Special reader submitted article from the Washington Post Archives
IN DEFENSE OF GENERAL LEE
By Edward C. Smith
Saturday, August 21, 1999
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
Let me begin on a personal note. I am a 56-year-old, third-generation, African American Washingtonian who is a graduate of the D.C. public schools and who happens also to be a great admirer of Robert E. Lee’s.
Today, Lee, who surrendered his troops to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House 134 years ago, is under attack by people — black and white — who have incorrectly characterized him as a traitorous, slaveholding racist. He was recently besieged in Richmond by those opposed to having his portrait displayed prominently in a new park.
Private Collection
1919
My first visit to Lee’s former home, now Arlington National Cemetery, came when I was 12 years old, and it had a profound and lasting effect on me. Since then I have visited the cemetery hundreds of times searching for grave sites and conducting study tours for the Smithsonian Institution and various other groups interested in learning more about Lee and his family as well as many others buried at Arlington.
Lee’s life story is in some ways the story of early America. He was born in 1807 to a loving mother, whom he adored. His relationship with his father, Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, (who was George Washington’s chief of staff during the Revolutionary War) was strained at best. Thus, as he matured in years, Lee adopted Washington (who had died in 1799) as a father figure and patterned his life after him. Two of Lee’s ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence, and his wife, Mary Custis, was George Washington’s foster great-granddaughter.
Lee was a top-of-the-class graduate of West Point, a Mexican War hero and superintendent of West Point. I can think of no family for which the Union meant as much as it did for his.
But it is important to remember that the 13 colonies that became 13 states reserved for themselves a tremendous amount of political autonomy. In pre-Civil War America, most citizens’ first loyalty went to their state and the local community in which they lived. Referring to the United States of America in the singular is a purely post-Civil War phenomenon.
All this should help explain why Lee declined command of the Union forces — by Abraham Lincoln — after the firing on Fort Sumter. After much agonizing, he resigned his commission in the Union army and became a Confederate commander, fighting in defense of Virginia, which at the outbreak of the war possessed the largest population of free blacks (more than 60,000) of any Southern state.
Lee never owned a single slave, because he felt that slavery was morally reprehensible. He even opposed secession. (His slaveholding was confined to the period when he managed the estate of his late father-in-law, who had willed eventual freedom for all of his slaves.)
Regarding the institution, it’s useful to remember that slavery was not abolished in the nation’s capital until April 1862, when the country was in the second year of the war. The final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation was not written until September 1862, to take effect the following Jan. 1, and it was intended to apply only to those slave states that had left the Union.
Lincoln’s preeminent ally, Frederick Douglass, was deeply disturbed by these limitations but determined that it was necessary to suppress his disappointment and “take what we can get now and go for the rest later.” The “rest” came after the war.
Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the few civil rights leaders who clearly understood that the era of the 1960s was a distant echo of the 1860s, and thus he read deeply into Civil War literature. He came to admire and respect Lee, and to this day, no member of his family, former associate or fellow activist that I know of has protested the fact that in Virginia Dr. King’s birthday — a federal holiday — is officially celebrated as “Robert E. Lee-Stonewall Jackson-Martin Luther King Day.”
Lee is memorialized with a statue in the U.S. Capitol and in stained glass in the Washington Cathedral.
It is indeed ironic that he has long been embraced by the city he fought against and yet has now encountered some degree of rejection in the city he fought for.
In any event, his most fitting memorial is in Lexington, Va.: a living institution where he spent his final five years. There the much-esteemed general metamorphosed into a teacher, becoming the president of small, debt-ridden Washington College, which now stands as the well-endowed Washington and Lee University.
It was in Lexington that he made a most poignant remark a few months before his death. “Before and during the War Between the States I was a Virginian,” he said. “After the war I became an American.”
I have been teaching college students for 30 years, and learned early in my career that the twin maladies of ignorance and misinformation are not incurable diseases. The antidote for them is simply to make a lifelong commitment to reading widely and deeply. I recommend it for anyone who would make judgment on figures from the past, including Robert E. Lee.
[Dr. Smith is co-director of the Civil War Institute at American University in Washington, D.C.]
About the Author
Awesome insights, thank you.
I can only second that, and add to it by saying how good it is to see such a rational discourse in these times of mindless screaming and hollering and crowds making noises like a pack of wild animals that we find ourselves mired into today.
Fascinating. Curious to learn more. Here Mr. Smith speaks in 1993 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2S62SoN-sI and a comment of six months ago: “I had the pleasure of working for Professor Smith from 1998 to 2001 during his tenure as the director of the American Studies program at American University. When I worked for him as his assistant, he was terrible with computers and other technology but one of the most intelligent, kind and funny men I have ever known. He made my educational experience at AU.”
