by Ty Seidule
The trustees then begged Mary Custis Lee to allow her husband’s body to “remain forever within the walls of this College.” Their plan was to create a mausoleum in the basement and add a monument to Lee’s glory. Together, the chapel would “stand as a perpetual memorial of his virtues.”16 They wanted to make the best case possible to Mrs. Lee to keep her husband’s body in Lexington.
Richmond and Lexington literally fought over Lee’s dead body. Richmond, which sent a delegation to see Mary Lee, argued that the Confederate general’s greatest battles were in its vicinity. Moreover, Hollywood Cemetery interred some of Virginia’s greatest heroes. More than twenty-five years after his death, President James Monroe’s body had been moved from a grave in New York City to Hollywood.17 Many Confederate veterans, including those who served under Lee, wanted to see their hero enshrined in Richmond with so many other fallen comrades. By having Lee’s tomb in Richmond, the capital city would maintain its status as the Lost Cause mecca.
Lexington, however, had the stronger case. First, Mary Lee was nearly an invalid from arthritis; she lived in Lexington and wasn’t moving to Richmond. Second, even before her husband died, the trustees offered her a lifetime lease on the president’s home plus an annual pension of $3,000. Another powerful incentive to stay in Lexington. Third, the trustees named Lee’s son Custis, a professor at VMI, as the next president. As Judge John Brockenbrough, the head of the board of trustees, said, “The Son of General R. E. Lee was the most fit person” to lead the newly named Washington and Lee University. Lee’s burial spot would remain in Lexington with his widow and son so closely linked to the newly named Washington and Lee University.18
The trustees did not choose Custis Lee for his skills as an academic leader. In fact, Lee’s son hated every minute of the job he kept for twenty-six years. He tried repeatedly to resign, but even that he could not accomplish. The school withered under his leadership. By 1882, Washington and Lee University’s enrollment had dipped to fewer than a hundred. Most of the academic innovations started by Lee were dropped by his son. For the trustees, Custis Lee’s job performance meant less than his pedigree.19
As a student, all I knew of Custis Lee was that he was buried in the family crypt. I went down to the Lee Chapel basement on more than one occasion and saw the mausoleum of the Lee family, and only the Lee family, stacked three high behind an iron rail. In the center stack, Mary Custis Lee, Lee’s daughter who died in 1918, occupied the top row. Underneath the daughter lay her mother, Lee’s wife, also named Mary Custis Lee. On the first row just off center was his father, “Light-Horse” Harry Lee of Revolutionary War fame. Light-Horse Harry’s remains were reinterred in the mausoleum in 1913 from his original burial plot in South Carolina.
Robert E. Lee’s burial spot is center on the bottom row with only the following words: “GENL ROBERT EDWARD LEE.” The family and the trustees knew that Lee’s fame was not as college president but as Confederate general. The college would use and further General Lee’s legend to raise funds throughout the South and eventually the nation.
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AFTER HIS DEATH, the chapel would change from a place where, as the historian Christopher Lawton put it, “Lee could worship God to one where the Lost Cause faithful could ‘worship’ Lee.” One student, C. C. Brown, reminisced that after Lee died, he would often visit the general’s tomb to pray and contemplate Lee’s holiness.20
The books I read as a child—Meet Robert E. Lee, the Virginia textbooks, Song of the South, and Gone With the Wind—came to life in Lee Chapel. I might not have known the history, but I could feel the veneration inside the hallowed ground of Lee Chapel. A more recent W&L grad chose it as her wedding location because “Lee Chapel feels more sacred than any church I’ve ever walked into.” I would have wholeheartedly agreed with her.21
When I attended W&L, the chapel made no mention of slavery or racial violence. Lee Chapel wasn’t the Klan’s stronghold. No. That was too déclassé. Here trod the power elite of the white southern ruling class, a more important part of the system of white supremacy, in a way, than the Klan, and I was happy to be a part of it. I had walked into a white southern aristocratic stronghold, yet many of my classmates were from the North. Clearly the Lee mystique held firm for the entire nation.
