By SIMON ROMERO AUG. 22, 2017, New York Times [original article contains links]
Image from article, with caption: Some descendants of Robert E. Lee say the time has eome
for public monuments to their forbear, like the statue in Charlottesville, Va., to
be taken downs; others want them retained
Few American families are as deeply embedded in the nation’s history as the Lees of
Virginia. Members of the clan signed the Declaration of Independence, served the
new nation as judges and generals, lawmakers and governors, and one, Zachary
Taylor, even became president.
For decades, the family appeared to be united [JB emphasis] in promoting the adulation of its
best-known member, the pre-eminent Confederate general Robert E. Lee. But now,
as tempers flare around the country over Confederate monuments and what they
stand for, the Lees are grappling anew with the general’s checkered legacy. And
along with many other families, they are divided over what to do about public statues
of a famous forebear.
“Like so much else in this world, the Lees are complex,” said Blair Lee IV, 72, a
retired real estate developer from Maryland who describes Robert E. Lee as a
“distant cousin.”
“The war pitted brother against brother and cousin against cousin,” he said,
“and we’re still at this today.”
Some of the Lees have issued public calls for the statues to come down, and
want to distance the family from the white supremacists who marched in
Charlottesville, Va., to protest the proposed removal of a Lee statue there.
But others want the monuments to the general to remain where they are, and Blair
Lee is among them, even though he is descended from a branch of the family that
sided with the Union in the Civil War.
“I don’t understand how tearing down Confederate monuments advances the
cause of racial harmony in this country,” said Mr. Lee, whose father was governor of
Maryland in the 1970s. “If we’re looking for people to be angry about, why not erase
the names of English monarchs from many places?”
The statue debate provides a glimpse into how the Lees of today are reacting to
what historians say has been a masterful propaganda campaign aimed at restoring
and bolstering white supremacy in the South through the mythology of the “Lost
Cause.”
White southerners appropriated the term from Sir Walter Scott’s description of
the failed 18th century struggle for Scottish independence, and used it to soften and
romanticize the Confederate rebellion, according to James C. Cobb, a historian.
Robert E. Lee himself opposed building public memorials to the rebellion,
saying they would just keep open the war’s many wounds. But after his death in
1870, admirers in the South made him the centerpiece of the Lost Cause campaign.
His remains are kept in a Virginia mausoleum near those of his wife, their seven
children and even his horse, Traveller — an echo of the reverence some Latin
American nations lavish on their national heroes.
The propagandists insisted that under General Lee, the South had fought nobly
for the principles of self-determination and states’ rights, despite having little hope
of defeating the more industrialized North. Slavery, in their telling, was a side issue,
and had been a fairly benign institution that offered blacks a better life than they
would have had otherwise.
By glossing over the maintenance of slavery as the South’s overriding war aim,
the proponents of what came to be called the Lee cult diverted attention from
General Lee’s own record as a slave owner, and from any discussion of how the Lee
family tree came to include African-Americans.
“There was a rebranding campaign that promoted a total fallacy about what the
Civil War was about,” said Karen Finney, 50, a great-great-great grandniece of
Robert E. Lee. Her mother, Mildred Lee, a social worker, is white; her father, Jim
Finney, a civil rights lawyer, was black.
“It’s simple: my ancestor was a slave owner who fought to preserve slavery,” said
Ms. Finney, who worked as a spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential
campaign. “If his side had won, that system of enslavement would have included me
as well. Supporters of the statues still want to persuade people they’re not about
white supremacy. It’s time to bring the statues down.”
Though they are on different sides of the statue debate, what Ms. Finney and
Blair Lee IV have in common, along with hundreds of other close and distant
relatives, is their ancestral connection to Richard Lee, an early settler of Virginia in
the 17th century who is thought to have come from Shropshire in England’s West
Midlands.
Over the decades, that ancestry came to confer considerable prestige, abetted by
the creation in 1921 of the Society of the Lees of Virginia, an organization to
“promote a better knowledge of the patriotic services of the Lee Family.”
Carter B. Refo, the society’s membership secretary, declined to discuss the
statue issue or the Lee family’s long association with slavery before the Civil War.
“The Society has a policy of not making public statements, so I am unable to help in
that regard,” he said.
Lee descendants maintain a tradition of curating the family’s place in history.
Edmund Jennings Lee compiled a genealogical tome in 1895 that remains an
important reference work on the family. Today, one of the descendants who helps
organize and edit the family’s papers is Robert E.L. DeButts Jr., who works in the
financial crime compliance group at Goldman Sachs.
Much of the admiration for Robert E. Lee centers on his long and distinguished
military career, on his opposition to secession, on claims that he disliked slavery and
on his postwar years, when he supported reconciliation between North and South as
president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) in
Lexington, Va.
“There was this promotion of the general as a Christian gentlemen who only
fought to side with his homeland, the Commonwealth of Virginia,” said Glenn
LaFantasie, a professor of Civil War history at Western Kentucky University. “Of
course, Lee was much more than that, an owner of slaves and a man who sought the
capture of his runaway slaves. He fought to perpetuate slavery.”
When his command, the Army of Northern Virginia, invaded Pennsylvania in
1863, some units went on a spree, kidnapping fugitive slaves for their Confederate
former masters. Lee urged his soldiers to avoid “the perpetuation of barbarous
outrages upon the unarmed,” but did not stop the kidnappings.
Slavery’s importance in forging the fortunes of the Lee family has gained greater
attention through the work of Elise Harding-Davis, 70, a prominent AfricanCanadian
historian who says that she, too, is a relative of Lee’s.
Ms. Harding-Davis said that Lee family documents had corroborated oral
history in her family that Kizzie, her enslaved great-great-great-great-great
grandmother, was a daughter of Lee’s father, Henry Lee III, known as Light-Horse
Harry, a Revolutionary War cavalry commander. That would make Kizzie the
Confederate general’s half sister.
“We don’t take pride in being Lees, but in being pioneers of North America,” Ms.
Harding-Davis said, emphasizing that her ancestors moved to Ontario generations
ago in search of freedom. “When you understand the ugliness of the Civil War, and
what Robert E. Lee fought for, you know that the statues must come down.”
Researchers at Stratford Hall, the historic plantation in Virginia where Lee was
born, have described the kinship claim by Kizzie’s descendants as “tantalizing” and
offered the hope that with further research, “maybe their journey will indeed lead to
the Lees of Stratford.”
Other descendants remain proud of Robert E. Lee, while rejecting what the far
right of today would have him symbolize.
“There are a lot of wonderful things General Lee is known to have done, and this
is the antithesis of what he wanted,” Tracy Lee Crittenberger, 58, said of the violence
in Charlottesville, where white supremacists and their opponents brawled in the
streets and a man plowed his speeding car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing
one woman.
“But we have to acknowledge we’re not living in General Lee’s time period any
more,” said Ms. Crittenberger, an admissions official at the Madeira School, a private
boarding school for girls in McLean, Va. “If communities decide to take the statue
down,” she said, “then I’m not against it.”
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