by Ty Seidule
2. Col. Ty Seidule, “What Congress Needs to Know About War,” Politico, Jan. 25, 2015, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/congress-war-114508.
3. Peter Smith Michie, The Life and Letters of Emory Upton (New York: D. Appleton, 1885), 26; Schaff, Spirit of Old West Point, 208.
4. Schaff, Spirit of Old West Point, 149.
5. Ibid., 167.
6. James Morrison, “The Best School in the World”: West Point, the Pre–Civil War Years, 1833–1866 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1986), 132.
7. War Department, July 1, 1861, in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: United States War Department, 1899), 1:309.
8. Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 3rd Sess. (1863), 325, 328.
9. Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 1st Sess. (1861), 348; William Pierson Jr., “The Committee on the Conduct of the Civil War,” American Historical Review 23 (April 1918): 550–76; Seidule, “‘Treason Is Treason.’”
10. “Cadets William W. Dunlap and John C. Singleton, having refused to take oath of allegiance, are dismissed from the service,” Post Orders, 6:44, 1861, USMA Archives.
11. Title 10 United States Code, Chapter 403, Section 4346 for the West Point Oath.
12. Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., July 30, 1861, 325, 328; Oath File, USMA Archives; “Air Force Academy History,” U.S. Air Force Academy website, www.usafa.af.mil/News/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/428274/air-force-academy-history/; “A Brief History of USNA,” USNA Website, www.usna.edu/USNAHistory/index.php.
13. Clayton R. Newell, The Regular Army Before the Civil War (Washington, D.C.: Center for Military History, 2014), 50.
14. Circular, Dec. 1, 1863, Battle Monument file, USMA Archives.
15. West Point Battle Monument: History of the Project to the Dedication of the Site, June 15, 1864 (New York: Sheldon, 1864), 23.
16. “West Point’s Dedication,” New York Times, May 30, 1897.
17. “George W. Cullum, Obituary,” Association of Graduates, USMA Archives.
18. Cullum, Biographical Register, vol. I, 12–14.
19. Ibid., 1–17.
20. Review of Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the United States Military Academy, by George Cullum, North American Review 106, no. 119 (April 1868): 695–99.
21. Alvan Gillem, “Annual Reunion of the Association of Graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, 1876,” and Charles Kingsbury, “Annual Reunion 1881,” USMA Archives.
22. “A Check for $250,000,” Washington Post, May 25, 1892; New York Times, March 7, 1892; Last Will and Testament of George W. Cullum, Article 33; “Annual Reunion of the Association of Graduates, June 9, 1892,” USMA Archives; “West Point’s New Building,” New York Times, Jan. 29, 1895.
23. Charles Larned, History of the Battle Monument at West Point (West Point, N.Y.: Battle Monument Association), 116.
24. Ibid., 1.
25. Internal Correspondence, Jan. 14, 1898, 233, and “Report of the Committee on Device for the United States Military Academy,” Jan. 31, 1898, Proceedings of the Academic Board, USMA Archives; Seidule, “‘Treason Is Treason.’”
26. The Centennial of the United States Military Academy, June 1902 (West Point, N.Y.: United States Military Academy, 1902).
27. Ibid.
28. “Cost of New Academy,” Washington Post, April 23, 1902; Baltimore Sun, June 15, 1902; West Point Centennial Scrapbook, USMA Archives; “To Rebuild West Point,” New York Times, April 16, 1902.
29. Piston, Lee’s Tarnished Lieutenant.
30. The Centennial of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, 1802–1902, vol. 1, Addresses and Histories (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904), 79.
31. Lee Memorial Prize Files, 1929–1931, USMA Archives.
32. Lee Portrait File, 1930–1931, USMA Archives.
33. “Chicago Negro Makes His Bow at West Point,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 2, 1929; “De Priest Urges Negroes to Unite,” New York Times, Aug. 22, 1939; Kenneth Eugene Mann, “Oscar Stanton DePriest: Persuasive Agent for the Black Masses,” Negro History Bulletin 35, no. 6 (Oct. 1972): 134–37.