Inside the chapel, I noticed the spare design with simple wooden pews. I noticed the absence of the Book of Common Prayer and hymnals. In fact, no Christian imagery adorned the chapel at all. No crucifix. No listing of the hymns. No purpose-built pulpit. This chapel was missing most of the elements I knew belonged in a place of worship, and I knew my way around a church.
After confirmation at age twelve, I served as an Episcopalian acolyte all the way through high school. As a junior and senior, I was the head acolyte at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Monroe, styling in a white alb (robe) with a cincture (rope) around my waist. The church is like the army, with its own uniform, rules, and lingo. I lit candles, carried the cross, rang bells, handed out the offering plates, and assisted with the Eucharist. I knew my Episcopalian rites and traditions.
Lee was an Episcopalian, like most of the Virginia planter class. While not a consecrated church, Lee Chapel, like all mainline Protestant churches, has an apse or sanctuary. Episcopalians consider the sanctuary a holy place because it surrounds the altar, except we don’t call it an altar. Episcopalians call it “the Lord’s Table” or “the Holy Table.” At the Lord’s Table, the priest prepares the bread and wine to become the Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ.
When I looked at the sanctuary of Lee Chapel, I saw the altar, the Holy Table. Except that on top of the table lay Robert E. Lee’s statue. My school worshipped Robert E. Lee, literally. When I first saw Lee on the altar, I figured it was his sarcophagus with “the General’s” remains entombed in stone, like Napoleon in Paris or Grant in New York. Instead, Lee is buried in a mausoleum underneath the monument. In 1861, Napoleon had been reburied in Les Invalides in Paris in a red stone sarcophagus. Grant would eventually be buried in a red granite sarcophagus too. The Lee monument’s sculptor eschewed red for the whitest marble he could find. White to match the “Stainless Banner” of the Confederate national flag. White to show Lee’s purity, and, perhaps, white to show the people he fought to protect.22
At Lee Chapel, we had a church dedicated to the southern saint. Protestants don’t believe in relics, the bones or personal effects of a saint used to venerate the person. I have seen plenty of relics. When we were stationed in Naples, Italy, during the Balkan Wars, we took our young sons to dozens of beautiful churches, many of them started on the site of a saint’s martyrdom or burial. I would see old men and women whispering prayers to the bones of their saint, asking for favors or advice. It was the same at Lee Chapel. Buried beneath the sanctuary was Robert E. Lee, and the altar was his statue. Often students would go into the chapel when confronted by stress or tragedy, looking for help in the Church of Lee. We worshipped at the grave of the southern saint.
Another religious relic resided outside the basement mausoleum and Lee’s office—the buried remains of Traveller, Lee’s warhorse. Traveller died soon after Lee. The horse stepped on a nail, developed tetanus, and had to be euthanized. Lee’s son Custis had the horse buried in a ravine behind the Colonnade. In 1874, his bones were disinterred and began a circuitous journey. First to Rochester, New York, to a “museologist” who promised to preserve the bones. He never sent them back. Forgotten, the bones remained out of Lexington for thirty years.23
In 1907, the centennial of Lee’s birth, Traveller returned to Lexington. Someone screwed the bones together as a skeleton and displayed it in a natural history museum on campus. Students would carve their initials in the bones for luck on exams. In 1929, the skeleton moved to the Lee Chapel museum. When the chapel was fully restored in the 1960s, the bones had deteriorated beyond repair. Finally, in 1971, Traveller’s remains were buried in a wooden box under a concrete vault as close as possible to Lee’s office so the horse was close to his
master. Visitors place carrots and apples on Traveller’s grave and pennies as well. Always heads down. No one wanted to have the hated Lincoln’s face visible to Lee’s grave. Traveller’s bones became another relic for pilgrims, and Lee Chapel became the St. Peter’s Basilica of the Lost Cause religion.24
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IN THE CHAPEL’S sanctuary, its apse, resides the “Recumbent Lee” statue. Lee naps on a battlefield cot, “in repose.” Dressed in his Confederate uniform with his sword in hand, Lee looks like a medieval knight ready to fight the next Crusade for Christendom. Lee had his own crusade, ready to awaken at any moment to refight for his people, the white people of the South. Ready to fight for his “social system,” racial hierarchy.
