Robert E. Lee and Me

by Ty Seidule

  24. Palmer, Walt Disney’s Uncle Remus Stories, 7.

  25. Richard Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), 19.

  26. Jason Sperb, Disney’s Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the Hidden Histories of “Song of the South” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 86–89.

  27. Harris poll, “The Bible Remains America’s Favorite Book,” April 29, 2014, theharrispoll.com/new-york-n-y-april-29-2014-theres-always-one-it-might-be-something-you-remember-fondly-from-when-you-were-a-child-or-it-could-be-one-that-just-resonated-with-you-years-after-your-first-expe-2/.

  28. Molly Haskell, Frankly, My Dear: “Gone with the Wind” Revisited (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), 14.

  29. Bruce Chadwick, The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film (New York: Knopf, 2001), 187.

  30. Les Brown, “NBC-TV Pays Peak $5 Million to Show ‘Gone With Wind’ Once,” New York Times, May 17, 1974; “CBS Buys ‘Gone With the Wind’ for TV for $35 Million,” New York Times, April 6, 1978, 15.

  31. Gore Vidal, Screening History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 81.

  32. Richard B. Harwell, ed., Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” Letters, 1936–1949 (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 55–57.

  33. Richard B. Harwell, “Margaret Mitchell,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (New York: Anchor, 1989), 3:512.

  34. Harwell, Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” Letters, 39, 43.

  35. James McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000), 476.

  36. Historians have written extensively on the Lost Cause myth. Their work helped me understand my own history. These historians are helping the nation change its understanding of the Civil War and its aftermath. My thanks go to: Charles Reagan Wilson, Gaines Foster, David Blight, Charles Dew, James McPherson, Thomas Connelly, Caroline Janney, Karen Cox, Adam Domby, Gary Gallagher, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Robert S. Cook, John R. Neff, Kevin Levin, Brooks Simpson, Joan Waugh, Alan Nolan, Nina Silber, William Garrett Piston, Robert J. Cook, and James Loewen and many others. I’m indebted to their scholarship.

  37. Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 434.

  38. Charles Dew, Apostles of Disunion: The Southern Secession Commissioners and the Cause of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001).

  39. Gordon Rhea, “Why Non-Slaveholding Southerners Fought,” Civil War Trust, Jan. 2011.

  40. Alexander H. Stephens, Cornerstone Speech, March 21, 1861, teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/cornerstone-speech/.

  41. Dew, Apostles of Disunion; Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005).

  42. Mitchell, Gone With the Wind, 177.

  43. Kevin M. Levin, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

  44. Mitchell, Gone With the Wind, 472.

  45. Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  46. Edward E. Baptist calls plantations “enslaved labor camps” in his book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 115.

  47. Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (New York: Appleton, 1881), 1:534.

  48. Mitchell, Gone With the Wind, 654.

  49. Thomas Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 304–312.

  50. Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980), 56.

  51. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters (New York: Viking, 2007), 137; James Melton, ed. Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember: An Oral History (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 122.

  52. Diane Miller Sommerville, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Peter W. Bardaglio, “Rape and the Law in the Old South: ‘Calculated to Excite Indignation in Every Heart,’” Journal of Southern History 60, no. 4 (Nov. 1994): 749–72.

  53. R. E. Lee, General Orders No. 9, Headquarters Army of Northern Virginia, April 10, 1865. Michael Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee (New York: Random House, 2000), 190–192.

  54. Mitchell, Gone With the Wind, 278.

  55. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 858.

  56. Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army, 450–53. Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee, 192.

  57. Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 175.

  58. Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003).

  59. Mitchell, Gone With the Wind, 521.

  60. Ibid., 841.

  61. Ibid., 904.

  62. Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xi.

  63. Mitchell, Gone With the Wind, 665.

  64. Ted Tunnell, “Creating ‘the Propaganda of History’: Southern Editors and the Origins of Carpetbagger and Scalawag,” Journal of Southern History 72, no. 4 (Nov. 2006): 789–822.

  65. Mitchell to Ruth Tallman, July 30, 1937, in Harwell, Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” Letters, 162.

  66. Elaine Frantz Parsons, Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 303–308.

  67. Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863–1877, updated ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2015), xiii.

  68. Michael Fellman, In the Name of God and Country: The Counterrevolutionary White-Terrorist Destruction of Reconstruction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 142.

