Robert E. Lee and Me

by Ty Seidule

  “Hard to miss, sir,” I said, annoyed that he interrupted my class. Still, between army culture and my background as an educated Christian gentleman, I use “sir” and “ma’am” more than any person should.

  “Do you know what it’s called?” he asked.

  “I’m in the Department of History, sir. I know it’s Battle Monument, dedicated to the Union Regular Army dead,” I answered with surety.

  “No, Captain,” he drawled, enjoying the setup. “That is the monument to southern marksmanship!”

  I laughed. His joke didn’t upset me at all. Part of me still identified with the Confederates. Looking back to Captain Seidule, circa 1995, I’m amazed at my own obtuseness. The army sent me to Ohio State University to study military history. The first time I had lived north of the Mason-Dixon line. After two years in Columbus earning my master’s degree and completing the course work and comprehensive exams for a doctorate, I still identified as a southerner. My time in Ohio didn’t make me question my worship of Lee either. Instead, I was surprised to find no Lee memorabilia in the Ohio flea markets. Everything commemorated Lincoln and Grant.

  Initially, teaching at West Point didn’t change me either. I loved teaching cadets the History of the Military Art class, one of the oldest continuously taught courses in the country. In class, I focused on how officers planned and executed the campaigns of war. We focused on the levels of war: strategy, operations, tactics, and the “Face of Battle,” how soldiers experienced war at the tip of the bayonet. The smell of gunpowder seduced me again. I didn’t focus on why the two sides fought. Instead, we discussed how they fought and why battles turned out the way they did. I focused on the “great captains of military history,” like Lee and Jackson.

  The textbook we used when I first arrived, written by faculty in the 1970s, contributed to our focus on how wars were fought. The authors of the textbook spent less than a paragraph on the cause of the Civil War. When it did mention the cause, slavery and states’ rights were mentioned in equal measure. During my third year at West Point, we started teaching from a new textbook. It emphatically declared slavery as the cause of the war. Then we read an article about the 180,000-strong U.S. Colored Troops. Despite the course’s new emphasis on race, the facts, and I taught the facts, still didn’t affect my opinion of Lee and his army. I knew the cause of the war was slavery. Yet I could still venerate Lee.1

  While my educated Christian gentleman education still clouded my view of the Confederacy, I did understand the value of military history. War is unlike business or sports or any other human endeavor. Military history provides an officer vicarious experience for war that may only come once or twice in a career. The American people should understand war too. We aren’t a militaristic people who celebrate holidays with tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue like the Russians or Chinese, but we are a warlike people. No one goes to war more often than we do. Americans have a duty to better understand military history so they can hold their military and political leaders accountable.2

  After three wonderful years, we left West Point and went back to the operational army. After assignments in the Mojave Desert at Fort Irwin, California, Italy, the Balkans, and battalion command at Fort Knox, I was selected for a permanent faculty position, and we returned to West Point in 2004. I would spend the rest of my army career educating and inspiring cadets to become leaders of character for the nation, helping them to live the values of West Point’s motto, “Duty, Honor, Country.” I felt like the luckiest soldier in the army.

  During our first assignment to West Point, we lived in a nine-hundred-square-foot triplex, but now, because I was a lieutenant colonel, we moved to far nicer housing. In the military we call it RHIP—Rank Has Its Privileges. Our new house, built in the 1930s, was on Lee Road in Lee Housing Area by Lee Gate. To enter Lee Housing Area, a car turns north off Washington Road, creating a sign that has Washington and Lee on one pole. Perfect.

  I went back to teaching military history, but this time I led all the military historians. One day a couple of years after we returned, I walked to the cadet store to buy West Point swag for my family. As I strode past Eisenhower and Pershing Barracks, past Grant Hall, I stopped, staring at a sign that said, “Lee Barracks.” Then I looked east about twenty yards at a new memorial built while I was gone called Reconciliation Plaza. It featured three-foot-high relief monuments of Lee and Grant. I stood in front of the Lee statue for more than a minute.