Thank you for publishing this. There is never one side to a story nor one side to a person. The majority of southerners did not own slaves. They fought for the right of a state to determine its own course. History is the story of the past in the context of the time in which it occurred. We must learn from it not bury it.
The majority of southerners did not own slaves.
Now there is something which should be put up on billboards all over America to combat this ignorance that is so rampant here in the United States of America today.
I was in the U.S. Army in 1968 training to go to Viet Nam, and black soldiers thought they had a right to come up and punch me, which they did, because as they told me when explaining what the punch was for, since I was white, it followed logically in their thinking that my people owned black people as slaves, which is bull****, given that my people were French Canadians being repressed by the British in Quebec before they came south to New York to escape that repression, and I would take the time to carefully debunk their pernicious myth.
What is amazing is how long that ignorance has lived on, that because you have white skin, you had to be descended from slave owners because all white people owned slaves.
Going back in time far enough, my people were barbarians and there was a fair chance they were made slaves by Julius Caesar and were sold south to be gladiators or something for the pleasure of the thrill-seeking Romans who liked to see my people eaten by wild animals or stamped into the dirt of the arena floor by an enraged elephant, so should I waste this life given to me all these several thousand years later to hate the Romans for what they might have done to my ancestors?
No, I’m not that stupid to waste my life hating the past, so why then should we have to tolerate that in others making all these animal noises about these statues, as if incapable of rational and coherent speech, what we don’t tolerate in ourselves, which is hate of anything, including some statue of a dead confederate all alone in a park somewhere all covered with pigeons and pigeon crap?
“Sick of liberals trying to make you feel guilty about slavery? All you need to do is remind them of a few historical points:
All races kept slaves all throughout history.
Most of the American slaveships and American slave-markets were run by Jews. But no one blames modern Jews. Because if anyone today says anything was “run by Jews”, they’re immediately dismissed as a crazy anti-Semite, regardless of whether or not it’s true.
When the Trans-Atlantic slaveships docked at African slave-markets to buy slaves, they bought slaves who were already slaves. It was Arab Muslims and Black Africans themselves who captured members of rival tribes and took them to the coastal slave-markets to sell to the Whites and Jews. White people didn’t go into Africa and kidnap free black people. They barely needed to get off their ships to buy slaves, it was like buying McDonalds at a drive-through. The slaves were already at the slave-market in chains, ready to go.
In the 16th – 18th century, Africans enslaved 1.5 million White Europeans in the Barbary Slave Trade. African Muslims raided up the coastlines of Europe, particularly the British Isles but even as far as Iceland, kidnapping and enslaving White European Christians. The men were galley slaves, and the women were sex slaves. This was more brutal than working on a plantation or as a domestic servant.
Native Americans and Jews owned Black slaves too, but no one seems to assign a collective guilt to modern Native Americans and Jews for their slavery. In fact, Jews were the biggest slave-owners in America per capita.
Whites were the first people to stop slavery in modern times, whereas slavery still continues in Africa to this day. In Mauritania slavery was only made a punishable offense in 2007!
Less than 2% of Whites in America ever owned slaves
Only 5% of the black slaves transported across the Atlantic actually went to the modern U.S. Most in fact went to Latin America to serve Hispanic slave-owners. But we don’t look at modern Hispanics as evil slave-owners.”
Liberals have one color.
How much irrational hate does a person have to be consumed with to make them hate a statue of someone long since dead, out by itself in the elements in a park somewhere, covered with pigeons and pigeon ****?
Don’t they have anything better to do with their lives than run around hating things that are dead?
Quite simply put, no modern white man in America has owned any slaves and no modern black man in America has been a slave. With that being said, all of this is a non-issue.
‘We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when liberal men are afraid of the light.’
John, you’re a white man, eh?
tkenny, dude, ssssssss’up?
Where you been at, anyway?
You had people fretting, tkenny, by your absence, and off their feed as a result, that is how addicted people in America have become to your various little aphorisms and such, like this tkenny classic right above here – “John, you’re a white man, eh?”
Who else but you, tkenny, and this is what a lot of people are saying, so it isn’t just me, could lay that line out there like that with such aplomb?
And that answer is a resounding “NOBODY” from one end of America to the other, which is why you have such a tremendous internet following, and no wonder, with one-liners like that, which are so coherent they hang together as if joined by Elmer’s glue, or maybe Gorilla glue, which is even better.
So what if he is, tkenny, a “white man,” I mean?
And what particular strain of mathematical calculation or perhaps some form of intuitive reasoning makes you surmise that John is a white man?
How do you get there – by inductive reasoning, or is it deductive reasoning?
