A month ago the New York Times had an article by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Eric Foner on “The Making and the Breaking of the Legend of Robert E. Lee.” Aside from a mistake about The Band’s classic “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the article is pretty good and worth reading. Here are a few excerpts:
Lee has always occupied a unique place in the national imagination. The ups and downs of his reputation reflect changes in key elements of Americans’ historical consciousness — how we understand race relations, the causes and consequences of the Civil War and the nature of the good society.
Born in 1807, Lee was a product of the Virginia gentry — his father a Revolutionary War hero and governor of the state, his wife the daughter of George Washington’s adopted son. Lee always prided himself on following the strict moral code of a gentleman. He managed to graduate from West Point with no disciplinary demerits, an almost impossible feat considering the complex maze of rules that governed the conduct of cadets.
While opposed to disunion, when the Civil War broke out and Virginia seceded, Lee went with his state. He won military renown for defeating (until Gettysburg) a succession of larger Union forces. Eventually, he met his match in Ulysses S. Grant and was forced to surrender his army in April 1865. At Appomattox he urged his soldiers to accept the war’s outcome and return to their homes, rejecting talk of carrying on the struggle in guerrilla fashion. He died in 1870, at the height of Reconstruction, when biracial governments had come to power throughout the South.
But, of course, what interests people who debate Lee today is his connection with slavery and his views about race. During his lifetime, Lee owned a small number of slaves. He considered himself a paternalistic master but could also impose severe punishments, especially on those who attempted to run away. Lee said almost nothing in public about the institution. His most extended comment, quoted by all biographers, came in a letter to his wife in 1856. Here he described slavery as an evil, but one that had more deleterious effects on whites than blacks. He felt that the “painful discipline” to which they were subjected benefited blacks by elevating them from barbarism to civilization and introducing them to Christianity. The end of slavery would come in God’s good time, but this might take quite a while, since to God a thousand years was just a moment. Meanwhile, the greatest danger to the “liberty” of white Southerners was the “evil course” pursued by the abolitionists, who stirred up sectional hatred. In 1860, Lee voted for John C. Breckinridge, the extreme pro-slavery candidate. (A more moderate Southerner, John Bell, carried Virginia that year.)
Lee’s code of gentlemanly conduct did not seem to apply to blacks. During the Gettysburg campaign, he did nothing to stop soldiers in his army from kidnapping free black farmers for sale into slavery. In Reconstruction, Lee made it clear that he opposed political rights for the former slaves. Referring to blacks (30 percent of Virginia’s population), he told a Congressional committee that he hoped the state could be “rid of them.” Urged to condemn the Ku Klux Klan’s terrorist violence, Lee remained silent.
By the time the Civil War ended, with the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, deeply unpopular, Lee had become the embodiment of the Southern cause. A generation later, he was a national hero. The 1890s and early 20th century witnessed the consolidation of white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction South and widespread acceptance in the North of Southern racial attitudes. A revised view of history accompanied these developments, including the triumph of what David Blight, in his influential book “Race and Reunion” (2001), calls a “reconciliationist” memory of the Civil War. The war came to be seen as a conflict in which both sides consisted of brave men fighting for noble principles — union in the case of the North, self-determination on the part of the South. This vision was reinforced by the “cult of Lincoln and Lee,” each representing the noblest features of his society, each a figure Americans of all regions could look back on with pride. The memory of Lee, this newspaper wrote in 1890, was “the possession of the American people.”
Reconciliation excised slavery from a central role in the story, and the struggle for emancipation was now seen as a minor feature of the war. The Lost Cause, a romanticized vision of the Old South and Confederacy, gained adherents throughout the country. And who symbolized the Lost Cause more fully than Lee?
This outlook was also taken up by the Southern Agrarians, a group of writers who idealized the slave South as a bastion of manly virtue in contrast to the commercialism and individualism of the industrial North. At a time when traditional values appeared to be in retreat, character trumped political outlook, and character Lee had in spades. Frank Owsley, the most prominent historian among the Agrarians, called Lee “the soldier who walked with God.” (Many early biographies directly compared Lee and Christ.) Moreover, with the influx of millions of Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe alarming many Americans, Lee seemed to stand for a society where people of Anglo-Saxon stock controlled affairs.