  Finally, after far too many years, I had my “aha!” moment. I understood the question but not the answer. I started running around campus looking for every monument, every memorial, to Lee and finding them everywhere. West Point might have more monuments to Lee than my alma mater, Washington and Lee University. How did this happen? I asked, but no one knew or cared. As a historian, I knew how to solve this problem. I went to the archives, and there I spent the next several years trying to understand when and why West Point honored Lee. And that process changed me. The history changed me. The archives changed me. The facts changed me.

  The history I found was not what I expected. I thought that the bond of West Point would overcome the Civil War experience as soon as the war ended or at least when Lee died in 1870. Completely, utterly wrong. In the nineteenth century, West Point banished the Confederates from memory. Not one single plaque, monument, or memorial recognized a Confederate graduate at West Point. No Confederate graduate was buried in West Point’s prestigious cemetery. But why would West Point reject the Confederates, especially Lee? And even more perplexing, why would they embrace Lee in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?

  To understand West Point’s memorials, I had to first understand how the Civil War affected the academy. It suffered trauma just like the rest of the country, which brought intense criticism and even threatened to shutter the institution. In its early history, West Point helped forge the nation by bringing cadets from all over the country together. By 1859, West Point had changed. One cadet noted that the corps of cadets split “into two parties, hostile in sentiment and even divided in barracks.” The cadets had managed to create two southern companies and two northern companies.3

  Events in the country galvanized cadets even more, especially southern cadets. In 1859, the abolitionist John Brown attacked the garrison at the Harpers Ferry arsenal in modern West Virginia to foment a slave uprising, terrifying white southerners. At West Point, southern cadets became infuriated when some northerners publicly stated that Brown was a martyr. Cadet Pierce Young from Georgia told his fellow cadets after Brown’s raid, “By God, I wish I had a sword as long as from here to Newburgh, and the Yankees were all in a row. I’d like to cut the heads off every damn one of them.”4

  When the Republicans won the election, southern cadets reacted by burning Lincoln in effigy, a grave affront from an institution that should remain outside politics. As southern cadets became more violent, West Point’s leaders seemed to lose control. Cadet Morris Schaff, who later fought at Gettysburg, noted that it took more courage to vote for Lincoln at West Point in 1860 than it did to face Pickett’s Charge in 1863.5

  With Lincoln’s election, Henry Farley from South Carolina became the first cadet to leave West Point. Sixty-five of the eighty-six southern cadets would eventually join him, as would several younger faculty members. Yet West Point graduates, particularly those who had served for many years in the army, stayed in far greater numbers than those who left. Only 23 of the 155 officers assigned as faculty between 1833 and 1861 and no senior officers at West Point in 1861 left; even those from the South stayed.6

  Southern cadets departing to fight against their school and their nation traumatized the academy and, more important, angered West Point’s political masters in Washington. President Lincoln chastised West Pointers who “proved false to the hand which pampered them.” Secretary of War Simon Cameron accused West Pointers of “extraordinary treachery,” which he “traced to a radical defect in the system of education” at the academy.7

  In
1861, Congress was piping mad. Senator Zachariah Chandler from Michigan blamed the entire war on West Point. “I believe but for this institution the rebellion would never have broken out.” Warmed up, he continued, “West Point Academy has produced more traitors within the last fifty years than all institutions of learning and education that have existed since Judas Iscariot’s time.” Senator Benjamin Wade from Ohio called West Point graduates “perjured traitors.” Senator James H. Lane of Kansas declared, “If the Union were to perish, the epitaph will be ‘died of West Point pro-slaveryism.’”8

  If there is one thing that West Point feared in 1861 or today, it’s upsetting politicians. Most schools generate money through tuition, endowment, alumni giving, research, and state and federal funding. The service academies receive all their funding from the federal government, a precarious position. During the budget fights in 2013 called sequestration, West Point had to furlough its civilian workforce for two weeks. The Civil War, however, proved an existential threat.

