Being born in “The South,” I may be following news stories about the Confederate flag, and now Robert E. Lee.
The “War between the States” more aptly describes the Civil War, because the war began as a fight over statehood, states’ rights, not civil rights. As I begin this discussion, I can already hear the groans, see the rolling of eyes, and a desire by some to shun me. Practically anything to do with the south is an almost impossible discussion; those who say southerners are still fighting the Civil War, should be reminded that generally it is northerners who start with the smug name calling. It takes two to fight.
Robert E. Lee was born in Virginia to a family that still stood in the glory of their Revolutionary War hero ancestor, Light Horse Henry (Harry) Lee. The family was proud, but not particularly wealthy, and the father had to leave the country to escape his debts. His wife was Mary Custis Lee, who was a distant relative of Mary Washington. Our national cemetery in Arlington, Virginia is located on the grounds of the Custis-Lee estate, has become hallowed ground.
General Lee earned his title: he graduated second in his class (1829) at West Point, and fought in the Mexican War. It was some 30 years later that Abraham Lincoln nominated Lee to command what was to become the Union Army. With a heavy heart, Lee declined the command, not due to a lack of patriotism, but loyalty to family and his Virginia heritage. He saw that fighting the war would pit “brother against brother.”
Lee freed the slaves whom he had inherited in 1862; heralded Union generals Grant and Sherman held onto their slaves even after the war was over. Asked why he had persisted, he is said to have commented, “Good help is hard to come by.” No one owns the moral high ground on these issues, there is cruelty and subjugation enough to go around.
Upon his surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Lee’s concern was for his men. All but a few battles in the War were fought on Southern soil; many soldiers who fought and died for the Confederacy, fought, as they saw it, to defend their farms against an invading army. Of course slavery was a key issue in fighting the War, but, at the outset, Lincoln had no intention of emancipating the slaves. If the War had ended after a few months, as most thought it would, he might never have courageously issued the Emancipation Proclamation after three years into the War, as he did.
I ask you, are statues of Julius Caesar and Napoleon in recognition of their impact on history, or because of their vision of world domination? History, including the institution of slavery since time immemorial, cannot be rewritten. The Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, even the American Indians before the Europeans came, all kept slaves. Slavery in the U.S. was abolished as a result of the War Between the States, but the larger issue at its onset was whether the federal government superseded the states in the imposition of laws, or whether when federal and state laws conflicted, the state law would prevail. It is similar to Britain’s decision to leave the European Union.
We now accept that federal law overrides state law when they disagree, but it took a war to settle that question.
The most balanced presentation of the Civil War was presented by historian Shelby Foote, who died in 2005, and who wrote authoritatively on the subject. Foote narrated most of Ken Burns’ documentary on the Civil War, aired by PBS. In their move to eradicate flags and statues memorializing the Civil War, activists have handed supremacists emotional symbols to wage their cause. Are we going to allow fabric and metal objects to be turned into objects of hatred as the Nazi’s did with the Jewish star? Is the cross, used so heinously by the Ku Klux Klan, going to be next? We already fought one war, is it going to take more violence to fight it again? Let’s let history stand and get on with respecting one another.