Historians in the first decades of the 20th century offered scholarly legitimacy to this interpretation of the past, which justified the abrogation of the constitutional rights of Southern black citizens. At Columbia University, William A. Dunning and his students portrayed the granting of black suffrage during Reconstruction as a tragic mistake. The Progressive historians — Charles Beard and his disciples — taught that politics reflected the clash of class interests, not ideological differences. The Civil War, Beard wrote, should be understood as a transfer of national power from an agricultural ruling class in the South to the industrial bourgeoisie of the North; he could tell the entire story without mentioning slavery except in a footnote. In the 1920s and 1930s, a group of mostly Southern historians known as the revisionists went further, insisting that slavery was a benign institution that would have died out peacefully. A “blundering generation” of politicians had stumbled into a needless war. But the true villains, as in Lee’s 1856 letter, were the abolitionists, whose reckless agitation poisoned sectional relations. This interpretation dominated teaching throughout the country, and reached a mass audience through films like “The Birth of a Nation,” which glorified the Klan, and “Gone With the Wind,” with its romantic depiction of slavery. The South, observers quipped, had lost the war but won the battle over its history.
As far as Lee was concerned, the culmination of these trends came in the publication in the 1930s of a four-volume biography by Douglas Southall Freeman, a Virginia-born journalist and historian. For decades, Freeman’s hagiography would be considered the definitive account of Lee’s life. Freeman warned readers that they should not search for ambiguity, complexity or inconsistency in Lee, for there was none — he was simply a paragon of virtue. Freeman displayed little interest in Lee’s relationship to slavery. The index to his four volumes contained 22 entries for “devotion to duty,” 19 for “kindness,” 53 for Lee’s celebrated horse, Traveller. But “slavery,” “slave emancipation” and “slave insurrection” together received five. Freeman observed, without offering details, that slavery in Virginia represented the system “at its best.” He ignored the postwar testimony of Lee’s former slave Wesley Norris about the brutal treatment to which he had been subjected. In 1935 Freeman was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in biography.
That same year, however, W. E. B. Du Bois published “Black Reconstruction in America,” a powerful challenge to the mythologies about slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction that historians had been purveying. Du Bois identified slavery as the fundamental cause of the war and emancipation as its most profound outcome. He portrayed the abolitionists as idealistic precursors of the 20th-century struggle for racial justice, and Reconstruction as a remarkable democratic experiment — the tragedy was not that it was attempted but that it failed. Most of all, Du Bois made clear that blacks were active participants in the era’s history, not simply a problem confronting white society. Ignored at the time by mainstream scholars, “Black Reconstruction” pointed the way to an enormous change in historical interpretation, rooted in the egalitarianism of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and underpinned by the documentary record of the black experience ignored by earlier scholars. Today, Du Bois’s insights are taken for granted by most historians, although they have not fully penetrated the national culture.
Inevitably, this revised view of the Civil War era led to a reassessment of Lee, who, Du Bois wrote elsewhere, possessed physical courage but not “the moral courage to stand up for justice to the Negro.” Even Lee’s military career, previously viewed as nearly flawless, underwent critical scrutiny. In “The Marble Man” (1977), Thomas Connelly charged that “a cult of Virginia authors” had disparaged other Confederate commanders in an effort to hide Lee’s errors on the battlefield. James M. McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom,” since its publication in 1988 the standard history of the Civil War, compared Lee’s single-minded focus on the war in Virginia unfavorably with Grant’s strategic grasp of the interconnections between the eastern and western theaters.
Lee’s most recent biographer, Michael Korda, does not deny his subject’s admirable qualities. But he makes clear that when it came to black Americans, Lee never changed. Lee was well informed enough to know that, as the Confederate vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, declared, slavery and “the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man” formed the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy; he chose to take up arms in defense of a slaveholders’ republic. After the war, he could not envision an alternative to white supremacy.
What Korda calls Lee’s “legend” needs to be retired. And whatever the fate of his statues and memorials, so long as the legacy of slavery continues to bedevil American society, it seems unlikely that historians will return Lee, metaphorically speaking, to his pedestal.
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I’ll come back to this…
PART 1
First off, I want to thank the Admin for devoting his time to this piece.
I will, however, to put that this piece by Foner is an archetype of the main, contemporary historiography and theses of the Civil War/War Between The States, the Battle Hymn school of historical thought.
