Last week, after months of debate and protests following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in the middle of the pandemic-infused chaos of 2020, the Robert E. Lee statue that has stood guard over Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, finally came down and was "chopped into pieces" as some news accounts reported.
Appropriate not only in the wake of the George Floyd killing and the push to erase hatred from our history, but also in the wake of the January 6 riot at the Capitol Building fomented by then-president Donald Trump.
Now that his statue has been removed, it is time to finally dismantle the history about Robert E. Lee that many have been taught in schools.
First and foremost. Lee was a traitor and a stone-cold loser.
No general in United States history was defeated as unequivocally and as totally as Lee. For all his supposed strategic skill, his army was entirely destroyed. One-quarter of those who served under him were killed, and an additional half were wounded or captured. He was a traitor to the United States who killed more United States soldiers than any other enemy in the nation’s history, for the supremely evil cause of slavery. To boot, he was a cruel enslaver and a promoter of white supremacy until his death.
It is ridiculous that, in the year 2021, these simple truths are in dispute. But here we are.
As the massive statue of Lee and his horse finally came down from its pedestal, former president Donald Trump, the unquestioned leader of the Republican Party, penned an impassioned defense of the Confederate commander. It was ugly in its embrace of the themes that have powered white supremacists for generations. It was also fake history.
I will dismantle historical "Facts" about Lee, based on Trump's letter. (My facts are in parentheses). Trump wrote, "Robert E. Lee is considered by many Generals to be the greatest strategist of them all (He was defeated and his army was destroyed). President Lincoln wanted him to command the North, in which case the war would have been over in one day. (If it had, then slavery would have lasted much longer. Emancipation did not become policy until 1863). Robert E. Lee instead chose the other side because of his great love of Virginia, (Lee was one of eight United States Army colonels from Virginia at the time of secession in 1861.
The other seven remained loyal to the United States - as did Virginian Winfield Scott, the United States Army’s commander, and 80 percent of all colonels from the South. Lee was actually the outlier because no other officer benefited from slavery more than he did. Lee ran an enslaved-labor farm - a plantation - from 1857 to 1860. He was not even a resident of Virginia for most of his prewar life; Alexandria, his hometown, was part of the District of Columbia until 1847). And, except for Gettysburg, would have won the war. (The day after Gettysburg, Ulysses S. Grant triumphed at Vicksburg, giving the United States Army control of the Mississippi River and splitting the Confederacy. Lee’s army could not function without thousands of enslaved people working as servants or in factories and on farms, and after Vicksburg, they lost all that enslaved labor as the United States Army pushed into the South.) He should be remembered as perhaps the greatest unifying force after the war was over (Grant called Lee’s actions "forced acquiescence"that was “grudging and pernicious.” Though more conciliatory than others, Lee testified to Congress in 1866 that black residents “cannot vote intelligently” and that “it would be better for Virginia if she could get rid of them.” In 1868, Lee joined in issuing the White Sulphur Springs manifesto, which argued that black people had “neither the intelligence nor the qualifications … for political power.”)… If only we had Robert E. Lee to command our troops in Afghanistan, that disaster would have ended in a complete and total victory many years ago (If the United States military had suffered the same casualty rate in Afghanistan that Lee’s army did, 200,000 American troops would have been killed, not the actual 2,400. Some 400,000 would have been injured or captured instead of 20,000 injured.) What an embarrassment we are suffering because we don’t have the genius of a Robert E. Lee!”
All those talking points were developed by leaders of Jim Crow repression who chose Lee as the dignified, slightly tragic hero of their fanciful retelling of what they called “The War Between the States.” They painted Lee as an honorable man, personally opposed to slavery, who reluctantly chose loyalty to his state of Virginia over allegiance to the Union - and who, albeit in a losing cause, was the most brilliant general in United States history.
Neither Lee nor his statue deserves a pedestal.
Now that the statue of Robert E. Lee that towered over the onetime capital of the Confederacy has been cut into pieces and hauled away to some obscure warehouse, maybe the weaponized myth of Lee as a great man - or even a good one - can finally be mothballed as well.
Lee’s bronze equestrian likeness, erected in 1890, was the most imposing of the “lost cause” memorials that once lined leafy Monument Avenue in Richmond. And it represented the biggest lie.
Southern propagandists concocted and embellished the Lee myth toward the end of the 19th century, as part of a larger justification for erasing the gains made by African Americans during Reconstruction and imposing a system of state-approved white supremacy. One of the true good things it is possible to say about Lee, who had died 20 years earlier, is that he would have been among the first to object, in an effort to close the sores of war.
Now, for the truth about Lee.
Lee was a traitor. A graduate of West Point, he decided to take up arms against the nation he had sworn an oath to serve. The choice he made cost hundreds of thousands of Americans their lives. Treason was, and remains, a capital crime. Abraham Lincoln was determined to seek reconciliation at any cost, “with malice toward none with charity for all.” But following the surrender at Appomattox Court House, the president would have had every legal and moral right to have Lee promptly court-martialed and hanged.
Not only did Lee and his wife, Mary Custis, own slaves inherited from his mother and her father, but Lee actually petitioned Virginia courts to allow him to keep some of those people enslaved for longer than the five years specified in his father-in-law’s will. The debts their labor helped him pay off were apparently more important than their freedom. Lee did refer to slavery in a prewar 1856 letter as “a moral & political evil,” but argued that the institution was “a greater evil to the white man than to the black race” and asserted that the “painful discipline” enslaved black people were suffering was “necessary for their instruction as a race.”
When an enslaved man and woman escaped the plantation and were recaptured, Lee had them whipped - hard. According to reports, Lee then ordered that their lacerated backs be doused with brine. And Lee was particularly ruthless in separating families, hiring out husbands, wives and children to different distant plantations.
When Lee’s renowned Army of Northern Virginia invaded Pennsylvania, its soldiers abducted free African Americans and sent them south into slavery. At the Battle of the Crater in 1864, as in many Civil War encounters, black Union soldiers who tried to surrender were not taken as prisoner. Instead, they were massacred on the spot - by troops under Lee’s command.
And as for Lee’s alleged military genius? One stubborn fact interferes with the myth: He lost the war.
Lee is indeed credited as a gifted hit-and-run tactician. But his strategic decision to engage the Union in a conventional battle of massed armies at Gettysburg was a monumental blunder. Throughout the war, Lee had the advantage of fighting on friendly terrain with overwhelming civilian support. Still, he got pummeled into unconditional surrender.
Appropriately, there was remarkably little fanfare about the removal of the Lee statue.
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