by Ty Seidule
After Early’s destruction of a civilian city, Grant ordered Philip Sheridan, West Point class of 1853, to find Early and destroy his force. Outnumbered and outgeneraled, Early was eventually crushed by Sheridan and lost the confidence of white southerners in the Shenandoah Valley. As one Charlottesville woman wrote in her diary in 1864, “Oh! how are the mighty fallen! Gen. Early came in town this evening with six men, having been hid somewhere in the mountains. He used to be a very great man.”38
After an uproar from fellow Virginians about Early’s generalship, Lee gently but firmly fired him. Early would not go quietly into retirement. Relieved of command before Appomattox, Early went west to join the Confederate fight in the trans-Mississippi theater. After hearing about Lee’s surrender, he left the United States “to get out from the rule of the infernal Yankees. I cannot live under the same government with our enemies. I go therefore into voluntary exile.” After stops in Cuba and Mexico, he settled in Canada for four years. His time abroad made him bitter at the Confederate loss and even less willing to accept defeat. As he said from his perch in exile in 1867, “I have got to that condition, that I think I could scalp a Yankee woman and child without winking my eyes.”39
Even before Reconstruction had started in earnest, Early wrote a memoir that put forward most of the Lost Cause ideas. It was the first memoir written by a senior commander on either side and shaped the dominant view not only in the South but eventually in the entire country. Early argued that the war was about not slavery but the “inestimable right of self-government.” The enslaved became a “class of laborers as happy and contented as any in the world, if not more so.” The South lost because of the overwhelming combat power and the “cruelty and barbarity of the Federal Commanders.”40
Early also retained his prewar views of African Americans. Many southerners abandoned the notion that slavery was a positive good but not Early. He argued that the outcome of the war did not show that God had punished white southerners. “Providence has no more condemned us on account of slavery, and therefore permitted our overthrow by our enemies, than it condemned Job.” White southerners, he argued, were the victims of northern might, but the Confederates were right by God. “In the dispensations of Providence, it has repeatedly happened that the right has failed, and the wrong has been triumphant.” Emancipation represented the “grievous wrong,” not slavery.41
Early believed that God ordained white supremacy, and no matter what the cost white southerners must maintain the racial hierarchy of the slave era. The preface to Early’s 1866 memoir could not be more clear. “Reason, common sense, true humanity to the black, as well as safety to the white race, required that the inferior race should be kept in a state of subordination.”42
Early returned to the United States in 1869, realizing that a new war would need fighting. Who would control the meaning of the war, the history of the war? Early would prove a more formidable presence writing and lecturing than he was as a Confederate general in the Shenandoah Valley. Until his death in 1894, he would follow a simple formula when writing or lecturing about the war. Robert E. Lee was the greatest general not only in “the War Between the States” but in human history.
The Army of Northern Virginia lost, Early wrote, only because of overwhelming odds fighting a mechanistic northern army far superior in men and matériel, but not in fighting spirit. Ulysses S. Grant could not compare with Lee in any way and was not fit to brush the mud off Traveller’s horseshoe. Stonewall Jackson was at the right hand of the Christlike Lee, and his death at Chancellorsville was the great tragedy of the war. James Longstreet was to blame for the “unpleasantness” at Gettysburg. Certainly not Lee. Finally, the only area of the war that mattered was the fight in and around Virginia.43
Early’s Lee Chapel speech in 1872, which was later turned into a widely sold pamphlet, hit every point. On the stage of Lee Chapel, Early gave one of the earliest and most complete versions of the Lost Cause defense. He compared Lee to every magnificent warrior in military history including Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, Marlborough, Napoleon, and Wellington. That’s quite a list. I taught their campaigns for years. Collectively, they are known as the great captains of military history. None could compare, said Early, to the greatest of all time, Robert E. Lee. He was not only the greatest soldier of the Civil War; he was the greatest soldier in the history of military annals. Early even said that Lee was a far greater general than Washington.44
If Lee compared favorably to the great captains of military history, he towered over Grant. Early compared Lee with “the Great Pyramid which rears its majestic proportions in the valley of the Nile,” while Grant was “a pygmy perched on Mount Atlas.” Toward the end of his speech, Early declared, “Our beloved Chief stands, like some lofty column which rears its head among the highest, in grandeur, simple, pure and sublime, needing no borrowed luster; and he is all our own.”45
Early would continue to set the course of the war’s history with supreme effect, leading the Southern Historical Society, which would brook no criticism of Lee. As the person who wrote first, he set the understanding of the war for me, though I didn’t know it. Most of the Lee biographers would channel Early well into the second half of the twentieth century. Any person who went into Lee Chapel could almost hear the echo of Early’s sermon as the high priest of the Lee cult.
