Robert E. Lee and Me

by Ty Seidule

  * * *

  ON APRIL 9, Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant; the war ended soon thereafter. I learned as a child that Lee graciously accepted defeat, showing his true character to send his men home rather than keep fighting a guerrilla war. Lee was the hero of Appomattox showing dignity under duress. My Meet Robert E. Lee book argued that he surrendered to save his state from ruin and his soldiers from certain death. Of course, Virginia was already ruined, and if Lee had wanted to save his men, he could have surrendered far earlier, but Lee and his army fought until they could fight no more.

  After nearly a year of bloody battles to destroy Lee’s army and capture Richmond, Grant finally cut the southern rail lines near Petersburg on April 2, 1865. Lee’s choice was retreat, surrender, or become surrounded. He chose retreat but still lost nearly 10,000 soldiers captured, killed, or wounded extricating himself from Petersburg. On April 6, Lee lost nearly a fifth of his force, 8,000 soldiers (compared with 1,150 U.S. casualties), plus many guns and supply wagons at the Battle of Sayler’s Creek, his largest one-day loss of the war. Sheridan called the battle “one of the severest of the war, for the enemy fought with desperation to avoid capture, and we, bent on his destruction, were no less eager and determined.”87

  Lee’s reaction to the sight of his men in disorderly retreat was to declare in dismay, “My God! Has the army been dissolved?” As a kid growing up, I never heard about Lee’s devastating defeat only days before Appomattox, and for good reason. Surrender showed Lee’s character to save his men and the South when in reality his army had no supplies and dwindling numbers.88

  Yet Lee still fought on, trying to link up with Joseph Johnston’s Confederate army coming from the south. Lee’s surrender would mean complete Confederate defeat. As his army dissolved, he refused Grant’s overture of surrender until his entire army was surrounded on all sides. Lee fought and fought and fought until the bitter end, surrendering only because Grant whipped him. I thought Grant simply used his overwhelming resources to force Lee to capitulate, but the truth is more complicated. Lee accepted surrender because Grant had him surrounded and offered lenient terms. No humiliation. No prisoner of war camps. No trials and no hangings.

  Other civil wars had ended with harsh retribution for failed rebellions, and Lee knew his history of the English Civil War and Napoleon’s campaigns in Spain. Both featured grisly postwar killings. Or Grant could have humiliated Lee. The U.S. commander had earned the nickname Unconditional Surrender Grant, but to end the war, Grant gave generous terms. Go home under parole, and do not take up arms against the U.S. government.

  As the soldiers of the former Army of Northern Virginia started to make their way home, the fight moved from the battlefield to the peace. What would peace mean? For Grant, the war meant a righteous triumph over a rebellion for slavery: right over wrong. The U.S. victory confirmed perpetual Union, the strength of democracy to abide by the “rule of the majority.” For Grant, the war also saved the United States from slavery, “an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it.” Grant would later remind readers that his boss, President Lincoln, believed “a cause so just as ours would come out triumphant.”89

  In June 1865, Grant issued General Orders No. 108. In class, I have my cadets stand as I recite it aloud, telling them to answer with “Huzzah!”

  Soldiers of the Armies of the United States! By your patriotic devotion to your country in the hour of danger and alarm—your magnificent fighting, bravery and endurance—you have maintained the supremacy of the Union and the Constitution, overthrown all armed opposition to the enforcement of the law, and of the Proclamations forever Abolishing Slavery, the cause and pretext for the Rebellion, and opened the way to the Rightful Authorities to restore Order and inaugurate Peace on a permanent and enduring basis on every foot of American soil.

  Your marches, Sieges, and Battles, in distance, duration, resolution and brilliancy of result, dim the luster of the world’s past military achievements, and will be the patriot’s precedent in the defense of liberty and Right in all time to come. In obedience to your country’s call, you left your homes and families and volunteered in its defense. Victory has crowned your valor.90

  Huzzah! Every time I read Grant’s stirring words, I am so proud to be a U.S. Army soldier.

  For Lee, the war meant something quite different. The historian Elizabeth Varon wrote that Lee saw his defeat as the victory of “might over right.”91 That “God is on the side of the strongest battalions,” as Rhett Butler quoted an apocryphal saying of Napoleon’s.92 Lee acknowledged defeat but felt neither he nor the white South had done anything wrong. In his famous General Orders No. 9, Lee bid his soldiers farewell. He stated his version of what the war meant and why it ended, initiating the Lost Cause myth. The Army of Northern Virginia “succumbed to overwhelming numbers and resources,” a kind of code criticizing the immigrant army of the United States supported by unsavory businessmen and ruthless politicians. It implied that the United States didn’t fight fair and therefore southern honor was still intact.93

  Lee wrote to Davis on April 12 that he was outnumbered five to one, beginning the Lost Cause myth that only numbers and supplies caused Confederate defeat. Lee was wrong. He wrote that he had only ten thousand effectives, but more than twenty-eight thousand applied for parole in less than a week. Throughout the final campaign, Grant had a two-to-one advantage. My army training taught me that an attacking force should hold at least a three-to-one manpower advantage.94

