Robert E. Lee and Me

by Ty Seidule

  Like the two men whose names and portraits were on my diploma, George Washington and Robert E. Lee, I hoped I was now a Virginia gentleman. At the age of twenty-one, I had a superb education combined with the unearned confidence of a man who went to an elite southern college. Like my school’s namesakes, I would start my adult life as a soldier. The army had provided me with an education. Now I had to fulfill my four-year commitment to serve in the army. I had no plans to make the military a career. At least, that’s what I thought as I headed to my first army assignment at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, named for a Confederate general.

  5

  My Military Career: Glorifying Confederates in the U.S. Army

  I departed Lexington the day after I graduated to begin my military career. At first, the army was a job. I never planned on serving more than my four-year commitment, much less a career, but the army grew on me—slowly. Now I find it hard to identify where the army ends and I begin, even though, finally, I’ve taken off the uniform. The army trained me, educated me, and provided me with a mission and a career. For nearly all my thirty-six years in uniform, my wife and I lived in army housing. Our sons went to schools on post. The army was more than a job; it was a way of life.

  My first assignment took me to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, named for the Confederate general Braxton Bragg, one of ten army installations named for Confederate officers. Over the course of my long career, I would find that the army honored Confederate officers just as I did. Despite the Confederates’ record of killing U.S. Army soldiers, my army memorialized Confederate generals as much as or more than the U.S. generals who led America to victory in the Civil War and World War II.

  When I reported to Fort Bragg for duty in 1984, the stench of defeat in Vietnam still permeated the army. The last American soldiers had scampered off the Saigon embassy rooftop less than a decade earlier. I joined an army that still felt the searing pain of the United States’ only military defeat. As Bill Murray declared in Stripes, my favorite army movie from that era, “We’ve been kicking ass for two hundred years! We’re 10 and 1!” The one in the L column, Vietnam, obsessed the army I joined. Reeling from defeat, drug problems, and race riots and trying to adapt to the end of the draft, the army had a serious inferiority complex magnified by a lack of societal respect. Today, anyone in uniform walking through an airport will be greeted dozens of times with “Thank you for your service!” Americans accord the military a level of status that was noticeably absent when I first joined.

  As I in-processed, no sign explained why the post was named Fort Bragg. Bragg was a place, like a city. I knew little about the person the army honored. Braxton Bragg was a Confederate general, and a mediocre one at that. Bragg’s Civil War–era photo shows a withering stare, a bristly beard, and an impressive monobrow that combined to create an almost cadaverous presence. One woman described him as “looking like an old porcupine.” Bragg graduated from West Point in 1837 and excelled in the Mexican-American War.

  Famously, at the Battle of Buena Vista, General Zachary Taylor said, “Give them a little more grape, Captain Bragg.” Grapeshot from a cannon was like a shotgun from hell, firing a coffee can of small balls at near-point-blank range. At the time, Bragg’s artillery unit supported Colonel Jefferson Davis’s infantry regiment, with Bragg earning three brevet promotions for bravery. Brevet promotions remained the only battlefield awards until the creation of the Medal of Honor during the Civil War.1

  Yet his contemporaries and superiors widely loathed him. One historian called Bragg “the orneriest, most divisive general in the rebel army.” Another described Bragg as “harsh in manner, sour in temper, he made few friends and many enemies.” During the Mexican-American War, Bragg was nearly fragged. A soldier lit a twelve-pound shell under his cot. Bragg escaped serious injury, but the shell shredded his bedding. The most powerful general in the army, Winfield Scott, a hero in the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War, despised Bragg for publishing articles critical of Scott and the army.2

  Ulysses S. Grant’s story of the “naturally disputatious” Bragg in the antebellum army is one I delight in telling my classes. As a company commander, the officious Bragg requested supplies to the quartermaster, an army word for supply officer. In addition to his command duties, Bragg served as the quartermaster and denied his own requisition, sending the request back to himself with the reasons for the denial. Bragg the commander re-sent the request to himself as quartermaster, arguing that he wanted only those supplies authorized and that he should receive them immediately. As quartermaster, Bragg responded in writing back to himself, defending his denial. At an impasse, Bragg referred the matter to his commanding officer, who exclaimed, “My God, Mr. Bragg, you have quarreled with every officer in the army, and now you are quarreling with yourself!”3

