By ERIC FONER, New York Times, AUG. 28, 2017 [original article contains links]
Lee image from article
soldier refers to Robert E. Lee as “the very best.” It is difficult to think of
another song that mentions a general by name. But Lee has always occupied a
unique place in the national imagination. The ups and downs of his reputation
reflect changes in key elements of Americans’ historical consciousness — how we
understand race relations, the causes and consequences of the Civil War and the
nature of the good society.
Born in 1807, Lee was a product of the Virginia gentry — his father a
Revolutionary War hero and governor of the state, his wife the daughter of George
Washington’s adopted son. Lee always prided himself on following the strict moral
code of a gentleman. He managed to graduate from West Point with no disciplinary
demerits, an almost impossible feat considering the complex maze of rules that
governed the conduct of cadets.
While opposed to disunion, when the Civil War broke out and Virginia seceded,
Lee went with his state. He won military renown for defeating (until Gettysburg) a
succession of larger Union forces. Eventually, he met his match in Ulysses S. Grant
and was forced to surrender his army in April 1865. At Appomattox he urged his
soldiers to accept the war’s outcome and return to their homes, rejecting talk of
carrying on the struggle in guerrilla fashion. He died in 1870, at the height of
Reconstruction, when biracial governments had come to power throughout the
South.
But, of course, what interests people who debate Lee today is his connection
with slavery and his views about race. During his lifetime, Lee owned a small
number of slaves. He considered himself a paternalistic master but could also
impose severe punishments, especially on those who attempted to run away. Lee
said almost nothing in public about the institution. His most extended comment,
quoted by all biographers, came in a letter to his wife in 1856. Here he described
slavery as an evil, but one that had more deleterious effects on whites than blacks.
He felt that the “painful discipline” to which they were subjected benefited blacks by
elevating them from barbarism to civilization and introducing them to Christianity.
The end of slavery would come in God’s good time, but this might take quite a while,
since to God a thousand years was just a moment. Meanwhile, the greatest danger to
the “liberty” of white Southerners was the “evil course” pursued by the abolitionists,
who stirred up sectional hatred. [JB emphasis] In 1860, Lee voted for John C. Breckinridge, the
extreme pro-slavery candidate. (A more moderate Southerner, John Bell, carried
Virginia that year.)
Lee’s code of gentlemanly conduct did not seem to apply to blacks. During the
Gettysburg campaign, he did nothing to stop soldiers in his army from kidnapping
free black farmers for sale into slavery. In Reconstruction, Lee made it clear that he
opposed political rights for the former slaves. Referring to blacks (30 percent of
Virginia’s population), he told a Congressional committee that he hoped the state
could be “rid of them.” Urged to condemn the Ku Klux Klan’s terrorist violence, Lee
remained silent.
By the time the Civil War ended, with the Confederate president, Jefferson
Davis, deeply unpopular, Lee had become the embodiment of the Southern cause. A
generation later, he was a national hero. The 1890s and early 20th-century witnessed
the consolidation of white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction South and
widespread acceptance in the North of Southern racial attitudes. A revised view of
history accompanied these developments, including the triumph of what David
Blight, in his influential book “Race and Reunion” (2001), calls a “reconciliationist”
memory of the Civil War. The war came to be seen as a conflict in which both sides
consisted of brave men fighting for noble principles — union in the case of the North,
self-determination on the part of the South. This vision was reinforced by the “cult of
Lincoln and Lee,” each representing the noblest features of his society, each a figure
Americans of all regions could look back on with pride. The memory of Lee, this
newspaper wrote in 1890, was “the possession of the American people.”
Reconciliation excised slavery from a central role in the story, and the struggle
for emancipation was now seen as a minor feature of the war. The Lost Cause, a
romanticized vision of the Old South and Confederacy, gained adherents throughout
the country. And who symbolized the Lost Cause more fully than Lee?
This outlook was also taken up by the Southern Agrarians, a group of writers
who idealized the slave South as a bastion of manly virtue in contrast to the
commercialism and individualism of the industrial North. At a time when traditional
values appeared to be in retreat, character trumped political outlook, and character
Lee had in spades. Frank Owsley, the most prominent historian among the
Agrarians, called Lee “the soldier who walked with God.” (Many early biographies
directly compared Lee and Christ.) Moreover, with the influx of millions of Catholics
and Jews from southern and eastern Europe alarming many Americans, Lee seemed
to stand for a society where people of Anglo-Saxon stock controlled affairs.