  Part of Grant’s manpower advantage did come from immigrants. Lee had far fewer foreign-born soldiers because no immigrant would want to compete against slave labor. Grant did have 180,000 Black soldiers who fought so hard and so well to ensure their own freedom. As one USCT soldier put it, “We the colored soldiers, have fairly won our rights by loyalty and bravery.”95

  No need to explain why the South had no African American soldiers. The Confederates had fewer forces because their cause was so flawed. Yet the numerical disadvantage was never as great as Lee argued. By 1865, the U.S. Army was the best-led, hardest-fighting, best-provisioned, and most strategically and tactically proficient combat force on the globe. The United States won because they were better.96

  * * *

  WHEN I WAS growing up, Lee’s life after Appomattox had two elements: innovative educator at Washington College and leader of reconciliation for the nation. As Douglas Southall Freeman wrote, “Lee the warrior became Lee the conciliator.” Lee was a talented educator, and he saved Washington College, but the reconciliationist part is more complex. In his first interview, only three days after the war ended, Lee told a reporter that while he was for reconciliation, “should arbitrary, or vindictive, or vengeful policies be adopted, the end was not yet.” Lee certainly showed no remorse for the war or the South’s role in starting it. Instead, he made demands of the United States, despite the utter defeat of his army.97

  Initially, he told General George Meade that he would not take the oath of allegiance until he saw how the United States would treat the defeated South. In those initial days after defeat, Lee worried about how vengeful the United States would be, and there were plenty of calls for his head in the northern press.98

  On June 7, a judge indicted him along with two of his sons and his nephew for treason. When that happened, he could have fled the country as many others did, including Jubal Early. Lee stayed. As he told a cousin, “I am aware of having done nothing wrong, and cannot flee.” Over the next several months, even though he was still under indictment for treason, Lee began to press his former Confederate officers to rejoin the Republic and work for its betterment. As he told one officer, “I believe it to be the duty of everyone to unite in the restoration of the country, and the reestablishment of peace and harmony.”99

  Lee’s finest hour, in his entire life, came on October 2, 1865. On that day in front of a notary public in Lexington, Lee signed an amnesty oath to the United States, his first U.S. o
ath since March 1861.100 By signing the oath, Lee applied for a pardon from President Andrew Johnson. The U.S. attorney general, James Speed, wrote that “the acceptance of a pardon is a confession of guilt.” Lee might not have believed Speed, but he knew many southerners did. They would see his oath as evidence that secession was wrong.101 Yet he took it anyway.

  I Robert E. Lee of Lexington Virginia do solemnly swear, in the presence of Almighty God, that I will henceforth faithfully support, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and the Union of the States thereunder, and that I will, in like manner, abide by and faithfully support all laws and proclamations which have been made during the existing rebellion with reference to the emancipation of slaves, so help me God.102

  Lee sent the oath forward to Washington, where President Johnson personally approved each request. In Lee’s case, the president refused to grant him a pardon. Johnson still wanted to try him for treason. While he wasn’t pardoned, Lee did fall under the general amnesty issued on Christmas Day in 1868.103 Taking the oath was Lee at his best, and he persuaded many other former Confederates to take it as well.

  Lee’s reaction to other issues, however, shows a man who did not accept the outcome of the war. Before the war, Lee declared that “secession was revolution.” After the war, he argued that secession was constitutional. While at Washington College, he wrote essays on the “complete sovereignty” of the states.104 Much like the secessionists in 1861, Lee argued privately against majority rule. The blame for the war should not go to the secessionists who fired on U.S. territory. Instead, the United States bore responsibility for the war because it impeded slavery in the western territories. As a kid, I heard Lee took responsibility for defeat, and he did after Gettysburg. Not so much after the war, blaming in private his subordinates like Stuart and Ewell. Once going so far as to argue that he had actually won at Gettysburg.105

  From those early days after defeat, Lee changed to become more reconciliationist in public at least, but his views on African Americans changed little. During his first interview days after the war, he said, “The Negroes must be disposed of,” hinting that unless African Americans’ status was in accord with the former secessionists, white southerners would subvert emancipation.106 In testimony before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction in Washington in 1866, Lee testified that “they cannot vote intelligently” and that he opposed African American enfranchisement because it would “excite unfriendly feelings between the two races.” When asked by the committee, “Do you think that Virginia would be better off if the colored population were to go to Alabama, Louisiana, and other Southern States?” Lee replied, “I think it would be better for Virginia if she could get rid of them.”107

  Two years later, in March 1868, Lee wrote to his son Robert E. Lee Jr. After dispensing practical farming advice, he showed that his racist attitude toward African Americans was no different from what it had been before the war:

  You will never prosper with the blacks, and it is abhorrent to a reflecting mind to be supporting and cherishing those who are plotting and working for your injury, and all of whose sympathies and associations are antagonistic to yours … our material, social, and political interests are naturally with the whites.108