  The Civil War became the greatest crisis in the academy’s history, just as it was the greatest crisis in the nation’s history. In 1861 and 1863, Congress debated bills to close West Point completely. While those bills failed to muster a majority, they left a lasting impression. West Point refused to memorialize Lee and the men in gray in the nineteenth century because Congress and the nation blamed the academy for its graduates’ decision to fight against the United States. Congress’s anger at Confederate West Point graduates remained visible, even though I didn’t realize it.9

  From the first day cadets arrive, the effect of the Civil War is present—if hidden. R Day, short for “Reception Day,” occurs every year in late June when new cadets arrive at West Point. It’s a stressful day for cadets and their parents. After a short brief—the army loves briefs—a loud voice announces, “You have ninety seconds to say goodbye to your families and your time starts—now!” So starts a stressful day. The upper-class cadets yell at the new ones purposefully, but one event is quiet. During that day, each cadet must sign an oath. Few people at West Point realize that oath dates to the Civil War.

  In 1861, the anger Congress felt coalesced into action. A bill ordered West Pointers to take a loyalty oath immediately in front of a civilian magistrate. Two Kentuckians went forward, crying. As they raised their right hands, they stopped, shook their heads, ran out of the building, and left West Point. On August 3, 1861, Congress passed another bill creating a loyalty oath only for West Point. As the bill’s author, Abram Olin, said on the floor of Congress, “This oath will not permit that … [a cadet] shall set aside his allegiance to the general Government whenever a band of traitors and rebels shall choose to set up a defiant authority.” To ensure compliance, the bill mandated that any West Point cadet who took the oath and later broke it would face a court-martial and death by hanging if found guilty. That’s commitment.10

  R Day finishes with a parade. Cadets march through the sally ports, past Washington’s statue onto the plain wearing their smart gray uniforms as their families look on from the stands proud and worried. The parade climaxes with the oath. The commandant of cadets, West Point’s dean of students, tells the twelve hundred and fifty cadets to raise their right hands, and she solemnly leads them in the Cadet Oath:

  I, [your name], do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States, and bear true allegiance to the National Government; that I will maintain and defend the sovereignty of the United States, paramount to any and all allegiance, sovereignty, or fealty I may owe to any State or country whatsoever; and that I will at all times obey the legal orders of my superior officers.11

  That oath remains the law of the land. Neither the Air Force Academy nor the Naval Academy must take a prescribed oath like West Pointers. Of course, the Air Force Academy’s first class didn’t graduate until 1959. The Naval Academy’s first class graduated in 1854, but it was not an important source of commissions in 1861.12

  During the Civil War, West Point was far from combat, but it fought its own battles. The Military Academy represented the Regular Army, the professionals who stayed in the army in peace and war. The Regular Army was tiny prior to the war, with only fifteen thousand enlisted and eleven hundred officers. As the army increased to fight the rebellion, the vast majority who served were volunteers. West Pointers felt as though Congress and the public slighted the small prewar professional army, giving all the credit for fighting to the volunteers.13

  To correct this perception, several officers had the idea to dedicate a monument at West Point to the regulars who died in combat. Their effort, starting in 1863, was one of the earliest efforts to memorialize Civil War veterans, even predating Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address dedicating the cemetery at the battlefield. The officers created a bank account and taxed every officer in the Regular Army 6 percent of one month’s pay. By the end of the war, they had $14,000. Impressive, but not nearly enough for a massive monument. Rather than wait for the money to accrue, West Point decided to hold a dedication ceremony in June 1864 without a monument.14

  The Reverend John French, West Point’s chaplain, opened the ceremony with an invocation that was more exhortation than prayer. He insisted the country remove “the spirit of sedition, conspiracy, [and] rebellion” while ensuring the nation had “steadfast loyalty and unswerving allegiance.” The speaker for the ceremony was none other than George McClellan, nicknamed the “Young Napoleon.” Like Beauregard, McClellan failed to live up to his moniker. Lincoln fired “Little Mac” after the Antietam campaign in 1862 and assigned him to a meaningless position in his home state of New Jersey, but he stayed in the army.15

  Long a critic of Lincoln, he became the Democratic presidential candidate in the 1864 election while still wearing army blue. The campaign posters showed him in the uniform of a U.S. Army major general. In the summer of 1864, Lincoln feared McClellan would defeat him in the fall election. In fact, no president since Andrew Jackson had secured reelection.