Frederick Douglass and Ulysses S. Grant were as prominent in its origin as were Jubal Early and Edward Pollard with the Lost Cause, and which Howard K. Beale helped to enflesh in his work as the ‘Devil Theory’; that traitors had attempted to destroy the Union upon false claims to rights of states, (such as secession), which had never had any basis in existence.
The Battle Hymn school/theses had some merit and validity, and forced the consideration of pertinent evidence and historical questions which had been not been adequately grappled with. The same can be said of the Lost Cause.
This review of the post will examine both the Battle Hymn and Lost Cause (BH, LC), but will put an altogether different theses and from a wholly other historiography and theses to do so: The All American school.
The points made will be put following an inset line of asterisks citing the original text (***********). I’m going to make these as much bullet points as possible. I will expand on these if requested with full disclosure of evidence.
****************But, of course, what interests people who debate Lee today is his connection with slavery and his views about race. During his lifetime, Lee owned a small number of slaves. He considered himself a paternalistic master but could also impose severe punishments, especially on those who attempted to run away.******************
-Lee emancipated the slaves he had somehow come into ownership of at some point prior to the 1850s. Those that were not freed (the best explanation being that such would have required them to move away from family and kin in Virginia, as emancipated slaves had to decamp from the state by law at the time and it was extremely legally complicated for them to return for any purpose), Lee arranged ‘de facto’ emancipation for him in Washington D.C.
-If the alleged whipping of Wesley Norris did occur (and a substantial amount of evidence exists to argue that it didn’t), there is no disputing that whipping, which is the main punishment inferred, was a horrific experience.
But there if it did, whipping as a punishment was not considered an unusual punishment in the era and just as much evidence exists to force a serious reconsideration of it. In short, if it did occur, because of legal complexities at the time in Virginia pertaining to estates which were in debt and the legal rights of creditors, the whipping was doled out for the purpose of ensuring no slaves would be absent come manumission day at the courthouse, otherwise, none could be manumitted.
**************Lee said almost nothing in public about the institution. His most extended comment, quoted by all biographers, came in a letter to his wife in 1856. ***************
This fails to disclose that there are approximately 40 pieces of contemporary evidence that show Robert E. Lee had firm and devoted anti-slavery and was an Emancipationist in the same manner as Abraham Lincoln.
*********************Here he described slavery as an evil, but one that had more deleterious effects on whites than blacks. He felt that the “painful discipline” to which they were subjected benefited blacks by elevating them from barbarism to civilization and introducing them to Christianity. The end of slavery would come in God’s good time, but this might take quite a while, since to God a thousand years was just a moment.
Meanwhile, the greatest danger to the “liberty” of white Southerners was the “evil course” pursued by the abolitionists, who stirred up sectional hatred. ****************************
Robert E. Lee did say in his 27 December 1856 letter from Texas to his wife that slavery was a greater evil to White Americans than Black Americans. In this, he was certainly and definitively wrong and these lines are an indication of the racial prejudice that he embraced at the time.
It is true that slavery victimised White Americans and Lee was correct in this much; it is just as incorrect for him to have said Black Americans were less affected by it than the former.
What is also missing is that Robert E. Lee exhorted in the same letter to his wife for they, and by implication all whom disagreed with the institution, that they ‘must give all their efforts to bringing about the end of slavery’. That Lee could not see, in the pre-war, the ultimate end of the institution was something he shared with Abraham Lincoln. To that effect, before the war and during it, Lee took formidable steps towards this, such as breaking the law to provide Black Americans with an education and arguing to the Confederate government over and over to effect emancipation.
It was not the place of a career military officer in America to publicly espouse opinions.
Lincoln and Lee were both Emancipationists, not Abolitionists. The former believed in a gradual method and pace of abolishing slavery in order to allow for societal/economic adjustment and to equip freed slaves with life and vocation skills (see above). Lee disparaged what he perceived as the irresponsibility of Northern Abolitionists who sought an immediate end to the practice in order to action an alternative form of White Supremacy (such as the exclusion of Black Americans from their home areas and midst). Emancipationism obviously could be critiqued for its flaws, but so could Abolitionism.
**********************In 1860, Lee voted for John C. Breckinridge, the extreme pro-slavery candidate. (A more moderate Southerner, John Bell, carried Virginia that year.)******************
The assertion proves little, if anything. In the same election, Ulysses S. Grant voted for Stephen Douglas, whom was certainly no opponent of the spread of slavery if supported by democratic demonstration.
