried to explain away Lee’s behavior on the Third Day of Gettysburg, suggesting he suffered a heart attack, or that Gen. Longstreet waited too long to begin the charge or that cowardly North Carolinians broke and ran, abandoning the brave boys from Virginia.
Seidule is also impressed with Lee’s performance as president of Washington College. He turned the institution from classics to a math-based practical curriculum, fit for rebuilding a region, and tried to launch business and agriculture schools. Letters, however, showed that Lee remained a white supremacist who urged extending as few rights as possible to former slaves.
Neo-Confederates have accused Seidule of “rewriting history.” He responds that it was already rewritten by the Lost Cause mythologizers. A lot of inconvenient facts were omitted from the record, and from Southern school textbooks — the raw facts of slavery, the lynchings of thousands of black men after the war, and Wilmington’s white supremacist 1898 coup, to name a few.
He thinks the record needs to be corrected, if African Americans and others are to have their rightful places in American life. Part of the correction means adjusting the image of Robert E. Lee, a brilliant general who, like Benedict Arnold, betrayed his country in wartime.
Seidule writes with a convert’s zeal, and he confesses to a share of self-righteousness. Yet his arguments and his army of facts, strategically deployed, will pose a formidable obstacle to anyone who cares to argue against him.
Ben Steelman can be reached at 910-616-1788 or peacebsteelman@gmail.com.
BOOK REVIEW
“Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning With the Myth of the Lost Cause”
By Ty Seidule
St. Martin’s Press, $27.99
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