Robert E. Lee and Me

by Ty Seidule

  5. Ibid., 3–6.

  6. A Statistical Summary, State by State, of School Segregation-Desegregation in the Southern and Border Area from 1945 to the Present, 16th rev., Southern Education Reporting Service, Nashville, Feb. 1967, files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED019382.pdf. Also see 1970 census, www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html.

  7. “44 Negroes Seized at Georgia School; Attempt to Block Buses in Protest Over Conditions,” New York Times, Feb. 16, 1968.

  8. Graves v. Walton County Board of Education, 300 F. Supp. 188 (U.S. District Court of the Middle District of Georgia, July 30, 1968), law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/300/188/1820876/.

  9. “School Stories: Good Hope-Peters,” Georgia High School Basketball Project Blog, May 17, 2017, https://ghsbp.wordpress.com/tag/good-hope-peters/.

  10. George Walton Academy timeline.

  11. Georgia Independent School Association, www.gisaschools.org/general-info/about-gisa/; “1979 George Walton Academy Bulldogs,” Georgia High School Football Historians Association Database. ghsfha.org/w/Special:SchoolHome?view=seasons&season=1979&school=George+Walton+Academy.

  12. Monica Kristin Blair, “A Private History of School Segregation in Georgia” (master’s thesis, University of Georgia, 2013), 8–9.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Logan Strother, Thomas Ogorzalek, and Spencer Piston, “The Confederate Flag Largely Disappeared After the Civil War. The Fight Against Civil Rights Brought It Back,” Washington Post, June 12, 2017.

  15. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 3.

  16. Ibid., 5–7.

  17. William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 42–45; Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 132–37.

  18. Kathleen Gorman, “‘This Man Felker Is a Man of Pretty Good Standing’: A Reconstruction Klansman in Walton County,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 81, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 897–914.

  19. Ibid.

  20. United States Congressional Serial Set, vol. 1534, Oct. 23, 1871, 468.

  21. Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 247.

  22. Manfred Berg, Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011), 31.

  23. Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 64–66.

  24. Thomas Nelson Page, The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 100.

  25. Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd ed., Equal Justice Initiative, 41, lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/.

  26. “A Brute’s Attempted Crime. He Is Captured and Sunk in a Pond,” Columbus Daily Enquirer, July 11, 1890, 1.

  27. “Fiendish Assault in Walton County; Posses Hunting Negro,” Macon Telegraph, April 14, 1911.

  28. “No Military Escort for Tom Allen Today. Negro Accused of Assaulting Walton County Woman Will Be Tried,” Macon Telegraph, June 27, 1911.

  29. “Fiendish Assault in Walton County; Posses Hunting Negro.”

  30. “No Military Escort for Tom Allen Today.”

  31. Ibid.

  32. Laura Wexler, Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America (New York: Scribner, 2003), 73.

  33. Wes Swietek, “Lynchtown: America’s Last Mass Lynching and 70 Year Search for Justice,” unpublished MS, 22; Wexler, Fire in a Canebrake, 74.

  34. Crisis, Aug. 1911, 143.

  35. Swietek, “Lynchtown,” 22; Wexler, Fire in a Canebrake, 74.

  36. Swietek, “Lynchtown,” 22.

  37. “Lynching in Walton Reported at Athens. Matter Kept Quiet Three Days—General Boyd Taken Out by Quiet Crowd and Is Hanged,” Macon Telegraph, Nov. 25, 1913, 1.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Anita B. Sams, Wayfarers in Walton: A History of Walton County, Georgia 1818-1967 (Monroe: General Charitable Foundation, 1967).

  40. “Camp Still Active,” The Confederate Veteran XXV, no. 11 (Nov. 1917): 497. Mark Bauerlein, Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001); Charles Crowe, “Racial Massacre in Atlanta, September 22, 1906,” Journal of Negro History 54 (April 1969); Cox, Dixie’s Daughters.