34. Carl Murphy to White, Dec. 12, 1929, and White to De Priest, Dec. 13, 1929, NAACP Administrative Files; “Education West Point Military Academy,” 1929–1930, Manuscript Division NARA.
35. Benjamin O. Davis Jr., American: An Autobiography (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 16–20.
36. Ibid., 24–26.
37. Benjamin O. Davis Jr., “Oral History Interview by Colonel Alan Gropman, 3 February, 1990,” U.S. Air Force Oral History Program.
38. William Connor, “Address to the Association of Graduates, June 11, 1937,” 68th Annual Report of the Association of Graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, June 11, 1937.
39. T. Harry Williams, “Freeman, Historian of the Civil War: An Appraisal,” Journal of Southern History 21, no. 1 (Feb. 1955): 91–100.
40. “Sesquicentennial Program of the United States Military Academy, 1952,” USMA Archives.
41. MacGregor, Integration of the Armed Forces, 430, 434.
42. Lee Portrait File, 1952, and Sesquicentennial File, 1952, USMA Archives.
43. Martha Severens, “Sidney Dickinson in Alabama,” Alabama Heritage (Spring 2010): 22–29.
44. Ibid.
45. Freeman to Gordon Gray, March 25, 1952, Sesquicentennial File, USMA Archives.
46. Maxwell Taylor Speech at Lee Portrait Dedication, 1952, Sesquicentennial File, USMA Archives.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Gordon Gray Speech at the Lee Portrait Dedication, 1952, Sesquicentennial File, USMA Archives.
50. Jeffrey J. Crow, “‘The Paradox and the Dilemma’: Gordon Gray and the J. Robert Oppenheimer Security Clearance Hearing,” North Carolina Historical Review 85, no. 2 (April 2008): 163–90.
51. Sesquicentennial File, 1952, USMA Archives.
52. Cook, Troubled Commemoration; Wiener, “Civil War, Cold War, Civil Rights.”
53. “Black in Gray: History of Blacks at the United States Military Academy,” unpublished study by the Office of Institutional Research, United States Military Academy, 1972, Minority Admissions File, USMA Archives.
54. Charles D. W. Canham to the Superintendent, “Memorial to West Pointers Who Served the Confederacy,” July 16, 1971, USMA; Knowlton, oral history interview, 612–13.
55. Ty Seidule, “Black Power Cadets: How African American Students Defeated President Nixon’s Confederate Monument and Changed West Point, 1971–1976,” Hudson River Valley Review 36, no. 1 (Autumn 2019).
56. Memorandum to the Gifts Program Officer, Subject: Memorial to West Pointers Who Served the Confederacy, from Charles D. W. Canham, Assistant to the Superintendent, July 16, 1971, USMA Special Collections.
57. Knowlton, oral history interview; Percy Squire, conversation with author.
58. Percy Squire, conversation with author; Timothy Lupfer, conversation with author, March 13, 2014; Knowlton, oral history interview, 615.
59. “Manifesto,” Nov. 3, 1971, author’s copy. The author is indebted to Arthur Hester, who found a copy of the manifesto in his personal papers. It is the only known copy to exist.
60. Memorandum to Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, Department of the Army, from William Knowlton, Superintendent, United States Military Academy, Subject: Possible Civil War Memorial, Nov. 17, 1971, USMA Special Collections.
61. Larned, “Battle Monument at West Point,” 594; Seidule, “‘Treason Is Treason.’”
CHAPTER 7: MY VERDICT: ROBERT E. LEE COMMITTED TREASON TO PRESERVE SLAVERY
1. Freeman, Robert E. Lee, 4:505.
2. Emory Thomas, Robert E. Lee: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1995), 30–43.
3. My breakfast cereal, Ralston Shredded Wheat, has a trivia quiz on the back of the box. The first question is: “Who was the only person, to date
, to have graduated from West Point Military Academy without a single demerit.” The Lost Cause shows up even at breakfast. Thomas, Robert E. Lee, 49.
