I don’t think Robert E. Lee is the personification of evil. He was a complicated man who had many admirable qualities. But he made the wrong decision when he decided to commit treason in the defense of slavery, and we need to always keep some key statistics in mind. Approximately 620,000 Americans lost their lives in the Civil War. On the Union side, 360,222 people died preserving the integrity and unity of our nation. You can’t celebrate Gen. Lee’s military genius without taking into consideration his contribution to those numbers.
As you can imagine, it takes a lot of space to bury 360,222 people. The available burial plots in and around northern Virginia filled up quickly.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, most military personnel who died in battle near Washington, D.C., were buried at the United States Soldiers’ Cemetery in Washington, D.C., or Alexandria Cemetery in Alexandria, Virginia, but by late 1863 both were nearly full. On July 16, 1862, Congress passed legislation authorizing the U.S. federal government to purchase land for national cemeteries for military dead, and put the U.S. Army Quartermaster General in charge of this program. In May 1864, Union forces suffered large numbers of dead in the Battle of the Wilderness. Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs ordered that an examination of eligible sites be made for the establishment for a large new national military cemetery. Within weeks, his staff reported that Arlington Estate was the most suitable property in the area. The property was high and free from floods (which might unearth graves), it had a view of the District of Columbia, and it was aesthetically pleasing. It was also the home of the leader of the armed forces of the Confederate States of America, and denying Robert E. Lee use of his home after the war was a valuable political consideration.
It’s nice to pretend that the Arlington Estate’s high ground was a major consideration, but we all know that burying the dead in Robert E. Lee’s yard was a way of punishing him for his treachery and the butchery we was causing to the Union forces. Arlington National Cemetery is the nation’s monument to Robert E. Lee. It is a fully appropriate “fuck you” to a man who was invited to lead the Union’s forces but chose to fight for secession and slavery.
On April 18 [1861], Lee met separately with Francis Preston Blair Sr. and General Winfield Scott. Empowered by Lincoln to “ascertain Lee’s intentions and feelings,” Blair asked Lee to assume command of the army being raised to put down the rebellion. Lee declined the offer and proceeded immediately to Scott’s office, where he recounted his conversation with Blair and reiterated that he would not accept the proffered command. Tradition has it that Scott, a fellow Virginian, replied, “Lee, you have made the greatest mistake of your life; but I feared it would be so.”
That should have been the end to monuments to Robert E. Lee. I don’t often agree with Jay Nordlinger, but I think we’re on the same page here:
Some monuments are meant to record history, it’s true. I think of memorials to the dead. They are very important. Other monuments — probably most of them — are meant to honor the person depicted. He is literally on a pedestal…
…After the collapse of the Soviet Union, people all over the former empire took down statues of Lenin and Stalin. In doing so, they were not eradicating history. They know this history all too well; they want it recorded, faithfully. They did not want Lenin and Stalin honored. They did not believe that these men ought to be on pedestals. So they took them down.
A reader made a point to me: There are no monuments to Hitler. Oddly enough, we manage to remember World War II and the Holocaust.
So, by all means, let’s have our arguments over the Confederate monuments. And let’s not shirk our duty to think. To exercise our powers of discrimination. To try to determine who is worthy of honor and who is not. Let’s not become, or pretend to be, zombies.
We ought to memorialize the dead who fought and defeated Robert E. Lee’s Confederacy, and I think it was pure genius to do so in the yard of the general’s estate. They were worthy of our honor and Gen. Lee was not. When we honor those we’ve lost in war, we do so in a way that is a perpetual rebuke of the treason that Lee committed. For all time, he is held to account for filling the spot with the corpses of American boys who should never have had to go fight his armies. That history cannot and will not be eradicated.
And it was an offense against our nation the second the first statue of Lee was put on pedestal and people were taught to honor his memory. It’s a testament to the tolerance of the victors and our nation’s commitment to free speech that these confederate statues were tolerated for even a moment. To think that people would expect us to keep them up forever out of some kind of faithfulness to history is to confuse an accommodating desire to patch up our nation’s wounds with some kind of consensus that we should let bygones be bygones.
Robert E. Lee made war against his own people of his own free choice. He wasn’t some Georgia farm kid conscripted into a cause he didn’t fully understand. He was asked to put down the rebellion and he chose to lead it instead. That’s why we still bury our fallen soldiers in his yard.
And that’s all the honor he should ever get.
Mr. Longman deserves thanks for this fine post, which is entirely correct. The more one understands about Robert E. Lee’s record, especially with regard to slavery, the less one admires him.