The cold, accurate historical truth is that no matter his personal sentiments (to his credit they were), a vote for Lincoln in the 1860 was a vote for the continuation of slavery, and thus, a vote for American slavery. The institution was in danger from none of the four candidates.
************************* Lee’s code of gentlemanly conduct did not seem to apply to blacks. During the Gettysburg campaign, he did nothing to stop soldiers in his army from kidnapping free black farmers for sale into slavery. In Reconstruction, Lee made it clear that he opposed political rights for the former slaves. Referring to blacks (30 percent of Virginia’s population), he told a Congressional committee that he hoped the state could be “rid of them.” Urged to condemn the Ku Klux Klan’s terrorist violence, Lee remained silent.*********************
As with a great deal of the BH theses, this assertion is dishonest by omission; the only way that it can be seen as an accurate description of history is by deliberately refraining from admitting that evidence exists that seriously challenges.
During the war, Robert E. Lee saved the life of a USCT POW who was being tortured by a White Confederate soldier, threatening to hang the latter if such were not desisted and ever occurred again upon any race of person. He also put in writing his revolt at the murder of wounded USCT troops at Saltville, Virginia, in 1864 and forwarded a report demanding that those responsible be charged.
After the war on numerous occasions, Lee stopped a race riot and in so doing, made a public example towards racial equality (and same upon other occasions such as when he argued that Black American representatives be received and seated equally with their White counterparts at an Episcopal meeting from his sickbed).
There are four pieces of primary evidence that prove that Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln both supported Black Americans voting in the post-war in the same terms of impartial suffrage. Lee wrote out letters of reference for Black Americans’ to gain employment and remained a staunch advocate of their receiving education, citing it, ‘a good thing for both races in the South’.
It is true that during the war and on both the Antietam and Gettysburg campaigns, the Army of Northern Virginia forcibly impressed Black Americans into slavery. This action is deserving of absolute criticism.
And yet, it is not true that the ANV ‘scooped up’ indiscriminately every Black American they came upon, and a high number of those Black Americans whom were so seized were returned to the North when legal proceedings in the South determined them not to be fugitive slaves.
Nothing in that takes away from the terror the Black Americans affected and seized must have felt and this deserves to be openly examined, in the same manner as how during the war other figures whom forcibly impressed Black Americans into slavery ought to have theirs’, such as Benjamin Butler, Ambrose Burnside, the New York Police Department, George Stone Chapman, Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln.
There has always been something suspicious about the manner in which Lee is said to have opined to the Congressional Committee in February of 1866 that Virginia ought to ‘get rid’ of the Black American population; it is in stark contrast to even the sentiments to which he affixed his signature in the 1868 White Sulphur Springs Letter that the two races were dependent upon each other in the South, etc.
It is fair to suggest that Lee was unsure of what exactly might be provided towards the emancipated Black Americans from the federal government, but he may well have been influenced to believe that provisions might be forthcoming from his chat after Appomattox with George Meade in Richmond (though no details exist of their exact words), and such was seemingly at least part of his reasoning behind telling his cousin in May or June of 1865 to rescind the latter’s Black American workforce and hire White Southerners in their stead (believing evidently that after Lincoln had been assassinated, no government relief would be forthcoming to the pro-Confederate White population from the Radical Republicans), in addition to never 100% eschewing his racial prejudices (and to which a measure of fair and balanced criticism is certainly due).
But the statement cited in his 1866 testimony cannot be read accurately as in the ‘absolutist’ context it is presented as in the BH theses. In the famed 29 April 1865 interview in the ‘New York Herald’, Thomas Morris Cook, the reporter who had interviewed Lee for the story, wrote to the General on the day of the publication basically confessing that the General’s words had been tampered with as they appeared.
*****************I will finish later*******************
I have written person how Foner’s attempt to I’ll Lee with the Ku Klux Klan is unsupportable; in the post-war, Lee committed himself to example, position and actions contrary to the Klan over and over.
Robert E. Lee wasn’t a post-war civil rights advocate; rather, on numerous occasions, he set a personal and often public example that was heroic in terms of social
progression.
******************By the time the Civil War ended, with the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, deeply unpopular, Lee had become the embodiment of the Southern cause. A generation later, he was a national hero.*****************
-This description by Foner omits that Lee was held in esteemed terms by a wide spread of the North at war’s end, as well. And that by the time that a generation of past, Davis had won heroic status as well, at least in the South.
