Robert E. Lee and Me by Ty Seidule published by St. Martin’s Publishing (2021).
West Point History Professor Ty Seidule had just finished a talk in Atlanta on Robert E. Lee, when a man raised his hand and said; “Colonel, you have provided no evidence that the War Between the States had anything at all to do with slavery.” Seidule was puzzled. “I had spent the first five minutes recounting the Confederate secessionists’ own words declaring their independence to protect and expand slavery,” he writes in his new book. Seidule came to understand that “Nothing I could say would refute his upbringing, his feelings, and his history. Then I realized evidence didn’t matter; he had chosen his own facts based on his culture.” History and facts did not matter, because the man had been raised by his parents and mis-educated by the Southern school systems to ignore the record and embrace a pseudo-history that justified white dominance of the region.
Seidule knew this because he was raised the same way.
The professor’s early years were spent growing up blocks from Lee’s home in Northern Virginia. The most memorable book of his childhood introduced him to his hero, Robert E. Lee. He was proud when he learned that his birthday, July 3, was the day that Pickett’s Charge took place, and event he was told was a display of unmatched heroism, not unbridled hubris.
As he got older, Seidule’s family moved to the Deep South, where his father became the headmaster of a segregation academy, a private school created after Brown v. Board of Education, where white children could be educated in all-white classrooms. He was taught the lies of the Lost Cause and the importance of venerating the Confederate Pantheon of Saints. The demigod of this array was, of course, Robert E. Lee.
The author did not just revere Lee, he wanted to be as much like the Confederate commander as he possibly could. He hoped to one day be a Christian Gentleman.
This led Seidule to Washington and Lee University, where he proudly enrolled in the school that was once ruled by Robert E. Lee. It was only when he brought his wife to the school and took her to the Lee Chapel at the college that he began to see the school as part of the Lee Cult. His wife, a Catholic, observed that the place in this house of worship where an altar with a Bible or some other symbol of God would normally be, was instead occupied by a life-sized sculpture of Lee, in uniform, lying down. Was Lee their God?
Being confronted by the woman he loved, the mother of his children, with the idolatry implicit in the image shook the author and helped him reexamine the belief he had received uncritically from his father, his region, and his school up until then.
Seidule writes that; “The power of white southern culture and white southern history—actually not history, myth—shaped my understanding of the Civil War almost from infancy, true, but it shaped something more important than my view of the past. The white southern myths created my identity. The problem is that the myths I learned were just flat-out, fundamentally wrong. And not just wrong in a moral sense, as if that weren’t significant enough, but wrong factually, whether through deception, denial, or willful ignorance. The myths and lies I learned promoted a form of racial hierarchy and white supremacy. I use the word “lie” deliberately.”
Seidule began an intense course of research into the Civil War and the role his hero played in it. He came to a simple and stark conclusion: “My former hero, Robert E. Lee, committed treason to preserve slavery.”
Seidule understands that many of his generation growing up in the South disagree with him because they were mis-educated from their earliest years. He writes that “After the Civil War, former Confederates, their children, and their grandchildren created a series of myths and lies to hide that essential truth and sustain a racial hierarchy dedicated to white political power reinforced by violence. But for decades, I believed the Confederates and Lee were romantic warriors for a doomed but noble cause. As a soldier, a scholar, and a southerner, I believe that American history demands, at least from me, a reckoning.”
This book is part of that reckoning. Seidule was also the viral media star of a five minute lecture on slavery and the Confederacy that tore through the history internet five years ago. It was a social media corrective to the lies he had been taught in school. His textbooks depicted slaves as happy being the property of white people. When they were sold off, they often broke down crying because “Negroes did not wish to leave their old masters.” The fact that their families were broken by the sales seemed to play no role in their emotional outbursts.
Seidule writes that “As a schoolkid in Virginia, I never received an honest accounting of slavery. Many historians have now given us a clear look at the slave trade, plantation life (that is, life on the enslaved labor farms), and slave rebellions. Every aspect of slavery was just as evil as the abolitionists and the peerlessly honest former slave Frederick Douglass described it. If anything, the conditions were worse. The only way to argue for slavery, then or now, is to believe that the enslaved weren’t real human beings. That the lives of those who had darker skin had less worth; that the color of skin meant the difference between human and not quite human. And that is the hideous lesson my Virginia history textbook taught schoolchildren in the Old Dominion.”
This is one man’s personal journey from a childhood belief in the majesty of Robert E. Lee and the Confederates, reinforced by every institution of white power in the South, to being confronted by his wife with the implications of his belief, to his own deeply researched understanding of the Confederacy and his subsequent commitment to opposing white supremacy in his own life, in the Army and at West Point.
Professor Seidule’s advocacy for removal of Confederate symbols at The Point form the final sections of this book. He notes that while West Point was Confederate-Free for decades after the Civil War, it became Confederate-friendly in the 1960s, just when the rest of America was beginning to question the Lost Cause.
Robert E. Lee and Me is very much a first-person account of one man’s wrestling with ideas that seem to haunt us now even more than they did in the 20th Century. His narrative is informed by rigorous historical analysis and it is lucid, at time courageous, and unique in its perspective. Whether reading it would change the mind of the professor’s Atlanta interlocutor is impossible to say though. White identity seems to be even more enshrined in marble today for some people than it did when that meeting took place in a more civilized time.
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A great read that really makes you think. This book required a lot of courage to write and I admire the author for writing it.
I have never thought about, for example, the role “Gone With the Wind” played in setting us all up for the systemic racism that plagues our country today, Have you?
I am nearly finished with Seidule’s brave and persuasive book. I can’t help but wonder if he would have been able to publish this book while in the service as a West Point History instructor. Because of his background and experience he has considerable credibility in opposing the maintenance of the Confederate Monuments and the still existing confederate memorabilia prevalent throughout the United States. I was particularly incensed about the fact that most of our major Army bases were named after Confederate generals who often were fire breathing secessionists who aided the white supremacy movement after the Civil War. This is a book that is particularly relevant during these times of division and misinformation.