The statue’s symbolism is clear. Lee’s right hand rests over his heart showing his Christian sense of righteousness and duty to fight for his people. A blanket covers his Confederate uniform, except for his sword hand and his boots. Lee looks ready for violence to execute his duty. To prove his willingness to battle for his people, his left hand grasps the sword’s scabbard. The statue’s bedding rests on a platform with the Virginia seal, not Christian iconography, as though the monument and Lee himself belong to the state. Lee’s recumbent statue represents the Lost Cause as clearly as anything else in the South.25
The “Recumbent Lee” conformed to his widow’s specifications. Lee himself made clear that he wanted no monuments created or battlefields saved. When he died, that sentiment died with him. Mary Lee told a member of the memorial committee that she had studied “with earnestness the best models approved in Christendom.” The ones she liked more than any other were the recumbent statues of Queen Louise and Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. Choosing Prussian monarchs as the example for her husband’s memorial seems odd.26
Louise died in 1810, three years after Prussia’s humiliating defeat by Napoleon’s Grande Armée at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt. After Napoleon’s victory over Prussia, he crushed the Russians at Friedland the next year. I know those battles well. I taught them for years. After leading a discussion of the campaigns, I would show a picture of the defeated Russian and Prussian emperors at Tilsit with the victorious Napoleon. For the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, ending hostilities, Napoleon forced Prussia to sign away nearly half its territory. I told cadets that some said Queen Louise died of grief over the French occupation of her country.27
Louise’s husband, Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm III, died in 1840, and he too has a recumbent statue. Friedrich Wilhelm’s statue has his boots uncovered by the blanket that covers Louise completely. Lee’s statue also has his boots crossed and uncovered. A symbol of readiness to awaken and fight again. The statue also links to the tradition of the chivalric knights of the medieval period, ready to fight for Christendom. Lee the white knight who fought and will fight for his people; his sword will never dull. Even defeat and death will not stop him from doing his duty for God and the white people of the South.
Mary Lee chose Prussian royalty to serve as the example for her husband. Napoleon had been reburied in the enormous Les Invalides in 1861. She could have linked her husband to the French emperor and military genius who was finally defeated by all the powers of Europe. Instead, she chose the Prussian king and queen. Mary Lee saw similarities between Friedrich Wilhelm and Louise and Robert and herself. At Louise’s death, the famed Prussian marshal Gebhard von Blücher said, “Our saint is in heaven.” Louise came to be seen as Prussia’s guardian angel, “the soul of national virtue.”28
Mary Lee also knew that Prussia’s situation had changed recently. Louise and Friedrich Wilhelm’s son Kaiser Wilhelm I led a resurgent nation. In September 1870, Prussia resoundingly defeated the French at the Battle of Sedan. I taught that battle too. The Franco-Prussian War led to a united Germany and forced France to give up the province of Alsace-Lorraine. The thumping German victory in 1870, avenging the 1806 Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, came only a month before Lee died. Could Mary Lee have thought that one day, decades in the future, the South would also prevail, seeing Robert E. Lee and Mary Lee as their guardian angels?
Prussia had similarities to the Old South. Like Mary Lee’s slave-owning planter class, Prussia’s landed aristocracy, called Junkers, owned vast estates worked by peasants with few rights. The Junkers also had a well-earned reputation as fierce warriors. Perhaps Mary Lee saw similarities between the Custis-Lee family, once the South’s landed aristocratic-warriors, and the Prussian Junkers. She chose the new Lee monument to be like that of a sainted figure of Prussia who lost the first battle but whose new country, Germany, won the war. In a way, her choice seems prescient. The South lost the war but won the battle for the narrative, the history of the war.