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EARLY’S 1872 SPEECH represented the nineteenth-century Lee cult as a southern phenomenon. A speech in Lee Chapel on the centennial of Lee’s birth represents Lee as a figure of national reverence. In 1906, W&L’s energetic president, George H. Denny, looked to use the Lee centennial to bring attention and resources to Lexington. Denny had assumed the presidency of the university at the age of thirty. He quickly brought W&L’s finances back to solvency and the enrollment to levels not seen since Lee was college president.46
Denny needed a national figure to talk at the January 1907 ceremony marking the centennial of Lee’s birth, which would be a major celebration throughout the South. Denny knew the day was an opportunity for Washington and Lee University to reach a national audience and prime a fund-raising drive.
His choice of speaker was both daring and brilliant. He persuaded Charles Francis Adams Jr. to talk. The great-grandson and the grandson of U.S. presidents, Adams had written on Lincoln’s election that “the country had once and for all thrown off the domination of the Slaveholders.” During the war, Brigadier General Adams fought in the U.S. Army. A veteran of the Antietam and Gettysburg campaigns, he led a U.S. Colored Troop Cavalry Regiment into Richmond at the war’s end.47
Despite Adams’s Yankee pedigree, Denny knew he would treat Lee kindly. In a 1901 speech on the Civil War, Adams praised Lee’s choice to surrender, thereby creating “a new national life.” The entire country, argued Adams, owed Lee an “infinite debt of gratitude.” Adams argued in another speech a year later that Lee’s actions were so important he deserved a monument in the nation’s capital. By 1900, Lee had become a national figure and, along with Lincoln, the most famous and admired man of the Civil War era.48
Adams hadn’t committed to talking in Lexington yet, so Denny resorted to the most effective of inducements—flattery. Denny told Adams that his speech would be the most important one for the Lee centenary in the country. Flattery worked and Adams agreed to give the speech. Denny was right; the rest of the South took notice too. Richmond’s Times-Dispatch declared that Adams’s speech “will be the event of day as far as the South was concerned.” Adams knew it would be important. He printed the speech even before he gave it.49
After a fawning introduction from Denny, Adams stood behind the lectern, framed by Lee’s recumbent statue bedecked in flowers from various Confederate veterans’ and women’s groups. According to one contemporary report, a thousand people jammed into the small church. On the stage, the audience could see more than a dozen Confederate flags and the 1861 Virginia state flag. One lonely U.S. flag seemed overwhelmed.50
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When Adams first started talking, the white southern crowd grew restless. Adams quoted Charles Sumner, another Massachusetts native who led the antislavery forces in the U.S. Senate during the Civil War and later worked harder than almost anyone to grant equality to freedmen. Adams quoted Sumner’s famous remarks when the Senate debated giving Arlington back to the Lee family in 1870. Sumner called Lee a “traitor” and said that “General Lee … stands high in the catalogue of those who have imbrued [stained] their hands in their country’s blood. I hand him over to the avenging pen of History.”51
Then Adams went all in, teasing the audience that their most beloved son
was false to his flag,—educated at the national academy, an officer of the United States Army, he abjured his allegiance and bore arms against the government he had sworn to uphold. In other words, he was a military traitor.52
By now the audience was twitching. Reading this part of Adams’s speech, I can almost hear the Virginia ladies and gentlemen grumbling, “Tut-tut” and “Oh, my!” One contemporary source called the reaction “glances of displeasure.” Adams quickly reeled the audience back in by telling them he meant to praise Lee as a “man of character.” Adams stated, “Under similar conditions I would myself have done exactly what Lee did. In fact, I do not see how I, placed as he was, could have done otherwise.” At that time, a person’s state, Adams argued, was more important than the nation. The Lexington audience burst into frenzied applause, hearing from the scion of an antislavery Massachusetts family that Lee was right.53