I’d only point out that the proliferation of Lee memorials and other Confederate commemorations did not arise entirely from Northern “tolerance” or “commitment to free speech.” These things resulted from the resurgence of white supremacy in the South that resulted in the end of Reconstruction and the establishment of segregation. And those conditions existed because people in the North simply did not care enough about the millions of African-Americans in the South to continue to defend them against attacks by white people, including KKK terrorism. As Stephen Budiansky makes clear in his excellent book, “The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War,” the struggle to suppress the Klan and related organizations was intense and difficult, but we should be clear about the motives of those who decided, in effect, to let Southern whites win the war after they had lost on the battlefield. White people North and South reconciled literally over the dead bodies of African-Americans.
Nordlingers article is indeed excellent. Hard to see how he doesn’t get the Frum/Bartlett treatment.
The Confederate leaders should have been executed for their treason. Black people in the South have been paying heavily for that error for over 150 years.
Do you think that would have led to a general insurgency and would that hsve been better or worse than what followed.
Well, Nathan Bedford Forrest wouldn’t be alive to form the klan. So that’s better.
Better, traitors don’t get statures. they get hung.
It might have. And then that would have been put down as well.The South lost but because the North didn’t win the peace, the bigoted white folks have acted like they won ever since. Because they have more ‘honor’ or ‘white manners’, or something that has entitled them to believe they can treat anyone that’s not a white straight Southerner like absolute crap.
In Germany and Japan at least we learned our lesson. Execute the worst scum and imprison the rest for the remainder of their natural lives.
Yes, it would have led to extended guerrilla warfare, some of which happened anyway in isolated areas.
Lee had his faults, but one of his best attributes was the loyalty he had from his troops which allowed him to tell them to give up and go home and they did it.
We could have had a decades, if not century, long insurgency. Or a complete dictatorship as happens all too often in such cases.
Thank god he refused the command of union forces, because the likely result would have been a union loss. While he was very good on tactics, he had very little understanding of strategy, had no use for logistics, and threw his men’s lives away needlessly. Longstreet, Grant, Sherman, Thomas were all better generals.
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Curious why you would include James Longstreet in your list, as he was an abject failure in every independent command he was ever given and was an obstinate insubordinate officer to boot.
As an egomaniac, he did have a wonderfully inflated view of his “genius” and talents, much like the current CEO of FailedNation Inc. And he did do a wonderful job of lying about his record and manifest failures after the war…
All one need do is take a look at today’s political map and our ineradicable Neo-Confederacy to see that the Civil War was (disastrously) permitted to continue as a cold war–although as afdiplomat notes the Southern states were permitted to use terrorism “against their own people”, to use a famous Bushism. The decision to allow the rise of the “Noble Cause” mentality/inculturation was catastrophic and has had immense long term consequences, including the likely doom of the nation politically, economically and environmentally.
Given that the lion’s share of today’s recruits come from the Neo-Confederacy, the nation’s military is riven with Noble Cause-ism.
Lee, of course, did advocate that Southerners “make your sons Americans” after the war. Wonder what his thoughts on the nation would be now….
Lee himself called succession nothing but revolution.
Either way, if you lose, you are the traitor unless you skip out to England or such like Arnold.
By the way, where are all those statues of ol’ Benedict anyway? After all, he’s a part of history too.
Well stated about “Bobby” Lee. His treason caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands in a war clearly prolonged by his military genius. And, he fought to the very bitter end at Appomattox.
Kinda like the Germans defending Berlin from the Russians in 1945.
I have no sympathy for or gauzy “the Lost Cause” sentimentality about him. Pull down those statues!
Losers and traitors don’t get participation awards.
I rarely differ with your political analysis, Martin. In fact, I admire your insights. When it comes to historical analysis, however, we have our differences.
You wrote, “It’s a testament to the tolerance of the victors and our nation’s commitment to free speech that these confederate statues were tolerated for even a moment.” In my view it’s a testament to the depth of our history of racial prejudice and evidence of our willingness to sacrifice the interests of black people to appease whites as well as our willingness to sweep important issues under the rug.
As for Lee, I agree he made a mistake. But in saying that I’m voicing my subjective view of right and wrong. In those days, the United States was still a confederation of separate republics. My understanding of Lee is that he thought the rebellion a bad idea but felt honor bound to fight for his country, which he viewed as the state of Virginia.
Notions of “nation” are essentially glorified notions of tribe or clan. We are wired as humans to identify our group as “ins” and everyone else as “outs”. This is the source of racial prejudice. We have empathy for our own kind and a lack of it for others. We can overcome this by learning to think of broader groups as kin but it doesn’t come naturally. All of us are bigoted. My bigotry may be toward Texans rather than African-Americans. It’s bigotry just the same.