  When Secretary of War Edwin Stanton found out McClellan would give a speech at West Point, he went ballistic. A prickly but competent wartime leader, Stanton loathed McClellan and could not believe the Military Academy would provide a perch for the general to lambast the administration. He telegraphed Alexander Bowman, the superintendent, hours before the ceremony, ordering him to rescind McClellan’s invitation immediately. As The New York Times reported, “A great commotion ensued.” Bowman disobeyed the order and allowed McClellan to speak. With the ceremony complete, Stanton fired Bowman and emplaced a new superintendent with impeccable anti-Confederate qualifications, George Washington Cullum, West Point class of 1833.16

  Cullum came to West Point on a mission to root out any Confederate apostates. After an investigation, he determined that the sister of an officer’s wife living on post might have said something positive about Confederates at a dinner party. He immediately kicked her off post. Cullum remained superintendent only through 1866, but his legacy and that of his anti-Confederate ardor lasted far longer.17

  In 1867, Cullum started the alumni association named the West Point Association of Graduates. In that same year, he published the first Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy. When Cullum died, a senior professor called the register “a historical monument to his brother officers.” Each entry was a mini biography of every graduate’s assignments, promotions, and battles, including accomplishments when a graduate left the army.

  Cullum wrote an introduction when he first published his register, providing a full-throated defense of West Point, arguing it did not deserve “every opprobrious epithet from unscrupulous demagogues.” He asked the reader to look carefully at other institutions, arguing, correctly, that former presidents, justices, and senators joined the Confederacy at a higher percentage than academy graduates. “Four-fifths of its graduates remained faithful,” a higher percentage than Harvard, Yale, Columbia, or Princeton. West Point, he wrote, “was the most loyal branch of publ
ic service.” In fact, half the southern graduates “stood firm by the stars and stripes.” Cullum’s highest praise went to the “noble band of 162 Southern graduates, cradled and reared in State Allegiance, but rescued from treason by West Point influences.”18

  Cullum’s “noble band” played the role of heroes; the villains were just as clear. He had no sympathy for those West Pointers who “forgot the flag to follow false gods,” reserving his harshest criticism for sixteen northern graduates who fought for the Confederates and “dishonored their alma mater.” West Pointers from the North fought for the Confederacy, argued Cullum, for one of two reasons—love or high rank in the rebel army.19

  For Cullum’s next edition in 1878, some graduates asked him to include West Pointers who fought for the Confederacy. Cullum refused; he would not “give even the semblance of my approval of their taking up arms against the flag under which they were educated.” Cullum had plenty of support. In 1868, a reviewer of the register wrote of those who fought with the Confederate States of America, “When they lost their honor, they had lost their lives with it.”20

  Cullum also edited the alumni association’s annual report, which included obituaries. Of course, all the U.S. Army generals received effusive praise. When the southern-born U.S. Army major general Alvan Gillem died in 1875, Cullum called him one of Tennessee’s greatest heroes because the “vow of fidelity to the National flag was as sacred to him as that of the vestal virgins.”21

  Most West Point graduates know the name Cullum because of Cullum Hall, one of the older buildings at West Point. The top floor of Cullum has an enormous ballroom with dozens of larger-than-life portraits of the U.S. Army generals of the Civil War. The paintings seem to stare down at anyone in that cavernous room implying that, if not for us, for West Point, there would be no United States of America.

  Cullum, while important for West Point, was no Grant or Sherman. I wondered why such an important building was named for him. The answer was easy to find. He paid for the building. When Cullum died in 1892, his will provided $250,000 for West Point’s memorial hall. Cullum astutely ensured that his will became federal law, and one clause of the will/law said that “no unworthy subjects” would grace his building. By that he meant Confederates. To ensure compliance, the law directs that anything going in or out of Cullum Hall must have the vote of two-thirds of the Academic Board, comprised of the long-serving professors (like me). Cullum wanted to ensure that no Confederate-sympathizing superintendent would desecrate his building.22