by Ty Seidule
Among the many arguments Squire gave to the superintendent, the most effective was “Graduates who fought for the South violated their oath.” African American cadets argued that they may be called on to lead military units against a group of Black citizens such as the Black Panthers. If these future officers left their army units to accept positions of leadership among “rebelling Blacks,” they would be punished, even though “emotion, birth and racial ties” attracted them to this cause. The cadets provided a strong argument that breaking the oath, treason, was the Confederates’ worst sin. Interestingly, the cadets didn’t mention slavery, because they knew that white officers would react more positively to the oath issue.
If the academy forced cadets to march in a parade dedicating a Confederate monument, African American cadets would march, but they would not render honors and might even walk out of formation in front of the statue. Thanking Squire, Knowlton called the White House to inform the administration that a Confederate monument would hurt minority recruiting efforts and cause a publicity nightmare. The White House dropped the issue immediately. Percy Squire and the other African American cadets had defeated the president of the United States.60
Today, hundreds of thousands of people visit Trophy Point for its million-dollar view up the Hudson River. Tour guides and Department of History faculty always discuss the soaring Battle Monument that honors the U.S. Army officers and men whose sacrifice “freed a race and welded a nation” during “the War of the Rebellion.” They may need to explain why the Civil War is called “the War of the Rebellion.” They may need to explain why the war “freed a race and welded a nation.” Thanks to African American cadets, there is no Confederate memorial to explain.61
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LIKE MANY OTHER institutions, West Point reexamined its Confederate memorialization after the massacre of Black churchgoers in Charleston in 2015 by a Confederate flag–waving racist, forming two committees. Frustratingly, the superintendent chose not to place me or any other historian on the committees. He knew I was the expert on Civil War memory at West Point—in fact, I was the only person who had researched the subject, ever—but he also knew that I harbored strong opinions. My passion can verge into righteousness. While I wasn’t on the committees, I did brief them, bludgeoning them with a ninety-minute lecture that left no doubt on the facts or my view.
Before the committees finished their remit, the superintendent received directed guidance. Make no decisions before the 2016 election. By regulation, the superintendent has sole authority for the naming of buildings, rooms, and prizes at West Point, the only local commander in the army with that authority. Of course, if his bosses in the Pentagon give him other orders, he must follow them. The shrewd generals in D.C. did not want to make West Point an issue during the election. History is too dangerous. The committees received orders to disband, with the idea that they may resume if new guidance came from higher.
Early in 2017, West Point received word from its new civilian masters in the Pentagon. Don’t change any names. While I disagree with the sentiment, an order is an order. West Point should not and will not make any changes until the chain of command allows it. Eventually, the army and West Point will make changes. At the United States Military Academy, it’s an easy call. Robert E. Lee resigned his commission, fought against his country, killed U.S. Army soldiers, and violated Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution. Lee committed treason.
I treasured my years at West Point and dedicated my professional career to its mission. West Point has the best mission statement of any institution in the country: educate, train, and inspire leaders of character for the nation who live the values of Duty, Honor, Country. In a famous speech, Douglas MacArthur described to the corps of cadets what those values mean: “Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.”
The U.S. Military Academy should honor graduates who lived the values of Duty, Honor, Country, not those who tried to destroy the country we promise to support and defend.
7
My Verdict: Robert E. Lee Committed Treason to Preserve Slavery
I can’t remember life without Robert E. Lee. Of course, not the man Robert Edward Lee who lived, laughed, loved, cried, and died. No, my relationship was with the Southern Saint, the Marble Man, the icon. As a child in the 1960s, a high schooler in the 1970s, a college student in the 1980s, and an army officer into the next century, every part of my background led me to the one “true” ideology—a belief in Lee as the greatest of all Americans.
One story shows Lee’s stature among white southerners. While Lee was still alive, a young mother brought her child to the great man “to be blessed,” as though he were the southern pope.1 Lee the sainted figure of the white South for more than a century—that was my origin myth. Now, however, myth isn’t enough. I needed evidence to decide for myself as a soldier, as a scholar, and as a human being: What do I think of Robert E. Lee?
First, I need to account for a life in full. When Lee was a child, his father, “Light-Horse” Harry Lee, the famed Revolutionary War general, left the family destitute after a series of poor business decisions. Harry Lee spent time in two different jails for nonpayment of debts. After nearly dying at the hands of a lynch mob, he immigrated to the West Indies, and Robert never saw his father again. Lee’s mother moved the family to Alexandria, only a few miles from where I was born.
With little money, Lee sought and then accepted an appointment to West Point, where he excelled.2 He managed to spend four years at the U.S. Military Academy without earning a demerit. The Lee myth made that an extraordinary feat, but five other members of his class managed to avoid demerits as well.3 After graduating second in his class of forty-six, Lee joined the Corps of Engineers, the most prestigious branch in the army. Despite the glacial promotion system, he continued to serve, even though he spent much of his time in desolate frontier posts. To avoid the rigors and loneliness of army life, Lee could have used his skills as an engineer to seek well-paying employment. Only 30 percent of his West Point class remained in the army beyond twenty years.4 Instead, he chose to continue serving the nation.