  * * *

  LATER IN 1868, Lee gathered a group of former Confederate military and political leaders including the former vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, at White Sulphur Springs. The group published a manifesto, called General’s Lee’s Letter by some. Widely circulated in the South, the manifesto argued for a return to the social system of the antebellum era. Lee argued that Black people were needed as the “laboring population” but that they had “neither the intelligence nor the qualifications … for political power.” Lee and his group made clear they “opposed any system of laws which will place the political power of the country in the hands of the negro race.”109

  Lee’s racist views failed to change after the war, and African Americans in Lexington paid the price. Students at Washington College routinely harassed and assaulted African Americans. Lee exercised complete command over the young men at the college. When students threatened to leave early for Christmas one year, Lee promised to expel them immediately if any tried. No one left Lexington early. After a trying stint at West Point and four years with soldiers, Lee understood how to control young men. If he had wanted to stop the abusive behavior toward African Americans, he could have done so easily.110

  Assisting African Americans, who made up 33 percent of Lexington’s population, was a local branch of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which bore responsibility for helping emancipated people with shelter, clothing, and especially education. When the first Freedmen’s Bureau arrived, it created a schoolhouse for African Americans, causing anger in the white population. The bureau’s agents warned an incoming director that “General Lee’s Boys” made Lexington a “hard place for ‘Nigger’ Teachers.” Northern women reported that students spat on them in the streets. One woman was greeted daily by “Damn Yankee bitch of a nigger teacher.”

  The historian John McClure argued that Lee’s students and the VMI cadets were “sexual predators” who preyed on Black women. The Freedmen’s Bureau reported several attempts “to abduct … unwilling colored girls [for] readily divined purposes.” Sexual violence by students against Black women was omnipresent.111

  While Lee would often remain circumspect about his racial views, his wife talked more openly. Historian Emory Thomas argued that Mary Lee’s views “reflected the emotions of her husband.” In May 1866, Mary Lee wrote to her friend about African Americans in Lexington, “We are all here dreadfully plundered by the lazy idle negroes who are lounging about the streets doing nothing but looking what they may plunder during the night…” Then she spoke directly about a violent solution to racial issues in Lexington. “When we get rid of the freedman’s Bureau & can take the law in our hands we may perhaps do better. If they would only take their pets north it would be a happy riddance.”112

  Twice during Lee’s tenure, students were involved in violent confrontations that nearly turned into lynchings. In one case Lee expelled a student, but in another, more serious case, when students created a vigilante committee and threatened to storm the jail to lynch a Black man, no student was expelled. With the number of accusations of harassment and assault leveled at Washington College men, Lee used a light disciplinary touch around racial intimidation, attacks, and sexual violence, even though he was known for a heavy hand in less serious incidents. Lee did not consider African Americans worthy of protection.113

  * * *

  AFTER LOOKING AT Lee’s life in full, what do I think about the man now, as a southerner, as a historian, and as a soldier?

  Historians don’t usually do counterfactual history or predict the future, but we should wonder what would have happened if the Confederacy had won, if Lee had been successful. Despite all the states’ rights blather of the Confederacy, its constitution allowed no states’ rights on slavery. One clause barred any state from making a law “impairing the right of property in negro slaves.” Changing the constitution required two-thirds votes of the states; no easy task. Because the price of enslaved people was at an all-time high in 1860, slavery would have continued for decades or longer. In 1840 the number of enslaved people stood at 2.5 million. By 1860 the number had grown to four million.114

  If Lee’s cause had emerged victorious, millions of people would have endured misery, rape, family separation, torture, and murder well into the future. As bad as the Jim Crow era would become, and it was awful, slavery was far worse. We must remember: Lee fought for perpetual slavery.

  With a porous border to the north of the Confederacy, enslaved people would have continued to flee to freedom. How would the new southern country react? By deploying the Confederate army to the border? Certainly, skirmishes leading to more war would have continued over white southerners’ “property rights.”

  As a soldier, I think about two countries f
ighting across the breadth of North America. Think of the border wars. The entire continent would be militarized far more than it is now. Who would gain the West? What would happen after the West had been settled? The southern states had their eye on annexing Cuba before the war. The two countries would have fought for other Caribbean islands, Mexico, and more. War would have been even more pervasive, and our entire history blighted.

  Looking at what “might have been” shows the possibility of a terrible future, but it’s speculation. We do know, however, what Robert E. Lee did. For me, the biggest issue was the fateful, awful decision he made in April 1861. Lee’s decision to fight against the United States was not just wrong; it was treasonous. Even worse, he committed treason to perpetuate slavery.

  Slavery was and is wrong. That’s not a hard moral judgment. Four million men, women, and children were not property; they were people who deserved to share the American dream. Frederick Douglass described the experience of a typical enslaved man, “robbed of wife, of children, of his hard earnings, of home, of friends, of society, of knowledge, and of all that makes his life desirable.”115

  Once I accepted that simple fact—the enslaved were people who deserved the same rights as any American—my whole thought process changed. I grew up thinking that before 1861 slaves were somehow not quite as human as white southerners. That the enslaved only became real people after 1865. It pains me to write that I believed something so grotesque and immoral, but it’s worse to lie.