Mary Lee chose the sculptor as well. Edward Virginius Valentine had the right middle name; that’s for sure. Mary wanted a Virginian. Valentine’s studio was in Richmond. Mary knew that Valentine trained in Berlin with a student of the artist who created the original Prussian royal recumbent statues.29
In the summer of 1870, Valentine traveled to Lexington, and Lee sat for the artist. As Valentine would later remark, “My intercourse with the General during the weeks of the Summer of 1870 is among my most treasured memories.”30 Valentine’s work would be hailed throughout the South and eventually the nation. In 1909, the State of Virginia commissioned Valentine to create a standing sculpture of Lee in his Confederate uniform. Today, that statue still resides in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, although Virginia is now debating whether to remove it.31
When the completed recumbent statue was moved from Richmond, thousands of white Virginians came to view the cavalcade, as though the actual body of Lee were moving from the capital. One newspaper reporter recorded his impressions of the procession, which included “every man, woman, and child in the city … One could well imagine a procession of the silent, powerless specters of the ‘Lost Cause’ moving before him.” The white citizens of Richmond showed their veneration of Lee and the Lost Cause myth.32
When it arrived in Lexington, VMI cadets greeted the statue with a thirteen-gun salute to start another procession. One Richmond newspaper declared the statue would make Lexington the “Mecca of the South.” During the dedication ceremony in 1883, the future Virginia senator John W. Daniel likened Lee to Christ, calling him “the Priest of his people.”33 With the dedication of the recumbent statue, Lee became the Marble Man.34
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WHEN I FIRST took my wife and two sons, then fourteen and twelve, to my alma mater, we went into Lee Chapel. We started downstairs in the mausoleum, museum, and Lee’s office, unchanged in more than 140 years. My wife was already mumbling about the reverential treatment accorded Lee. Then we went up and looked inside the chapel. Shari’s face went ashen. “Oh my God. That’s awful!”
“What is?” I answered, feeling defensive. It was like our first date all over again. Shari would upbraid me for my southern gentleman upbringing.
“Lee is the altar,” she gasped. “Get me out of here!”
Our boys tried to take my side, telling their mom not to be mean about my school, but she was having none of it. Raised a Catholic, she understood that having Lee on the altar in the sanctuary meant only one thing. My school—and I—worshipped a Confederate general. She was right. When the class of 1984 went in Lee Chapel, we genuflected at the altar of Saint Bob, as we called him. His recumbent statue was sacred space, commanding the sanctuary and every view within the chapel. At Washington and Lee, we had a god much more tangible, and one worshipped far more openly than Jesus. Robert E. Lee was God, and his Confederate cause was the one true religion.
Lee Chapel had other relics to revere too. Lee’s office in the basement, unchanged, was a relic. In the sanctuary with the statue were Confederate Battle Flags. The flags came on loan from the Museum of the Confederacy. The U.S. Army had captured nearly all the flags during Civil War battles. As a sign of goodwill, the U.S. Army returned the flags in 1906. Several of them came to Lee Chapel, where they remained on display, either or
iginals or replicas, until African American law students successfully petitioned for their removal in 2014. The flags reinforced the formal setting of the Shrine of the South. So too did the speakers who used the pulpit to reinforce Lee the deity and the Lost Cause.35
For more than a hundred years, Lee Chapel would be the location to further the Lee cult and with it the racist lies of the Lost Cause. The Lee cult started at his death, but it took decades to write and spread the gospel not just in the South but across the country. Lee’s funeral procession snaked through town for hours. Hundreds arrived to pay their respects to his casket and at the funeral. Of course, no record exists of any African Americans at the funeral.
The board of trustees invited Jefferson Davis to give the eulogy on Lee’s birthday, January 19, 1871, but he declined. Despite Davis’s absence, the board declared that Washington and Lee University would celebrate Lee’s birthday from that day forward. Later, the day Lee died would also be added to the celebratory calendar.36
In 1872, the university invited Jubal Early to speak on Lee’s sixty-fifth birthday. Early would become the Saint Peter of the Lee cult, creating and spreading the gospel of the Confederate chieftain. An 1837 West Point graduate, Early began the Civil War as an unlikely champion of the Lost Cause myth. He was a strong unionist in 1861. As he wrote in his postwar memoir, “I opposed secession with all the ability I possessed.” True, but when Virginia did secede, he never looked back. Fitzhugh Lee, Lee’s nephew, remarked that once Early drew his sword for war, “he was never after able to find the scabbard.”37
During the war, Early served in positions of increasing responsibility from brigade to division to corps commander, fighting in most of the major battles in the eastern theater including Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg. Given an independent command in 1864, Early led a force that expelled David Hunter, who had sacked Lexington, out of the Shenandoah Valley. Then he went north, threatening Washington before ordering the burning of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, as retaliation against Hunter’s depredations in Virginia.