In 1847, Lee became a warrior. The Veracruz campaign during the Mexican-American War is one of my favorite classes to teach at West Point. Led by the aptly nicknamed Old Fuss and Feathers, General Winfield Scott, the Veracruz campaign is among the greatest single operations in American military history. The Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, wrote that “the campaign is unsurpassed in military annals” and Scott “is the greatest living soldier.”5
If Wellington praised Scott, Scott said “the gallant, indefatigable Captain Lee” was “the very best soldier I ever saw in the field.” Lee served as an engineer on his staff, and Scott came to rely on his tactical judgment perhaps more than any other officer. In one famous incident, after three days with almost no sleep, Lee made a round-trip journey at night through a driving storm crossing some of Mexico’s most forbidding terrain. Scott described his trek as “the greatest feat of physical and moral courage performed by any individual” during the war.6
After the Mexican-American War, Lee’s reputation in the army changed from a stolid, dependable, if unimaginative engineer to perhaps the best warrior in the army. His next prominent assignment was one he did not want. He sent three letters begging to get a different assignment, but the new secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, would not accept anyone else. In 1852, Lee became superintendent of West Point, telling the chief of engineers that he had “never undertaken any duty with such reluctance.”7
Lee hated his job as West Point’s superintendent, complaining that the “climate is as harsh as my duties & neither brings me any pleasure.” Like many superintendents, he found the stresses of the job greater than the rewards. While Lee hated expelling cadets, he also despised the young men’s practiced ability to evade or break rules. In the worshipful biographies, Lee was praised for keeping discipline hi
gh among the cadets, and he did give out far more demerits than previous or future superintendents but without a positive result. In reality, like most superintendents, he failed to make the corps of cadets more disciplined. In one famous incident on New Year’s Day in 1854, one cadet described the pandemonium: “Knives were used, and several first classmen were stabbed … another will be dismissed because he knocked down the officer of the day.”8
Lee was not among the best or worst of superintendents. One family member of a cadet said Lee had “about as much heart as an ‘Iron Ram Rod.’” However, I know the difficulty of disciplining eighteen- to twenty-two-year-old men with a two-inch-thick rule book. West Point was, as Lee said, “a snake pit” of army politics. When the secretary of war offered him a spot in the storied 2nd Cavalry Regiment, Lee left during the middle of a storm rather than spend another day at West Point.9
Lee’s next prominent assignment came in 1859. While at his home in Arlington, Winfield Scott selected him to put down the abolitionist raid conducted by John Brown on the Harpers Ferry Arsenal, fifty miles northwest. From a soldier’s point of view, Lee did exactly what he should have. Brown was trying to capture weapons to lead an armed uprising against the laws of the land. Leading a small band of marines, Lee crushed the rebellion with a minimum of force. As in most of his assignments, he performed superbly, but he failed to understand how Brown became a powerful martyr for freedom after his hanging. Lee called him a “fanatic or a madman.”10
Most white people who came in contact with Lee thought highly of him. In 1860, A. M. Lea, an 1831 West Point graduate, wrote a letter to Sam Houston after meeting Lee, calling him “Preux chevalier [brave knight]” and saying he was “well informed in matters of state, honest, brave and skillful.”11 Until April 20, 1861, Lee would have to be reckoned among the best soldiers in the U.S. Army. Before the war, Winfield Scott called him “the greatest military genius in America.”12 Lee’s career before 1861 wasn’t what I revered, however. As a child growing up in Virginia, I worshipped Lee the Confederate general.
Lee the military commander was first-rate. Daring and innovative, for many years he intimidated and defeated opponents like George McClellan, Ambrose Burnside, and Joseph Hooker. He honed the Army of Northern Virginia into a formidable fighting force. The U.S. political leadership understood Lee’s importance to the entire southern cause and fixated on defeating him. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton believed “peace can be had only when Lee’s army is beaten, captured, or dispersed.”13 The Republican senator Charles Sumner said much the same: “When Lee’s army is out of the way, the whole rebellion will disappear.”14
Of the eleven major engagements he fought, Lee was outnumbered in every one. He won six. Two were a draw in which he won a tactical victory but lost strategically (Frayser’s Farm and Antietam), while three were definitive losses (Malvern Hill, Gettysburg, and Sayler’s Creek/Appomattox). In 1862, he took command of a force close to defeat and regained the initiative, forcing the United States to fight on his terms. At Chancellorsville, he created one of the great victories of any war by splitting his force not once but twice. During the war, he was seen by white southerners as the indispensable man. They were right. For the Confederate states, he was the most important person bar none.15
As a strategist, Lee kept trying to go on the offense, a policy the Confederate people demanded. As one soldier said, “The people have called for an active campaign and Gen. Lee has certainly given it to us.” His raid into Maryland did result in the capture of eleven thousand U.S. soldiers at Harpers Ferry, his largest haul of the war. However, the fight at Antietam, a tactical draw, meant that he had to abandon Maryland without affecting northern political sentiment, one of his chief aims. Nor did he succeed in convincing the British to recognize the Confederacy.16
Going into Maryland for the Antietam campaign, Lee thought the people would rise up to meet him as liberators. Maryland was, after all, a slave state. Most white Marylanders, however, saw him not as a liberator but as the leader of an invading army ready and willing to plunder. Moreover, his ragtag army failed to impress potential recruits.