  69. Mitchell, Gone With the Wind, 656.

  70. Jill Watts, Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 174–75.

  71. William L. Patterson, “‘Gone With the Wind’: Lies About the Civil War; It Glorifies Slavery; Sons of Rebels Cheer It; A Farce on Democracy,” Chicago Defender, Jan. 6, 1940. Professor Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders provided me with this source.

  72. Quoted in Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), 387.

  CHAPTER 2: MY HOMETOWN: A HIDDEN HISTORY OF SLAVERY, JIM CROW, AND INTEGRATION

  1. Ken Ringle, “The School with a Southern Accent,” Washington Post, Nov. 11, 1989.

  2. Arthur Barksdale Kinsolving, The Story of a Southern High School: The Episcopal High School of Virginia (Baltimore: Norman Remington, 1922); Richard Pardee Williams Jr., The High School: A History of the Episcopal High School in Virginia at Alexandria (Boston: Vincent-Curtis, 1964); John White, Chronicles of the Episcopal High School in Virginia, 1839–1989 (Dublin, N.H.: William L. Bauhan, 1989).

  3. Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood:The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980) 143.

  4. Cabell Phillips, “Virginia: The State and the State of Mind,” New York Times, July 28, 1957.

  5. Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 316.

  6. Made in Virginia Store, www.madeinva.com/product/virginian-creed-print/.

  7. U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8; Jacob E. Cooke, “The Compromise of 1790,” William and Mary Quarterly 27, no. 4 (Oct. 1970): 523–45; Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Vintage Books), 48–56.

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p; 8. Cooke, “Compromise of 1790”; Ellis, Founding Brothers, 48–56.

  9. Ellis, Founding Brothers, 51–56.

  10. Amos B. Casselman, “The Virginia Portion of the District of Columbia,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. (1909), 12:115–41.

  11. Ibid., 131.

  12. A. Glenn Crothers, “The 1846 Retrocession of Alexandria: Protecting Slavery and the Slave Trade in the District of Columbia,” in In the Shadow of Freedom: The Politics of Slavery in the National Capital, ed. Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 141.

  13. Ibid., 158–61.

  14. William H. Phillips, “Cotton Gin,” EH Net, eh.net/?s=cotton+gin.

  15. Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 59.

  16. Crothers, “1846 Retrocession of Alexandria,” 156.

  17. Mary Beth Corrigan, “Imaginary Cruelties? A History of the Slave Trade in Washington, D.C.,” Washington History 13, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 2001/2002): 24, 40.

  18. Ibid., 25.

  19. Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 8.

  20. Pryor, Reading the Man, 147.

  21. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 53–55.

  22. Corrigan, “Imaginary Cruelties?,” 4–27.

  23. “Virginia County Vote on Secession Ordinance, May 23, 1861,” www.newrivernotes.com/historical_antebellum_1861_virginia_voteforsecession.htm.

  24. Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 282.

  25. Ibid., 284.

  26. Ibid., 193–94.

  27. “The Murder of Colonel Ellsworth,” Harper’s Weekly, June 8, 1861, 267.

  28. Goodheart, 1861, 290–91.

  29. Exercises Connected with the Unveiling of the Ellsworth Monument, at Mechanicville, May 27, 1874 (Albany, N.Y.: Joel Munsell, 1875), 29.

  30. William Adrian Brown, History of the George Washington Masonic National Memorial, 1924–1974 (New York: History House, 1980), 103.

  31. Goodheart, 1861, 287.

  32. “The Martyr Jackson,” Richmond Daily Whig, May 30, 1861; Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 88–89.

  33. Meg Groeling, “Battlefield Markers & Monuments: Colonel Elmer Ellsworth and the Marshall House Hotel Plaque,” Emerging Civil War, 2017, emergingcivilwar.com/2017/10/23/battlefield-markers-monuments-colonel-elmer-ellsworth-and-the-marshall-house-hotel-plaque/; James W. Loewen, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 295–297.

  34. Patricia Sullivan, “Robert E. Lee Portrait Is Moved from Hometown City Hall to a Museum,” Washington Post, Nov. 19, 2017.

  35. Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Gretchen Long, Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care in Slavery and Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

  36. Alexandria’s Freedmen’s Cemetery Historical Overview, April 2007, www.alexandriava.gov/uploadedFiles/historic/info/archaeology/ContrabandsCemeteryHistoricalOverview.pdf.