  41. Daniel Allen Hearn, Legal Executions in Georgia: A Comprehensive Registry, 1866–1964 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2016), 157.

  42. “Patrol Disperses Crowd at Monroe: Throng Milling at Court House After Trial Dispersed by Tear Gas,” Atlanta Constitution, May 23, 1939, 1.

  43. Death Penalty USA, Georgia, deathpenaltyusa.org/usa1/state/georgia3.htm; “A History of the Office of Planning and Analysis, State of Georgia, Death Penalty in Georgia: Executions by Year 1924–2004,” Jan. 2014, www.dcor.state.ga.us/sites/all/files/pdf/Research/Standing/Death_penalty_in_Georgia.pdf. Frank Hobbs and Nicole Stoops, Demographic Trends in the 20th Century (U.S. Census Bureau, 2002), www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/censr-4.pdf.

  44. Gladys Kleinwort Bowles, Net Migration of the Population, 1950–60: By Age, Sex, and Color (Washington, D.C.: Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1965 and 1975).

  45. Three works have helped me understand the 1946 Monroe lynching: Wexler, Fire in a Canebrake; Anthony S. Pitch, The Last Lynching: How a Gruesome Mass Murder Rocked a Small Georgia Town (New York: Skyhorse, 2016); Swietek, “Lynchtown.”

  46. Pitch, Last Lynching, 45.

  47. Swietek, “Lynchtown,” 64.

  48. Pitch, Last Lynching, 103.

  49. Ibid., 29.

  50. Ibid., 103.

  51. Swietek, “Lynchtown,” 37.

  52. Donald L. Grant and Jonathan Grant, The Way It Was in the South (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1993), 358, 363–64; Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954–1992, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 11, 13–14, 18–19; Alton Hornsby Jr., “A City That Was Too Busy to Hate: Atlanta Businessmen and Desegregation,” in Southern Businessmen and Desegregation, ed. Elizabeth Jacoway and David R. Colburn (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).

  53. Wexler, Fire in a Canebrake, 36–37; Pitch, Last Lynching, 19.

  54. Swietek, “Lynchtown,” 33.

  55. Ibid., 31.

  56. Jennifer E. Brooks, Defining the Peace: World War II Veterans, Race, and the Remaking of the Southern Political Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 34–35.

  57. Swietek, “Lynchtown.”

  58. Ibid.

  59. “White Blight,” Washington Post, July 29, 1946.

  60. Martin Luther King Jr., “Kick Up the Dust,” letter to the editor, Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 6, 1946, Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute; Swietek, “Lynchtown,” 71.

  61. Swietek, “Lynchtown,” 71.

  62. Ibid.

  63. Ibid.

  64. Ibid.

  65. William Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 151; David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 22.

  66. Leuchtenburg, White House Looks South, 151; McCullough, Truman, 22.

  67. Isaac Woodard Testimony, Nov. 1947, faculty.uscupstate.edu/amyers/woodtestimony2.html and faculty.uscupstate.edu/amyers/woodtestimony3.html.

  68. Ibid.

  69. Ibid.

  70. Richard Gergel, Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring (New York: Sarah Crichton Books / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

  71. “To Secure These Rights”; Swietek, “Lynchtown,” 105.

  72. Theodore G. Bilbo, Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization (Poplarville, Miss.: Dream House, 1947), 59.

  73. Reg Murphy, “Desegregation Working Out for Once-Bitter Walton,” Atlanta Constitut
ion, June 16, 1965; “Congregation Bans Negroes at Monroe,” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 24, 1964.

  74. Bill McNabb, “Social Circle Quiet After Burning and Shooting,” Atlanta Constitution, April 18, 1972, 10.

  75. Ibid.

  76. Bill MacNabb, “Fires, Shootings Rack Social Circle,” Atlanta Constitution, April 14, 1972; Bill MacNabb, “Social Circle Cooling Off?,” Atlanta Constitution, April 15, 1972.