**********************The 1890s and early 20th century witnessed the consolidation of white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction South and widespread acceptance in the North of Southern racial attitudes. A revised view of history accompanied these developments, including the triumph of what David Blight, in his influential book “Race and Reunion” (2001), calls a “reconciliationist” memory of the Civil War. The war came to be seen as a conflict in which both sides consisted of brave men fighting for noble principles — union in the case of the North, self-determination on the part of the South.******************
-There is truth in this argument. The North HAD fought for re-union and the South HAD fought for independence. What was omitted by both in large measure was that, at least at war’s start, both had fought for slavery; if the South had fought for the arguable protection and expansion of the institution, the North had fought for the reconvening of all the rights to the system that had already been granted and was willing to reconvene these for eternity.
**********************This vision was reinforced by the “cult of Lincoln and Lee,” each representing the noblest features of his society, each a figure Americans of all regions could look back on with pride. The memory of Lee, this newspaper wrote in 1890, was “the possession of the American people.”*******************
This is a fair measure of accuracy to this description, if not 100% then a fair measure.
**********************Reconciliation excised slavery from a central role in the story, and the struggle for emancipation was now seen as a minor feature of the war. The Lost Cause, a romanticized vision of the Old South and Confederacy, gained adherents throughout the country. And who symbolized the Lost Cause more fully than Lee?****************************
Not necessarily; the Battle Hymn forcefully put the institution into the foreground as it cast nigh total responsibility for the institution upon the South and minimised or omitted the culpability of the North. It is true and an accurate criticism of the Lost Cause theses and historiography that it romanticized the South and within its structure, it contained a number of tenets that were of questionable historical accuracy and validity, (such as that slavery would have ‘inevitably’ died out w/o the Great American Conflict occurring from 1861-65).
At the same time, a fair number of the tenets of the Lost Cause had at least a variable measure of merit to them, such as the argumentation that American federalism/states rights had been an important factor in the war ever occurring, separate from any connection to slavery. While federalism/states rights certainly did at times converge with slavery, these could and did just as surely diverge with the former being an important factor in its own right. But one example of how this could be lies with the Aroostook War of 1837-38 wherein Maine attempted to invade/conquer/occupy/affix to its own state borders territory that is now part of New Brunswick while openly declaring that as a sovereign state of the Union, it had no obligation to so much as inform, let alone involve, the US federal government. The British Parliament openly discussed that the British colony was in a state of war with Maine.
This outlook was also taken up by the Southern Agrarians, a group of writers who idealized the slave South as a bastion of manly virtue in contrast to the commercialism and individualism of the industrial North. At a time when traditional values appeared to be in retreat, character trumped political outlook, and character Lee had in spades. Frank Owsley, the most prominent historian among the Agrarians, called Lee “the soldier who walked with God.” (Many early biographies directly compared Lee and Christ.) Moreover, with the influx of millions of Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe alarming many Americans, Lee seemed to stand for a society where people of Anglo-Saxon stock controlled affairs.
***************This outlook was also taken up by the Southern Agrarians, a group of writers who idealized the slave South as a bastion of manly virtue in contrast to the commercialism and individualism of the industrial North. At a time when traditional values appeared to be in retreat, character trumped political outlook, and character Lee had in spades. Frank Owsley, the most prominent historian among the Agrarians, called Lee “the soldier who walked with God.” (Many early biographies directly compared Lee and Christ.) Moreover, with the influx of millions of Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe alarming many Americans, Lee seemed to stand for a society where people of Anglo-Saxon stock controlled affairs.*********************
The key thing about this tenet of the Lost Cause is that many of its early originators and apologists, Jubal Early in particular, used Robert E. Lee to lend legitimacy towards notions that he would not have supported if his life be any indication.
For example, Lee had commanded in the Confederate Army vast numbers of Hispanics, non-WASP Europeans such as Irish, Native Americans and had not only argued for a Confederate version of the USCT to be created, but that he was willing to personally command and lead such a force into battle. In the post-war, he also supported the immigration to America of the Chinese when many nations of the West sought to bar them.
And many of these had given him their support.
That this demonstrable part of Lee’s life was at complete odds with this attempt to project him as the ‘stand in’ for such political goals and was secured so seamlessly can be seen in fact as something of a betrayal of Lee’s legacy.