Historians in the first decades of the 20th century offered scholarly legitimacy to
this interpretation of the past, which justified the abrogation of the constitutional
rights of Southern black citizens. At Columbia University, William A. Dunning and
his students portrayed the granting of black suffrage during Reconstruction as a
tragic mistake. The Progressive historians — Charles Beard and his disciples —
taught that politics reflected the clash of class interests, not ideological differences.
The Civil War, Beard wrote, should be understood as a transfer of national power
from an agricultural ruling class in the South to the industrial bourgeoisie of the
North; he could tell the entire story without mentioning slavery except in a footnote.
In the 1920s and 1930s, a group of mostly Southern historians known as the
revisionists went further, insisting that slavery was a benign institution that would
have died out peacefully. A “blundering generation” of politicians had stumbled into
a needless war. But the true villains, as in Lee’s 1856 letter, were the abolitionists,
whose reckless agitation poisoned sectional relations. This interpretation dominated
teaching throughout the country, and reached a mass audience through films like
“The Birth of a Nation,” which glorified the Klan, and “Gone With the Wind,” with its
romantic depiction of slavery. The South, observers quipped, had lost the war but
won the battle over its history.
As far as Lee was concerned, the culmination of these trends came in the
publication in the 1930s of a four-volume biography by Douglas Southall Freeman, a
Virginia-born journalist and historian. For decades, Freeman’s hagiography would
be considered the definitive account of Lee’s life. Freeman warned readers that they
should not search for ambiguity, complexity or inconsistency in Lee, for there was
none — he was simply a paragon of virtue. Freeman displayed little interest in Lee’s
relationship to slavery. The index to his four volumes contained 22 entries for
“devotion to duty,” 19 for “kindness,” 53 for Lee’s celebrated horse, Traveller. But
“slavery,” “slave emancipation” and “slave insurrection” together received five.
Freeman observed, without offering details, that slavery in Virginia represented the
system “at its best.” He ignored the postwar testimony of Lee’s former slave Wesley
Norris about the brutal treatment to which he had been subjected. In 1935 Freeman
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in biography.
That same year, however, W. E. B. Du Bois published “Black Reconstruction in
America,” a powerful challenge to the mythologies about slavery, the Civil War and
Reconstruction that historians had been purveying. Du Bois identified slavery as the
fundamental cause of the war and emancipation as its most profound outcome. He
portrayed the abolitionists as idealistic precursors of the 20th-century struggle for
racial justice, and Reconstruction as a remarkable democratic experiment — the
tragedy was not that it was attempted but that it failed. Most of all, Du Bois made
clear that blacks were active participants in the era’s history, not simply a problem
confronting white society. Ignored at the time by mainstream scholars, “Black
Reconstruction” pointed the way to an enormous change in historical interpretation,
rooted in the egalitarianism of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and
underpinned by the documentary record of the black experience ignored by earlier
scholars. Today, Du Bois’s insights are taken for granted by most historians,
although they have not fully penetrated the national culture.
Inevitably, this revised view of the Civil War era led to a reassessment of Lee,
who, Du Bois wrote elsewhere, possessed physical courage but not “the moral
courage to stand up for justice to the Negro.” Even Lee’s military career, previously
viewed as nearly flawless, underwent critical scrutiny. In “The Marble Man” (1977),
Thomas Connelly charged that “a cult of Virginia authors” had disparaged other
Confederate commanders in an effort to hide Lee’s errors on the battlefield. James
M. McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom,” since its publication in 1988 the standard
history of the Civil War, compared Lee’s single-minded focus on the war in Virginia
unfavorably with Grant’s strategic grasp of the interconnections between the eastern
and western theaters.
Lee’s most recent biographer, Michael Korda, does not deny his subject’s
admirable qualities. But he makes clear that when it came to black Americans, Lee
never changed. Lee was well informed enough to know that, as the Confederate vice
president, Alexander H. Stephens, declared, slavery and “the great truth that the
Negro is not equal to the white man” formed the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy;
he chose to take up arms in defense of a slaveholders’ republic. After the war, he
could not envision an alternative to white supremacy.
What Korda calls Lee’s “legend” needs to be retired. And whatever the fate of his
statues and memorials, so long as the legacy of slavery continues to bedevil
American society, it seems unlikely that historians will return Lee, metaphorically
speaking, to his pedestal.
Eric Foner is the author of “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American
Slavery,” winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history. His most recent book is “Battles for
Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History. Essays From The Nation.”
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