Either way, a committee of prominent mathematicians up this way say when you look at the facts, which is what John actually said, versus what you might have thought he said, which is “Quite simply put, no modern white man in America has owned any slaves and no modern black man in America has been a slave,” it’s odd’s on for a host of reasons that John is a mischievous enlightened, intellectual black man who enjoys twitting the Mosby of Mosby’s Raiders fame, by using his name as a black man.
Boy, wouldn’t that make the blood of a confederate statue-loving American citizen boil, now, a black man calling himself John Mosby.
But what if John is really white, and that happens to be the name he was born with?
Does that quirk of fate, a man alive today with the name of a dead confederate soldier, like John Mosby here, that the higher born and Godly among us find to be a living breathing symbol of hate, best kept well in the background, which certainly sounds like an attack on the right of John Mosby to speak and hold an opinion, which would be considered a denial of John’s civil rights if John happened to be a different color than white, negate anything that John said there, which is this: “Quite simply put, no modern white man in America has owned any slaves and no modern black man in America has been a slave.”
Help us out, tkenny, we’re confused and that is making people scared – what of that is not true?
Are you saying that John is wrong when he says “Quite simply put, no modern white man in America has owned any slaves and no modern black man in America has been a slave?”
OMG, tkenny, if that is the case, that is HORRIBLE, so why doesn’t somebody do something about it, like setting those enslaved black people free and prosecuting these slave owners?
Slavery in America is against the law, afterall, so nobody should be having anybody as a slave these days, outside of the federal government having all of us together as its slaves.
Who is letting this slavery go on, anyway – the Commonwealth of Virginia?
Your state governor?
And why?
CUI BONO as a result of that deal, tkenny?
What is your guess as to why the Commonwealth of Virginia would reinstitute slavery on the sly like that?
The candid world would like to know.
tkenny, and you are not,eh
And tkenny, not to pop any bubbles for you, dude, but check this out, if you will.
The original John Singleton Mosby, not the one in here, also known by his nickname, the “Gray Ghost”, was a Confederate army cavalry battalion commander in the American Civil War, which of course, flips the emotionally unstable and overly sensitive here in America right out to the point of frothing-at-the-mouth rage and righteous indignation, because everybody knows that as a Confederate, he has to be a disgusting symbol of white supremacy and white nationalism and all that crap which was discredited and debunked back by 1850, but such that is for the moment.
Of historical interest to those of us who are in control of our emotions, and thus, can read history dispassionately and not get made insane by it, Mosby’s command, the 43rd Battalion, Virginia Cavalry, known as Mosby’s Rangers or Mosby’s Raiders, was a partisan ranger unit noted for its lightning-quick raids and its ability to elude Union Army pursuers and disappear, blending in with local farmers and townsmen, and the area of northern central Virginia in which Mosby operated with impunity was known during the war and ever since as Mosby’s Confederacy.
Did you know any of that before this, tkenny?
Anyway, as we are now firmly into the AGE OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, where anything and everything even remotely related to the Confederate Era and white supremacy and white nationalism, like Yellowstone Park and Yosemite and things like that have to be erased not only from nati0nal history, but national memory as well before peace can once again reign in the land after the abolitionists and civil rights activists who are pretty one-sided when it comes to whose rights they are out to protect, have finally overcome all that can possibly be overcome, which won’t be in our lifetimes, I can assure you, this is the real kicker there as far as John S. Mosby goes:
After the war, Mosby became a Republican and worked as an attorney and supported his former enemy’s commander, U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant and he also served as the American consul to Hong Kong and in the U.S. Department of Justice.
HOLY COW, tkenny!
Can you imagine that ****?
A Confederate officer like John S. Mosby actually daring to serve in the U.S. Justice Department after the Civil War?
You know what that means, don’t you?
Yes, tkenny, you got that right – because Confederate John S. Mosby served in the U.S. Justice Department after the Civil War, it now has to be deemed as contaminated and toxic a disgusting symbol of white supremacy and white nationalism as any of those Con federate statues are, which means it too should be draped with black plastic so nobody can see it and be offended by it.
And then, to remove that disgusting symbol of white supremacy from our midst, they should come in the middle of the night to tear down that building which housed John S. Mosby and haul it away to a warehouse somewhere where we won’t have to see it and be offended by it.
I don’t think there can be racial harmony in this country until that is done.
How about you?
What are your thoughts on the matter?
Why should anything John S. Mosby put his hands on, like the U.S. Justice Department, or had anything to do with, like the administration of U.S. Grant as president be left standing?
As long as we are tearing down American history to make the black folks and offspring of former slave owners and these modern day abolitionists all feel good about themselves, shouldn’t we really tear down all of it, right on back to the beginning of time?
Why should we only tear down some of it, instead – I mean, is that fair, or what?