Adams was just warming up. Lee was the great military leader of the war. “The Army of Northern Virginia never sustained defeat.” Curious. Gettysburg and Appomattox would certainly seem to provide clear examples of defeat. No, Adams argued, Lee and his army succumbed to the blockade and lack of resources. Exhaustion did them in. Adams seemed to channel the ghost of Jubal Early and the Lost Cause.54
Grant’s victory at Appomattox earned Adams’s praise of Lee, who in surrendering “saved the common country.” If Lee had fought on using guerrilla tactics, it would have been “more morally injurious to the North than it would have been physically destructive to the South.” I’m not sure what measurement scale he used. Guerrilla war would have been far worse for the South. After Appomattox, “Lee wore defeat as ’t were a laurel crown” while turning Washington College into a “true university.” In fact, Lee’s tenure at Washington College was “the most useful to his country in his entire life.” After praising Lee, Adams trod even further down the Lost Cause trail.55
Reconstruction, Adams declared, was actually “servile domination.” Adams asked the audience if any people “prostrate after civil strife” had ever “received severer measure than was inflicted on the so-called reconstructed Confederate States.” Then Adams, an officer in an army that emancipated millions, told the white southern audience that they were the victims. The U.S. government “subjected the disenfranchised master to the rule of the enfranchised bondsman.” Adams argued that the “war penalty” the defeated Confederates paid, “slave confiscation, and reconstruction under African rule,” was “unworthy” and “ungenerous.” Truly, the Lost Cause had triumphed nationally, and the proof was in Lee Chapel.56
Adams, a former commander of African American troops, argued that Reconstruction policy was cruel for one reason and one reason only. It gave equal rights to African Americans. He agreed with the white supremacists. Two years later, Adams would return to Virginia to give a speech called “The Solid South and the Afro-American Race Problem.” His racist speech in Lexington was a mere warm-up for the one in Richmond. First calling African Americans “a distinct alien element in the body politic,” he went even further by stating the country’s greatest problem was “the unhappy presence of Africans.” Who should solve this “problem”? Adams asked, then answered. The white people of the South knew best. White southerners would give the vote to African Americans only when they were ready. Only white southerners would know when that date arrived, but Adams did not think that date was in the foreseeable future.57
Adams told his Virginia audience that he had not always believed in the inferiority of African Americans. Before and during the Civil War, he felt that Black people were “brothers” and “God’s image carved in ebony.” Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species changed his view. Now, he argued, science replaced spirituality. Adams used scientific racism to doom African Americans to second-class citizenship, a servant class in perpetuity. In Richmond, like in Lee Chapel, Adams encouraged white southerners to keep an “inferior race” under their heel. He solved the “race problem” with white supremacy. Jubal Early might have died twelve years before Adams’s speech, but he would have agreed wholeheartedly with the sentiment. Lee Chapel was once again used to promote white supremacy.58
After Adams’s Lee Chapel speech, President Denny used the occasion to start a million-dollar fund-raising drive, by enlisting top public officials. President Theodore Roosevelt had already weighed in, calling Lee “without any exception the very greatest of all the great captains that the English-speaking peoples have brought forth.”59 TR’s successor, William Howard Taft, supported both a great memorial to Lee and the creation of a school of engineering at W&L. While the panic of 1907 doomed any fund-raising effort, Lee Chapel, the Shrine of the South, became even more important as ground zero for the Lost Cause myth. The Lee centennial cemented Lee’s legacy as a figure of national reverence, at least for white America.60
While Lee had become a national figure, the chapel on campus was seen only as the repository, a host to Lee’s body and memorial. It would take two more events to make the building a true national shrine. The first occurred under the aegis of the W&L president who succeeded Denny, Henry L. Smith. The chapel designed under Lee’s presidency was small and spare and did not fit with the Greek Revival architecture on campus. Smith had grand designs to raze the old chapel and create a new, enormous memorial/church that could hold the entire student body.