  77. MacNabb, “Fires, Shootings Rack Social Circle”; MacNabb, “Social Circle Cooling Off?”

  78. David B. Hilder and Chet Fuller, “Soldier’s Hanging Death Probed; Suicide Believed,” Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 13, 1981.

  79. Brenda Mooney, “Walton Authorities Call It Suicide, but Sister Can’t Believe GI Hanged Himself,” Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 25, 1981.

  80. Celia W. Dagger and Jim Galloway, “Blacks, Klansmen Rally at Monroe,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Feb. 20, 1982; Andrew Kenneson, “First African Baptist Church: 150 Years and Counting,” Walton Tribune, Mar. 10, 2018.

  81. “Edward Fields,” Anti-Defamation League report, www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/assets/pdf/combating-hate/Fields-Edward-EIA.pdf.

  82. Dagger and Galloway, “Blacks, Klansmen Rally at Monroe.”

  83. Tracy Thompson, The New Mind of the South (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 78–80; “The Ku Klux Klan Said Thursday It Will Meet Civil Rights Activists,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Feb. 18, 1982.

  84. Swietek, “Lynchtown,” 176.

  85. Laurence Leamer, The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan (New York: William Morrow, 2016), 24–25.

  86. Ibid., 16–19.

  87. Ibid., 15–20.

  88. Ibid., 21–23.

  89. Ibid., 228–31; Phillip Tutor, “Yellow Mama, in All Her Glory,” Anniston Star, March 5, 2015.

  90. Leamer, Lynching, 298–310.

  CHAPTER 4: MY COLLEGE: THE SHRINE OF THE LOST CAUSE

  1. Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 270.

  2. Ollinger Crenshaw, General Lee’s College: The Rise and Growth of Washington and Lee University (New York: Random House, 1969), 11–12.

  3. Ibid., 26–34.

  4. Ibid., 136–38.

  5. Pamela H. Simpson, “The Great Lee Chapel Controversy and the ‘Little Group of Willful Women’ Who Saved the Shrine of the South,” in Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory, ed. Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 86–87.

  6. Pryor, Reading the Man, 440. Washington and Lee is ranked number 10 for 2019 among national liberal arts colleges in U.S. News & World Report, www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges.

  7. Pryor, Reading the Man, 438; Crenshaw, General Lee’s College, 160–63.

  8. Crenshaw, General Lee’s College, 163; James Tyrus Seidule, “‘Treason Is Treason’: Civil War Memory at West Point,” Journal of Military History 76 (Winter 2012): 427–52.

  9. Crenshaw, General Lee’s College, 150.

  10. “Enrollment Trends, 1980–1994,” Registrar Files, Washington and Lee University.

  11. Blaine Brownell, Washington and Lee University, 1930–2000 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017); “The Honor System,” Washington and Lee University website, www.wlu.edu/about-wandl/history-and-traditions/our-traditions/the-honor-system.

  12. R. David Cox, Lee Chapel at 150: A History (Buena Vista, Va.: Mariner, 2018), 9–15, 19–21.

  13. Simpson, “Great Lee Chapel Controversy,” 86–87.

  14. Crenshaw, General Lee’s College, 171–73; Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 155; Cox, Lee Chapel at 150, 41–45.

  15. Crenshaw, General Lee’s College, 171–73; Cox, Lee Chapel at 150, 41–45.

  16. Cox, Lee Chapel at 150, 43–46.

  17. “Hollywood Cemetery and James Monroe’s Tomb,” National Park Service, www.nps.gov/nr/travel/richmond/HollywoodCemetery.html.

  18. Crenshaw, General Lee’s College, 175–77; Cox, Lee Chapel at 150, 43–45.

  19. Crenshaw, General Lee’s College, 175–87.

  20. Christopher R. Lawton, “Constructing the Cause, Bridging the Divide: Lee’s Tomb at Washington’s College,” Southern Cultures 15, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 11; Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 155.