  Bragg served in the U.S. Army from 1837 until 1856. When he left the army, he purchased an enslaved labor farm in Louisiana that cultivated sugar. The farm came with 105 enslaved workers whom Bragg described as “a fair lot, the children very fine and of a pretty age and just getting to the field.” At the start of the Civil War, Bragg told an Irish journalist that “slaves were necessary for the actual cultivation of the soil in the South … and that the only mode of making the black race work was to hold them in conditions of involuntary servitude.”4 He firmly believed in racial control through slavery and benefited mightily from enslaved labor.

  During the Civil War, as a Confederate general, Bragg would fight in many of the battles in the western theater, losing most of them. While his ruthless emphasis on discipline helped shape the Army of the Tennessee, his subordinates and soldiers hated him and often refused to follow his orders, even when they were correct. Private Sam Watkins wrote in his memoirs, “None of Bragg’s soldiers ever loved him. They had no faith in his ability as a general. He was looked upon as a merciless tyrant … He loved to crush the spirit of his men.”5 He met defeat at almost every turn because of his reliance on frontal assaults and an uncanny ability to turn minor wins or losses into strategic defeats.

  One of the largest military installations in the world, home to the vaunted 82nd Airborne Division, was named after Braxton Bragg, a poorly regarded Confederate general and slaveholder who killed U.S. Army soldiers. While I knew Bragg was a Confederate at the time, I didn’t care. Not even a little. As a recent W&L grad, I considered Confederates heroes. Because the base was in North Carolina, the name made sense to me.

  After a summer at Fort Bragg, I moved to Fort Knox, named after a Revolutionary War hero, to train on tanks. After the armor officer basic course, I drove south to attend Airborne and Ranger Schools in Georgia. In Airborne School, I made five jumps out of a C-130 Hercules aircraft eight hundred feet above the ground to earn Airborne wings. Then I went to the much more demanding Ranger School, a nine-week course that tested me physically and mentally. I started the course at 165 pounds and finished at 135 pounds. Earning the black-and-gold Ranger tab remains the most difficult and therefore the most cherished accomplishment for many soldiers.

  Airborne and Ranger Schools call Fort Benning home. Fort Benning is also the home of the infantry, the most important branch in the army, and now my branch, armor. Located just outside Columbus, Georgia, the fort is named after Henry L. Benning, who had settled in Columbus and married into a prominent local family before the Civil War. Unlike Bragg, Benning did not attend West Point. In fact, he never served a day in the U.S. Army. As a Georgia farmer, he owned ninety enslaved workers with a combined value of nearly $100,000, giving him a strong financial interest in maintaining the “peculiar institution.”6

  Benning was a Fire-Eater, the nickname given by northerners to the most rabid southern believers in slavery and secession. Before the Civil War, Fire-Eaters pleaded with fellow white southerners, with increasing success, to secede from the Union to protect and expand slavery. Benning wrote in 1849 as part of a strident minority working to destroy the United States, “I think … that the only safety of the South from abolitio
n universal is to be found in an early dissolution of the Union.”7

  Benning’s most important role either before, during, or after the war came during the Secession Winter of 1861. Elected as a delegate at the Georgia Secession Convention, Benning argued for prompt and unqualified secession. In a widely reported speech, he said ominously and without evidence that a coalition of African Americans and northern whites would work to “exterminate the white race or expel them from the land.”8 After voting for secession, Georgia’s convention elected Benning to represent the state as a commissioner to the Virginia Commonwealth. His job was to convince the most important state in the South to secede from the United States.