********************************8he Progressive historians — Charles Beard and his disciples — taught that politics reflected the clash of class interests, not ideological differences. The Civil War, Beard wrote, should be understood as a transfer of national power from an agricultural ruling class in the South to the industrial bourgeoisie of the North; he could tell the entire story without mentioning slavery except in a footnote. In the 1920s and 1930s, a group of mostly Southern historians known as the revisionists went further, insisting that slavery was a benign institution that would have died out peacefully. A “blundering generation” of politicians had stumbled into a needless war. But the true villains, as in Lee’s 1856 letter, were the abolitionists, whose reckless agitation poisoned sectional relations. This interpretation dominated teaching throughout the country, and reached a mass audience through films like “The Birth of a Nation,” which glorified the Klan, and “Gone With the Wind,” with its romantic depiction of slavery. The South, observers quipped, had lost the war but won the battle over its history.***********************
The above has much merit. ‘The Birth of a Nation’ did wrongfully glorify the KKK.
What was missing from the teaching of the Lost Cause in the above cited passage of history, and is denied to exist by the nascent Battle Hymn is that the approximate 40 pieces of primary evidence that exist which prove Lee against slavery and an Emancipationist and the very different rendering of Lee from these force than what either school of historical thought above would concede.
***************************As far as Lee was concerned, the culmination of these trends came in the publication in the 1930s of a four-volume biography by Douglas Southall Freeman, a Virginia-born journalist and historian. For decades, Freeman’s hagiography would be considered the definitive account of Lee’s life. Freeman warned readers that they should not search for ambiguity, complexity or inconsistency in Lee, for there was none — he was simply a paragon of virtue. Freeman displayed little interest in Lee’s relationship to slavery. The index to his four volumes contained 22 entries for “devotion to duty,” 19 for “kindness,” 53 for Lee’s celebrated horse, Traveller. But “slavery,” “slave emancipation” and “slave insurrection” together received five. Freeman observed, without offering details, that slavery in Virginia represented the system “at its best.” He ignored the postwar testimony of Lee’s former slave Wesley Norris about the brutal treatment to which he had been subjected. In 1935 Freeman was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in biography.***************************
Freeman’s volume-based account of Lee’s life is somewhat dated, but nevertheless, it is still canon to the subject. The amazingly researched and documented work can be summarised as essentially as accurate today as would Carl Sandburg’s like volumed-biography of Abraham Lincoln.
Freeman was correct in putting forth his thesis that there was no complexity, etc, regarding Lee; he erred by not putting forth enough questions in his methodology, (a similar critique can be applied to Sandburg). And in truth, there is far more valuable information and grappling with the institution of slavery in his work than what Foner concedes, though, at the same time, Foner has a point that this could certainly have been expanded.
It is interesting that Foner points out the accusation of Wesley Norris that he and two other slaves of the Arlington estate claimed they had been whipped by Lee; he could have expanded on the stories printed in the late 1850s accusing Lee of this. It is just as interesting that Foner himself omits that just as much evidence exists that would challenge the whipping occurred, (such as the denial of it by Lee and his wife and the evidence supplied by two slaves related to one of those supposedly whipped by Lee – Amanda and Jim Parks).
**********************************8That same year, however, W. E. B. Du Bois published “Black Reconstruction in America,” a powerful challenge to the mythologies about slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction that historians had been purveying. Du Bois identified slavery as the fundamental cause of the war and emancipation as its most profound outcome. He portrayed the abolitionists as idealistic precursors of the 20th-century struggle for racial justice, and Reconstruction as a remarkable democratic experiment — the tragedy was not that it was attempted but that it failed. Most of all, Du Bois made clear that blacks were active participants in the era’s history, not simply a problem confronting white society. Ignored at the time by mainstream scholars, “Black Reconstruction” pointed the way to an enormous change in historical interpretation, rooted in the egalitarianism of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and underpinned by the documentary record of the black experience ignored by earlier scholars. Today, Du Bois’s insights are taken for granted by most historians, although they have not fully penetrated the national culture.*********************************
-Du Bois’ work was fundamental in challenging the Lost Cause argument and thereby enabling further learning and historical questioning to occur.