  37. Quoted in ibid.

  38. S. J. Ackerman, “Samuel Wilbert Tucker: The Unsung Hero of the School Desegregation Movement,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 28 (Summer 2000): 98–103; J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 285, 259–61.

  39. Smith, Managing White Supremacy, 261–63.

  40. Ibid.

  41. Ibid., 264–66.

  42. Ibid., 267.

  43. Ibid., 266–67; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–63.

  44. Gerald Astor, The Right to Fight: A History of African Americans in the Military (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1998), 181–82; Rick Atkinson, Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944 (New York: Holt, 2007); Daniel K. Gibran, The 92nd Infantry Division and the Italian Campaign in World War II (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001), 67–68.

  45. Ackerman, “Samuel Wilbert Tucker.”

  46. Mark Jinks, “Inventory of Confederate Memorials, Names, and Symbols,” Alexandria, Va., Aug. 28, 2015, www.alexandriava.gov/uploadedFiles/manager/info/Inventory082815.pdf.

  47. Patricia Sullivan, “Alexandria City Council to Reconsider Several Old Laws,” Washington Post, Jan. 14, 2014.

  48. “A List of Virginia’s 200-Plus Confederate Monuments and Public Symbols,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, Aug. 17, 2017.

  49. Lee to General Corse et al., March 18, 1870, in J. William Jones, Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of Gen. Robert E. Lee (New York: D. Appleton, 1875), 176.

  50. The portrait was removed quietly after the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville and placed in a museum. Sullivan, “Alexandria City Council to Reconsider Several Old Laws.”

  51. Carol Sheriff, “Virginia’s Embattled Textbooks: Lessons (Learned and Not) from the Centennial Era,” Civil War History 58, no. 1 (2012): 37–74.

  52. Francis Butler Simkins, Spotswood Hunnicutt Jones, and Sidman P. Poole, Virginia: History, Government, Geography (New York: Scribner, 1964), 368.

  53. Brendan Wolfe, “Slave Ships and the Middle Passage,” Encyclopedia Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Slave_Ships_and_the_Middle_Passage#start_entry.

  54. Sheriff, “Virginia’s Embattled Textbooks.”

  55. Simkins, Jones, and Poole, Virginia, 373–76.

  56. Ibid.

  57. “To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights,” 1947, Harry S. Truman Library, www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/to-secure-these-rights.

  58. Sheriff, “Virginia’s Embattled Textbooks,” 55.

  59. Ibid., 67–68. James S. Humphreys, Francis Butler Simkins: A Life (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), 205–207.

  60. Sheriff, “Virginia’s Embattled Textbooks,” 47, 67–68.

  61. Ibid., 68.

  62. Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 162.

  63. Mable T. Lyles, Caught Between Two Systems: Desegregating Alexandria’s Schools, 1954–1973 (Washington, D.C.: Xlibris, 2006), 27–31.

  64. Ira M. Lechner, “Massive Resistance: Virginia’s Great Leap Backward,” Virginia Quarterly Review 74, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 632.

  65. Ibid., 633–38.

  66. Douglas S. Reed, Building the Federal Schoolhouse: Localism and the American Education State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3.

  67. Ibid., 12.

  68. Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 222.

  69. Ibid., 358.

  70. S. J. Ackerman, “The Trials of S. W. Tucker,” Washington Post, June 11, 2000.

  71. Reed, Building the Federal Schoolhouse, 28–32.

  72. Ibid., 33.

  73. Krystyn R. Moon, “The African American Housing Crisis in Alexandria, Virginia, 1930s–1960s,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 124, no. 1 (2016): 7–10.

  74. Lyles, Caught Between Two Systems, 37.

  75. Reed, Building the Federal Schoolhouse, 6.

  76. Ibid., 65.

  77. Ibid.

  78. Smith, Managing White Supremacy, 3.

  CHAPTER 3: MY ADOPTED HOMETOWNS: A HIDDEN HISTORY AS “LYNCHTOWN”

  1. Mitchell, Gone With the Wind, 7.

  2. George Walton Academy timeline, author’s files.r />
  3. Robert A. Pratt, We Shall Not Be Moved: The Desegregation of the University of Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 1.

  4. Jeff Roche, Restructured Resistance: The Sibley Commission and the Politics of Desegregation in Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 16–20.