Like all people, Lee is complex. I don’t feel qualified to stand in judgment. No one can know what’s within another person’s heart. I’m grateful that the people of the time had the moxie to take his estate and make it the national cemetery, which does feel like a fitting memorial to the real history of the time. It’s a beautiful memorial.
I am in agreement that memorials to confederate leaders are inappropriate and should be brought down, that they show not a love of history but a willingness to tolerate hatred and bigotry. I have no problem with those who believe otherwise preserving them on private property. That’s free speech and expression in action. I do have an issue with giving them an honored place on public land.
Booman writes:
I wonder what those dead would be thinking now regarding our “integrity and unity.”
“Corruption and disunity” would be more like it…right on up and down the political, social and economic ladders.
It took less than 100 years after the Civil War’s end for the first really effective shot to be fired in the attack on the “integrity and unity” of the U.S.
JFK’s murder.
Followed by the murders of RFK, MLK Jr. and Malcolm X.
Coup accompli.
Bet on it.
AG
He was a slave owner, don’t forget, and apparently not the “benevolent” type.
Isn’t there some sort of odd angle to Lee’s slave ownership? Like, technically the slaves belonged to his wife’s family, not his[*]? I just recall back in the day (before the Declaration of Causes documents were well known) that some apologists liked to to trot out the idea the Lee did not actually own slaves as a reason the war wasn’t about slavery.
* Not that this made a huge difference in practice. But the apologists loved them some technicalities
Have to check that, but my emphasis should have been on his treatment of his (or his wife’s) slaves. He was not a kindly overseer.
Oh, I’m not arguing with you at all! I was just trying to recall that little ownership technicality and am too lazy to research it now, even via google.
One thing he did that is beyond dispute, that defines him as a man,
During his invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania, before the battle of Gettysburg, he captured Freeman (NOT escaped slaves) and sent them south to be enslaved.
That more than anything, explains how he felt about slavery.
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A good review on this subject by Ta-Nahesi Coates: Arlington, Bobby Lee, and the ‘Peculiar Institution’
Lee had owned slaves, but as he didn’t have land wealth, he hired them out; so, he earned income from his slaves. At least until 1852. Coates leaves out that Lee continued to own Nancy and her children that Lee inherited from his mother. There’s no record after that as to his personal ownership of slaves. However, his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, had significant land holdings and owned a large number of slaves, inherited from his grandfather, Daniel Parke Custis, who had died when his father, John Parke Custis, was a young child. George Washington raised both John Parke Custis and his son GW Parke Custis.
GW Parke Custis died Oct 1857 and in his will appointed Lee as his executor. Per his will, Custis’ slaves were to be freed, but (and here’s the interesting wrinkle) at the time of the executor’s choosing but no later than five years after Custis’ death which would have been Oct 1862. This was tied up in probate for several years with the Custis slaves claiming that they were free as of the death of GWP Custis. It is during this period that the record of Lee’s brutality towards the slaves is reasonably clear.
Lee executed the emancipation proclamation on 8 Jan 1863. Curiously including Nancy and her children.
I don’t disagree, but you’re a little late to this particular party, ain’tcha? 🙂
Nice to see this post. I have long believed these southern war leaders were traitors. Their monuments need to be put in museums and the KKK and affiliated white supremacist groups, in particular the neo Nazis completely eliminated.
This is the only statue there should be any controversy over:
Lee Chapel, Washington and Lee University, Lexington VA
And to their credit, at Washington and Lee there has been controversy already.
All other statues are matters of propaganda, intentionally promoted as such at that time. The expiration date on that propaganda is well past the rotten fish criterion. They all should be recycled new artworks. A statue of Bree Newsome climbing the South Carolina State House Confederate Monument flagpole, for example. Or Colin Kapearnick kneeling.
Great post, I wasn’t aware about that re. the location selection for Arlington National Cemetery.
Taking a step back, and (impossibly) ignoring the issues that precipitated the Civil War, I’m always amazed at how regions are harshly punished for even thinking about leaving a larger union. There should be an easy “Brexit” clause in every constitution (or similar) where if some portion of the population wants to split off it can with a simple vote. I imagine it’s national leaders who promote the punishing, as they stand to lose tax revenue and stature? All thing being equal, there isn’t anything inherently immoral or radical about wanting to split off.
Hell, I wish all those red states that hate the American experiment would secede, good riddance.
But it wasn’t Lee’s estate. On the death of her father, Mary Randolph Lee inherited a life interest in the property and on her death, her eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, inherited it. Perhaps more fitting that Lee’s son’s inheritance became a graveyard.
Would be interesting to know what’s on square 21 today, the property that Lee inherited directly from his f-i-l, and presumably passed down to him from his step-grandfather, George Washington.