But a critique of Du Bois is that he omitted evidence that challenged him, in a furtherance to the Battle Hymn theses. For example, he inadequately cited the many Black Americans who had had a positive view of Lee such as Thomas Morris Chester and he furthered the inaccurate understanding that the South had been alone responsible for slavery. Du Bois also failed to concede that Lee had undergone a significant amount of progressive change in his attitude towards Black Americans, as his willingness to argue for and personally command/lead potential Black Confederate national troops into battle alone would prove, (knowing the social-cultural-legal change such a movement would force the South to accomodate).
This argument stood at odds with the tenets of the Battle Hymn, which argued that states rights’ had never in truth existed in the South in the manner of sovereignty claimed, but simultaneously, secession had never been a right and the Union indissoluble.
If states did not have the rights they claimed to of sovereignty and the Union could never have been taken apart, then there could be no logical, legal or historical argument to diminish that the North had freely chosen to join the South in one country and thereby, the only way in which slavery could exist there was with the North’s awareness and enablement, as it had agreed to provide it with constitutional sanction. This was the reckoning of Frederick Douglass in 1849 and again in January of 1865 and Abraham Lincoln in that same latter year.
************************** Most of all, Du Bois made clear that blacks were active participants in the era’s history, not simply a problem confronting white society. Ignored at the time by mainstream scholars, “Black Reconstruction” pointed the way to an enormous change in historical interpretation, rooted in the egalitarianism of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and underpinned by the documentary record of the black experience ignored by earlier scholars. Today, Du Bois’s insights are taken for granted by most historians, although they have not fully penetrated the national culture.***********************
-This is very apt. Du Bois was a forceful voice that Black Americans had played a robust and significant part in historical events and they were underscored vastly as significant figures of agency. William Still, Martin Delany, Thomas Morris Chester, Frederick Douglass, and vast other Black Americans had argued this during the war they lived through and affected and through the generation following it.
Du Bois resurrected this aspect and convincingly put the argument forth, in essence, that Black American history was American history as it was world history.
This does not change that his arguments should not be accepted uncritically and that there were flaws and limits to his own works, It means that reading of Du Bois should be encouraged and incorporated.
*************************Inevitably, this revised view of the Civil War era led to a reassessment of Lee, who, Du Bois wrote elsewhere, possessed physical courage but not “the moral courage to stand up for justice to the Negro.”************************
-This is one of the previously cited flaws of Du Bois’ work and it is a significant one, that can in no way, shape or form be successfully defended when a holistic critical reflection is undertaken upon the known evidence (Du Bois very strongly promulgated the ‘Circle in the Sand’ tenet of the Battle Hymn: He attempted to convince his readership by presenting only very carefully selected and limited evidence and putting only very specific and limited questions to it).
A few examples will suffice: (A) Lee saved the life of John Brown following the latter’s capture by ordering the Marines he commanded to affix bayonets and charge/fire upon the Virginia mob that tried to seize and hang him. (B) Lee personally intervened to save the life of a USCT soldier being tortured by a White Confederate threatening to hang him if the conduct were ever repeated. (C) Lee was horrified by the murder of USCT in hospital at Saltville, Va, in 1864 and put in a report that the guilty officers ought be charged and punished (D) Lee convinced the Confederate government to reverse its stance on non-swapping USCT POWS and to enact a new policy to swap POWS w/o regard to race. (E) The content of Robert E. Lee’s 27 March 1865 orders to Richard Ewell about the organising of potential Black Confederate national troops and the change to Southern race relations cited that he supported is an impossible challenge to the arguments of Du Bois and Foner. (F) On numerous occasions in the post-war, Lee stopped a race riot and made a public example for racial equality. (G) There are four pieces of primary evidence that show Lee supported Black Americans being granted the vote in the post-war in the same terms as Abraham Lincoln.
***************************** Even Lee’s military career, previously viewed as nearly flawless, underwent critical scrutiny. In “The Marble Man” (1977), Thomas Connelly charged that “a cult of Virginia authors” had disparaged other Confederate commanders in an effort to hide Lee’s errors on the battlefield. James M. McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom,” since its publication in 1988 the standard history of the Civil War, compared Lee’s single-minded focus on the war in Virginia unfavorably with Grant’s strategic grasp of the interconnections between the eastern and western theaters.**********************
The life and military campaigns of Lee are as open, and ought to be, as welcoming to the challenge of scrutiny as any other aspect of his life.