Smith gained the approval of the best money-raising group in the South, the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They figure prominently throughout the twentieth century because of their unrivaled success in building memorials in marble and on paper to further the Lost Cause myth and vindicate the Confederacy. Smith knew that if the national UDC leadership said they would raise funds for him, he could bank on it.61
Smith made one mistake. He failed to brief the local Lexington chapter of the UDC. It was a mistake that would haunt him. The Lexington women saw Smith and the national UDC’s plans to destroy Lee Chapel as sacrilege. Before the local women started fighting, the chapel was seen as the location of the shrine but not the shrine itself. In fact, the chapel was falling apart and was a serious fire hazard. The Lexington UDC didn’t care. They fought to save the chapel with a fierce letter-writing campaign augmented with speeches, creating a powerful force to save the “sacred atmosphere” of the chapel, “a most holy procession.” Smith initially dismissed the “willful women” with a series of sexist remarks, but the women would not give up.62
To address local concerns, Smith said he would save the original chapel and add on to it to meet the needs of the university. The cry from the local UDC became “Lee Chapel—Add to it nothing more.” Smith gathered support from all quarters, including a positive review of the changes from The New York Times. But the women would not concede, and they brought out the heavy hitters. The assistant to President Calvin Coolidge and former congressman C. Bascom Slemp wrote that the chapel must not be changed because it belonged to the nation at large, not only to the South. The ailing former president Woodrow Wilson and his wife charged that “changes in the chapel … would be an outrageous desecration and bring serious discredit upon the University and the State.”63
By fighting so hard for the original Lee Chapel, the women of Lexington changed everyone’s view of the building. What had been seen as a chapel with Lee’s remains now became a shrine in its own right. While Lee did not design t
he building, he received credit anyway. The building became, as one postcard described it, “the Westminster Abbey of the Confederacy,” infused with the godlike cult of Lee. After several years of fighting, Smith conceded defeat. The Lexington women won, and the small chapel became, as they called it, “the Holy Shrine.”64
In a way, the university’s own literature had helped defeat the building initiative. A 1920 bulletin trumpeted its purpose as “transmitting to the future in the service of the whole nation the ideals and traditions that were the glory of the Old South.”65 I know what “Old South” means. White ladies and gentlemen sipping iced tea on the veranda under the shade of magnolia trees supported by enslaved workers. The “Old South” meant adherence to the religion of white supremacy, and its cathedral was Lee Chapel.
If the Lexington UDC “saved” the building from destruction, they failed to raise enough money to make it safe. By the late 1950s, the building was decrepit and close to ruin. The old pews were straight-backed and torturous to sit in for more than a few minutes. The ceiling leaked, creating bulges in the walls and warped floorboards. Lee Chapel was a tinderbox waiting for a destructive fire to destroy it or enough money to restore it.
In the 1920s, W&L looked south for money to build a new chapel. The United Daughters of the Confederacy was rightly seen as the best bet to raise money for Robert E. Lee. By the 1960s, Lee had become a national figure of reverence. In 1961, the U.S. Department of the Interior declared the chapel a national historic landmark. When the university went looking for money to save the dilapidated building, it searched nationally and in 1961, it received a large grant from the Ford Motor Company Fund in Michigan.66