He then tried the same offensive strategy in 1863, and it failed again. As one Georgian said after the Gettysburg campaign, “I think they fight harder in their own country, than they do in Virginia. I had rather fight them in Virginia then [sic] here.”17 In Pennsylvania, U.S. soldiers fought to protect their homes, while Lee’s army, despite his orders against thievery, plundered with abandon.
Yet Lee’s strategy based on battlefield victory, especially in Virginia, was essentially sound. As one of his lieutenants later described it, Lee hoped that the “desperation of [Confederate] resistance would exact … such a price in blood and treasure as to exhaust the enthusiasm of the population … for war.” Lee made grave mistakes at Gettysburg, but so too did the best general in the war, Ulysses S. Grant, who also conducted frontal assaults at Vicksburg and Cold Harbor that he came to regret.18
Lee’s strategy failed primarily because U.S. strategy and leadership were even better. The U.S. cause was also better. As the war continued, the United States gained forces from emancipated African Americans, while the South lost their enslaved workers. Lee lost because his opponent was better and the southern cause awful.
Over the course of the war, Lee mostly fought well. Both U.S. and Confederate soldiers and civilians would have agreed. Even after the defeat at Gettysburg, white southerners called him “the Invincible Lee.” An artillery officer in 1864 called Lee “one of the few great men who ever lived.” In fact, because Lee fought so well for so long, the South stayed in the war for four years, ensuring the destruction of the South’s infrastructure, not to mention the horrific bloodletting.19
The historian Joseph Glatthaar showed that nearly one in four of Lee’s soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia died in battle or of disease. Nearly three out of four of Lee’s soldiers either were killed, died of disease, were wounded, were captured, or were discharged as disabled, numbers the Confederate states could not replace. Lee knew that, and so did Grant.20
We know that Lee’s success on the battlefield prolonged the war and led to more suffering for the South. Of course, that’s not how I saw it as a child. I saw Lee’s battlefield success and dignity in defeat as signs of his high character. Yet as a child and well into my army career, I failed to look at the two issues that today sear my soul: treason and slavery.21
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I HAVE WORN a U.S. Army uniform as an ROTC cadet or an army officer for forty years, from 1980 to 2020. Over those four decades, I came to revere the U.S. Constitution. Despite its imperfection, I agree with Frederick Douglass, who said, using all caps, “The Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” I know our country is flawed. I’ve detailed those flaws extensively. Nonetheless, I believe in the United States of America. I’ve spent two-thirds of my life in its service. During my first few years in the army, while I was fulfilling my scholarship contract, I couldn’t articulate why I was serving. I would have talked about fighting for my fellow soldiers, especially the ones I led.22
Four decades in uniform, however, hone the mind. I chose to serve for so long because of my abiding belief in the United States of America. I was willing to fight and if necessary die for my country. Despite detailing the systemic racism throughout the history of this country, I believe in the promise of America. As a U.S. Army soldier, I believe the Constitution is worth defending. I love my country.
If the United States of America ever needs me again, I’m ready to serve. I kept several sets of combat uniforms after I retired just in case. In 2017, the president issued an amendment to the post-9/11 executive order giving the service secretaries the ability to recall more easily any retired soldier, sailor, airman, or marine to active duty.23 In the highly unlikely event my country ever needs an old soldier, I’m ready to mount up to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” as the oath demands.
&
nbsp; As an army officer, I started reading the Constitution regularly only in the last decade. When I read Article III, Section 3, I thought immediately of Lee:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
Robert E. Lee served in the U.S. Army either as a cadet or as a Regular Army officer from 1825 to 1861. Thirty-six years. Yet at the age of fifty-four, he committed treason. No court ever convicted him, although he was indicted. Lee was paroled at Appomattox and eventually granted full amnesty, as all former Confederates were on Christmas Day 1868.24 I am not arguing that a jury found him guilty; none did. But I don’t need a conviction to analyze facts.
When I read Article III, Section 3, Lee’s actions undeniably violated the Constitution he and I swore to defend. He waged war against the United States. Because he fought so well for so long, hundreds of thousands of soldiers died. No other enemy officer in American history was responsible for the deaths of more U.S. Army soldiers than Robert E. Lee. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia killed more than one in three and wounded more than half of all U.S. casualties. In the last year of the war, Lee’s army killed or wounded 127,000 U.S. Army soldiers.25
Lee killed American soldiers; that’s a fact. But is it fair for me as a U.S. Army officer or a historian to pronounce judgment? Can I question Lee’s decision to fight against the country that educated him? The country that he served for so long and so well? He lived in the nineteenth century, I live in the twenty-first, but we both wore army blue for more than thirty years. His decision to resign his U.S. Army commission and fight against the United States haunts me because of my background as a southerner and because of my own army service. As a soldier and as a historian, I need to see beyond the myth I grew up believing to understand the man and his decision.