And some of the critiques of TLC and JMM have merit in this. But what is occluded is that the Eastern Theatre of Operations was the one which the victor of the war would be determined, as much as Europe, not the Pacific, was that which decided the victor of WWII, or Dublin, rather than the Cork countryside, would in the Anglo-Irish War, etc.
The war did not cease after the Union capture of Vicksburg, Atlanta, etc. It was signified by the surrender at Appomattox, which even the above two historians must concede. Had Vicksburg still been a Union victory, but Gettysburg a Confederate one, the war would have been decided in the South’s favor.
When James Mason offered the Duncan F. Kenner Mission’s pledge that the South would abolish slavery in each of the 11 Confederate state constitutions to do away with the system, he was informed that the offer was seen as genuine, but that it had come too late; he was specifically told Gettysburg had been the time to offer the matter.
Lee understood that victory, to which meant Confederate independence, could only be won through the Eastern Theatre. Grant’s ultimate success was to achieve this at Appomattox.
***************************Lee’s most recent biographer, Michael Korda, does not deny his subject’s admirable qualities. But he makes clear that when it came to black Americans, Lee never changed.*****************************
-And this is where Korda and Foner make grave errs. It is true that Lee never eschewed 100% of his racial prejudices. But the evidence clearly shows that he did adopt a significant amount of progressive growth towards Black Americans, such as support for them to receive the vote, etc, etc.
*******************************Lee was well informed enough to know that, as the Confederate vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, declared, slavery and “the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man” formed the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy; he chose to take up arms in defense of a slaveholders’ republic.*******************************
-This penultimate tenet of the Battle Hymn, fully argued by Foner, Korda, etc, etc, is as severe a perpetration of historical dishonesty as the Lost Cause’s argument that the war had nothing to do, whatever, with slavery.
For it relies on ‘side stepping’ the fact that since 1789 and the adoption of the 3/5 and Fugitive Slave tenets in the Constitution, the United States of America had been committed to the institution of slavery. All federal office holders of any type, (such as Commissioned Armed Forces Officers like Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, George Thomas, William T. Sherman, David Farragault, Robert Gould Shaw, etc), and those in politics such as Thaddeus Stevens, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, etc, in order to take their seats or positions swore that, regardless of personal sentiment, they would uphold the place of slavery in the said Constitution. Not to mention that in the 1846-48 Mexican American War, the USA fought to protect and expand slavery by conquering new lands by tearing in half the republic next door in order to create new slave states.
Frederick Douglass would argue this with clarity in the 8 June 1849 ‘Liberator’ and at the January 1865 meeting of the Anti-slavery Society of Mass., and Abraham Lincoln at both Hampton Roads and his 2nd Inaugral Address: All of America was responsible for slavery. This was not true because Douglass and Lincoln voiced it; each spoke it because it was true.
More accurately, Lee and all of America had been living in a slaveholding republic all their lives. All of Americans shared in the responsibility for slavery, as all would in its end.
Korda, Foner, Du Bois, etc, etc, all fail to cite that the Confederacy, too, took steps to end slavery with the 1862 near-clinched Emancipation Treaty with France and Britain and again in the Duncan F. Kenner Mission. To occlude this from mention is dishonest.
******************After the war, he could not envision an alternative to white supremacy.***************
-See other replies. More gladly supplied.
*********************What Korda calls Lee’s “legend” needs to be retired. And whatever the fate of his statues and memorials, so long as the legacy of slavery continues to bedevil American society, it seems unlikely that historians will return Lee, metaphorically speaking, to his pedestal.*******************************
It was good that the Lost Cause thesis was challenged. It was good that Robert E. Lee’s life and legacy has been submitted to fresh questioning. That is the purpose of history; ‘gleaning the meaning’ from and of evidence.
But this has not been done in good conduct. And it is being done by the deliberate evasion of pertinent evidence and questioning.
RE: WHAT, WHY, HOW? In what manner did the following repudiate what they “swore to uphold”?
All federal office holders of any type, (such as Commissioned Armed Forces Officers like Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, George Thomas, William T. Sherman, David Farragault, Robert Gould Shaw, etc), and those in politics such as Thaddeus Stevens, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, etc, in order to take their seats or positions swore that, regardless of personal sentiment, they would uphold the place of slavery in the said Constitution.
Hi there, I think you’re addressing my comment.
I don’t understand the question you’re asking.