  Benning’s speech at the Virginia Convention was the culmination of his decade-long fight to break apart the United States and create a southern slave republic. Benning told the Virginians that Georgia seceded for only one reason, “a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery.” Virginia should be worried, even terrified that the “black Republican party of the North” embraced “a sentiment of hatred to slavery as extreme as hatred can exist.”9

  Benning then described the South after the abolition of slavery: “The black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything.” His view of equality was apocalyptic:

  Our men will be compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth; and as for our women, the horrors of their state we cannot contemplate in imagination. That is the fate which abolition will bring upon the white race … We will be completely exterminated, and the land will be left in the possession of the blacks, and then it will go back to a wilderness and become another Africa.

  Rather than a scenario of ending slavery, Benning told the crowd, “I say give me pestilence and famine sooner than that.”10

  In the Civil War, Benning fought bravely for the cause he so ardently believed in, leading a brigade that bore his name. At Antietam, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, the Overland Campaign, and finally Appomattox, the Old Rock, as his troops called him, fought for slavery to the bitter end. While Benning rose to the rank of brigadier general, he never commanded at a higher rank than brigade. Yet one of the U.S. Army’s most prestigious posts remains named after a fairly low-ranking Confederate commander, one who spent a lifetime trying to destroy the United States.

  Forts Bragg and Benning are two of the ten U.S. Army forts still named for those who rebelled against the United States. Fort Benning is a little more than a hundred miles west from my home in Monroe. Fort Gordon in Augusta is less than a hundred miles east. Home to the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps and Cyber, Fort Gordon takes its name from John Brown Gordon, another Confederate general who never wore army blue.

  Like Benning, Gordon defended slavery with vigor. In 1860, he argued that African slavery was “the Mightiest Engine in the universe for civilization, elevation, and refinement of mankind.” He told his fellow white Georgians to never apologize nor ever admit that slavery was wrong; instead, “take the position everywhere that it [slavery] is morally, socially, and politically right—and that it is, in truth, the hand-maid of liberty.” Although Gordon is not seen as a Fire-Eater like Benning, his biographer argued that he “fanned the flames of southern independence” to create a new country based on protecting and expanding slavery.11

  Unlike Benning, Gordon rose through the Confederate ranks from captain to major general, ending the war as a corps commander with Lee at Appomattox, one of the few to do so with no previous military training. At the Battle of Antietam in 1862, Colonel Gordon, commanding the 6th Alabama Regiment, defended a small, sunken farm road. After U.S. attacks on the Confederate left, Lee rode to Gordon’s position, convinced the next assault would be there. Lee told Gordon he had to hold or the entire army would face disaster. Gordon nearly shouted his reply to Lee to rally his soldiers: “These men are going to stay here, General, till the sun goes down or victory is won.”12

  The U.S. forces attacked, and a .58 caliber Minié ball passed through Gordon’s calf. An hour later, another round struck him in the same leg above the knee. He continued to limp around, exhorting his soldiers, when a third bullet mangled his left arm. With blood streaming down his arm, and despite his soldiers pleading for him to go to the rear, he remained. A fourth bullet slammed his shoulder before a fifth and final round struck him squarely in the face, entering his left cheek and passing through his jaw. He keeled over, nearly drowning in blood, but an earlier bullet hole in his hat drained the blood, saving his life.13

  Somehow, Gordon survived. That sunken farm road where U.S. Army soldiers shot him five times is now famous as the Bloody Lane. I’ve walked that ground a dozen times or more with cadets. Each time I stop at the Bloody Lane and recount Gordon’s heroics—five bullet wounds! Yet each time I recounted the story, I never discussed why Gordon fought. The smell of gunpowder seduced me. At the battlefields, I always glossed over the purpose of the war to talk about the tactics, the heroes, like Gordon and Lee, and the goats, like George McClellan, the U.S. commander at Antietam. I also visited Spotsylvania Courthouse, praising Gordon’s performance at the Bloody Angle. His battlefield competence saved Lee’s army. As a military historian, I knew all about Gordon, the great Confederate battlefield general. I never knew his prewar secessionist leanings or his postwar career.14

  After Gordon surrendered with Lee at Appomattox Courthouse, he went home broke but lost none of his white supremacist beliefs. He declared that “heaven’s unalterable decree” ensured that “in all times and ages [the] white man has been God’s chosen vessel and superior race.” He regarded African Americans as vital for Georgia, contending that “the Negro is the proper laborer for our State.”15 He entered politics to fight against federal Reconstruction, working tirelessly to prevent African Americans from enjoying political and legal equality.