4. Pryor, Reading the Man, 188.
5. William Nester, The Age of Jackson and the Art of American Power, 1815–1848 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 37–39.
6. Thomas, Robert E. Lee, 130–36; Pryor, Reading the Man, 164–67.
7. Thomas, Robert E. Lee, 152.
8. Ibid., 152–55; Pryor, Reading the Man, 215.
9. Pryor, Reading the Man, 222; Thomas, Robert E. Lee, 154–58.
10. Thomas, Robert E. Lee, 183.
11. Albert Castel, Winning and Losing in the Civil War (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 65.
12. Ibid., 75.
13. Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army, 465.
14. Noah Andre Trudeau, “‘A Mere Question of Time’: Robert E. Lee from the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House,” in Lee the Soldier, ed. Gary W. Gallagher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 523–28.
15. Gary W. Gallagher, “Another Look at the Generalship of R. E. Lee,” in Gallagher, Lee the Soldier, 275–86.
16. Glatthaar, Lee’s Army, 465.
17. Pryor, Reading the Man, 358–59.
18. Gallagher, “Another Look at the Generalship of R. E. Lee,” 284–86; Glatthaar’s General Lee’s Army also looks favorably on Lee the commander.
19. Gallagher, “Another Look at the Generalship of R. E. Lee,” 279–81.
20. Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army, 468–70.
21. Gallagher, “Another Look at the Generalship of R. E. Lee,” 286.
22. Frederick Douglass, “Oration Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, July 5, 1852,” in The Speeches of Frederick Douglass: A Critical Edition, ed. John R. McKivigan, Julie Husband, and Heather L. Kaufman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018), 568.
23. Presidential Executive Order Amending Executive Order 13223, Oct. 20, 2017.
24. Presidential Proclamation, “Granting Full Pardon and Amnesty to All Persons Engaged in the Late Rebellion, December 25, 1868,” www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.23602600/.
25. Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army, 464.
26. Freeman, Robert E. Lee, 1:431; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 281; Thomas, Robert E. Lee, 190; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Robert E. Lee and the Concept of Honor,” in Virginia’s Civil War, ed. Peter Wallenstein and Bertram Wyatt-Brown (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 37.
27. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, “‘Thou Knowest Not the Time of Thy Visitation’: A Newly Discovered Letter Reveals Robert E. Lee’s Lonely Struggle with Disunion,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 119, no. 3 (2001): 276–96; Pryor, Reading the Man, 276–97; Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, “‘I Owe Virginia Little, My Country Much’: Robert E. Lee, the United States Regular Army, and Unconditional Unionism,” in Crucible of the Civil War: Virginia from Secession to Commemoration, ed. Edward L. Ayers, Gary W. Gallagher, and Andrew J. Torget (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 35–57; Elizabeth Varon, “‘Save in Defense of My Native State’: A New Look at Robert E. Lee’s Decision to Join the Confederacy,” in Secession Winter: When the Union Fell Apart, ed. Robert J. Cook, William L. Barney, and Elizabeth R. Varon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 34–57; Gallagher, Becoming Confederates.
28. Edward M. Coffman, Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784–1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 46.
29. Morrison, “Best School in the World,” 130–31; “West Point,” North American Review 97 (April 1864): 535.
30. Alan T. Nolan, Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 37.
31. Pryor, Reading the Man, 288.
32. Cullum, Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, vol. 1.
33. Nolan, Lee Considered, 44–50. Nolan argues that the short time between resignation and acceptance meant that Lee had to have prearranged. Pryor quotes a postwar letter from a contemporary saying Lee was aboveboard.