  21. Cox, Lee Chapel at 150, 212.

  22. Ibid., 51–52.

  23. W. Donald Rhinesmith, “Traveller: Just the Horse for General Lee,” Virginia Cavalcade (Summer 1983): 37–46; “General Lee’s Traveller: On the Campus of Washington and Lee University,” pamphlet, n.d., W&L Special Collections.

  24. Cox, Lee Chapel at 150, 204–5.

  25. Lawton, “Constructing the Cause, Bridging the Divide,” 19.

  26. Lee said on multiple occasions that monuments and battlefield preservation would hurt, not help, the country. See, for example, Michael Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); W. N. Pendleton to E. V. Valentine, Jan. 19, 1875, W&L Special Collections.

  27. Clifford Rogers and Ty Seidule, eds., The West Point History of Warfare, digital ed. (New York: Rowan Technologies, 2015).

  28. August Kluckhohn, Louise, Queen of Prussia (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1881), 80; Neil McGregor, Germany: Memories of a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2015).

  29. Lawton, “Constructing the Cause, Bridging the Divide,” 19.

  30. Cox, Lee Chapel at 150, 48.

  31. Ibid., 12–20; Jenna Portnoy, “Two Virginia Democrats Want to Replace Lee Statue in U.S. Capitol,” Washington Post, December 23, 2019.

  32. Ibid., 21.

  33. Lloyd A. Hunter, “The Immortal Confederacy: Another Look at the Lost Cause Religion,” in Gallagher and Nolan, Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, 191.

  34. Thomas Connelly, The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 97–98.

  35. Luanne Rife, “W&L Will Remove Confederate Battle Flags from Lee Chapel,” Roanoke Times, July 8, 2014; Kenneth Ruscio, “Message to the Community,” July 8, 2014, www.wlu.edu/presidents-office/about-the-presidents-office/past-presidents/kenneth-p-ruscio/messages-to-the-community/president-ruscios-july-8-2014-message; “The History of Confederate Flags in Lee Chapel and Museum,” www.wlu.edu/lee-chapel-and-museum/about-the-chapel/history-of-lee-chapel-flags.

  36. Crenshaw, General Lee’s College, 171–73.

  37. Benjamin Franklin Cooling III, Jubal Early: Robert E. Lee’s Bad Old Man (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 135.

  38. Sarah A. G. Strickler, diary, March 2–10, 1865, in Encyclopedia Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Diary_of_Sarah_A_G_Strickler_March_2-10_1865.

  39. Gallagher and Nolan, Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, 37.

  40. Gary W. Gallagher, Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 72; Gallagher and Nolan, Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, 52.

  41. Gallagher, Becoming Confederates, 72.

  42. Jubal Early, A Memoir of the Last Year of the War for Independence, in the Confederate States of America (Lynchburg, Va.: Charles W. Button, 1867), viii.

  43. Gallagher and Nolan, Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, 50–52.

  44. Jubal Early, “The Campaigns of Gen. Robert E. Lee: An Address Before Washington and Lee University, January 19, 1872,” leefamilyarchive.org/reference/addresses/early/index.html; Early, Memoir, 143.

  45. Early, “Campaigns of Gen. Robert E. Lee”; Early, Memoir, 143.

  46. Crenshaw, General Lee’s College, 271–73.

  47. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 223.

  48. Charles Francis Adams, “Lee at Appomattox” and “Shall Cromwell Have a Statue?,” in Lee at Appomattox, and Other Papers (Boston: Houghton, Mi
fflin, 1903), 2, 18, 429.

  49. Cox, Lee Chapel at 150, 81.

  50. Crenshaw, General Lee’s College, 282–86.

  51. Charles Francis Adams, “Lee Centennial, January 19, 1907,” Washington and Lee University Bulletin 15, no. 5 (Oct. 1916): 2–3.