  Gordon also had an apocalyptic view of race relations. In 1868, in a speech he gave in Charleston, South Carolina, called “To the Colored People,” Gordon admitted he opposed freedom for the enslaved “because we had bought you and paid our money for you.” He went on to spell out what he thought would occur if African Americans attempted to gain equality. He explained that there were “three millions of your race and forty millions of white men.” If African Americans continued to insist on equality, Gordon said it would be an “attempt to inaugurate a war of races [and] you will be exterminated.”16

  Gordon did not rely on African Americans to heed his violent warning. Instead, he helped lead the Ku Klux Klan, calling it “a brotherhood of … peaceable, law-abiding citizens.” The Klan had three purposes. First, claw back any political rights from African Americans through violent terror. Second, preserve southern white independence from any federal influence whatsoever. Finally, ensure white Democratic Party supremacy politically, culturally, and socially.17

  Gordon led the Georgia Klan as its Grand Dragon and even led the national organization when Nathan Bedford Forrest’s health failed. Gordon would go on to serve as Georgia’s governor and senator. Until his death in 1904, he fought for white supremacy. As late as 1890, he begged his fellow Democrats to remember that “the integrity of your party is essential to the continued supremacy of the white race in Georgia.”18

  Two of the three large army posts in my home state of Georgia remain named for secessionists who never served in the U.S. Army but who did kill U.S. Army soldiers. Benning and Gordon believed until the end of their lives that African Americans, who today make up more than 20 percent of the army, were not fully human. The U.S. Army gives its highest honor to unrepentant white supremacists.

  In my other home state, Virginia, three posts carry Confederate names. One is a fort named for A. P. Hill, West Point class of 1847, who fought as a division and then corps commander under Lee. Hill died in combat just a week before Lee surrendered. The second post in Virginia named for a Confederate honors George Pickett of
Gettysburg fame, West Point class of 1846. Pickett summarily executed twenty-two captured U.S. soldiers who had previously been Confederates. He ordered them hanged as their family watched the gruesome spectacle. Pickett was a war criminal.

  The final and largest army post in Virginia is Fort Lee. Today, Fort Lee is the home of army logistics. While the U.S. Army has superb infantry and incredible tankers, our true claim to fame is logistics. During World War II, the army supported fighting in Italy, France, and all over the Pacific simultaneously. African American truckers accounted for nearly 75 percent of the famed Red Ball Express supplying George S. Patton’s Third Army in the march against the German Wehrmacht in 1944 and 1945.19

  Today, we are an expeditionary army, meaning we fight all over the globe. Our next fight could be anywhere. Before the army arrived in Dammam, Mogadishu, Pristina, Kabul, Mosul, or Tal Afar, I had never heard of the cities. Yet army logisticians figured out how to deliver beans, bullets, and now the internet to each place, sometimes on the move and under fire. No other army in the history of warfare can match our sustainers. In the twenty-first century, the army’s logistic branches like quartermaster, ordnance, and transportation are majority minority and 50 percent African American.20

  Those diverse volunteer soldiers received their initial training at the home of logistics, Fort Lee, Virginia, named in honor of Robert E. Lee. At our most racially diverse post, the army honors a man who wore army blue for three decades and then refused to stay when his nation needed him most. Instead, he fought so well and so hard to ensure African Americans stayed enslaved.

  Two posts in Louisiana, Fort Polk and Camp Beauregard, bear mentioning. Fort Polk is named after Leonidas Polk, the Fighting Bishop, West Point class of 1827. Before the war, he founded Sewanee, the University of the South, my father’s alma mater. Polk founded the college to provide southern men bound for ministry with an education that showed slavery was compatible with Christianity in general and the Episcopal religion in particular. Polk took off his clerical robes for a Confederate general’s stars because he believed thoroughly in the institution of slavery.21