34. Pryor, Reading the Man, 278–94; Thomas, Robert E. Lee, 192–93.
35. Pryor, Reading the Man, 278; Thomas, Robert E. Lee, 192–93.
36. Pryor, Reading the Man, 286.
37. Pryor, “‘Thou Knowest Not the Time of Thy Visitation.’”
38. Pryor, Reading the Man, 292–93.
39. Pryor, “‘Thou Knowest Not the Time of Thy Visitation.’”
40. Ibid.
41. Pryor, Reading the Man, 288; Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War and Peace (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 107.
42. Hsieh, “‘I Owe Virginia Little, My Country Much,’” 38–39.
43. Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War, 93.
44. Hsieh, “‘I Owe Virginia Little, My Country Much,’” 41–42.
45. Ibid., 38–42. Hsieh counts both Dennis Hart Mahan (Virginia) and William Bartlett (Missouri), who were West Point professors. At the time, their rank was professor, not colonel, but they were in the U.S. Army and influential. My position at West Point as professor and head of the Department of History traces its lineage to Mahan. (The loyal Virginia colonels: John J. Albert, René De Russy, Edmund P. Alexander, Washington Sewall, Philip St. George Cooke, George H. Thomas, and Dennis Hart Mahan remained loyal; Lee did not.)
46. Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War, 93.
47. Henry Coppée, review of The History of West Point, by Edward Boynton, North American Review 98, no. 203 (April 1864): 14; Pryor, Reading the Man, 295–96. Pryor makes the connection between Arnold and Lee.
48. James Kirby Martin, Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Warrior Reconsidered (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 9.
49. Hsieh, West Pointers in the Civil War, 109–10; Pryor, Reading the Man, 287.
50. Hsieh, “‘I Owe Virginia Little, My Country Much,’” 47; Alexandria Gazette, April 20, 1861.
51. Pryor, Reading the Man, 286–88.
52. Pryor, “‘Thou Knowest Not the Time of Thy Visitation’”; Pryor, Reading the Man, 287.
53. Robert E. Lee to Roger Jones, Letter, 20 April, 1861 USMA Archives.
54. Gallagher, Becoming Confederates, 8–34.
55. Robert E. Lee to Rooney Lee, Jan. 29, 1861, in Jones, Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of Gen. Robert E. Lee, 136–37.
56. Bachman, “Officer, Gentleman, Slavemaster.”
57. Ibid.
58. Edgar J. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1966), 178-179; Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 72-75.
59. Bachman, “Officer, Gentleman, Slavemaster.”
60. Lee was on paid administrative leave from October 24, 1857, to February 9, 1860, a total of 830 days. Thomas, Robert E. Lee, 174, 183.
61. Bachman, “Officer, Gentleman, Slavemaster.”
62. Pryor, Reading the Man, 262.
63. Ibid., 261–65.
64. Ibid., 264.
65. Ibid., 260.
66. Ibid., 265–70.
67. Ibid., 268–75.
68. Ibid., 260.
69. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, Dec. 27, 1856, Encyclopedia Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Letter_from_Robert_E_Lee_to_Mary_Randolph_Custis_Lee_December_27_1856.
70. Lee to James A. Seddon, Jan. 10, 1863, leefamilyarchive.org/family-papers/letters/letters-1863/9-family-papers/1180-robert-e-lee-to-james-a-seddon-1863-january-10; Gallagher, Becoming Confederates, 19.
71. “A Proclamation by the President of the United States,” Jan. 1, 1863, National Archives, www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation/transcript.html.
72. Pryor, Reading the Man, 349–52.
73. “Movements of the Rebel Cavalry,” New Yo
rk Times, June 30, 1863.
74. David G. Smith, “Race and Retaliation: The Capture of African Americans During the Gettysburg Campaign,” in Wallenstein and Wyatt-Brown, Virginia’s Civil War; Edwin B. Coddington and Edwin P. Coddington, “Prelude to Gettysburg: The Confederates Plunder Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 30, no. 2 (April 1963): 123–57.