‘A Foe Without Hate?’

JOANNE: Now we’re going to look at one figure who has certainly been in the news for the last year, Robert E. Lee.

REPORTER 1: Should we be removing Robert E. Lee from public vision?

REPORTER 2: Today, the city of New Orleans will take down a statue of Robert E. Lee.

REPORTER 3: Dozens of Ku Klux Klan members rallying against the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, yesterday. But the Klan members, outnumbered by–

NATHAN: In July of 2017, the KKK held a rally in Charlottesville. They were protesting the city council’s decision to remove statues of Confederate generals, including Robert E. Lee, from parks in the heart of downtown.

BRIAN: The rally drew thousands to the city, with wildly different opinions on the statues. We asked some people, what does Robert E. Lee mean to you?

WOMAN 1: Hero. You know? I mean, he’s just a hero.

MAN 1: The definition of an American. One of the greatest generals that there ever was.

WOMAN 2: He was a failed general. If you don’t win, you don’t win.

WOMAN 3: I don’t think people quite understand just how racist the man was.

MAN 2: I just hear racism all the time, you know? It was on the wrong side, but that doesn’t make him a horrible person.

MAN 3: I don’t think that Robert E. Lee himself necessarily thought the cause was worth fighting for, but ended up fighting for it because Virginia was his home.

MAN 4: He wasn’t about slavery. He was about– did he own slaves? Yes.

MAN 5: It was never proven that he owned slaves.

MAN 6: Robert E. Lee thought that it would have been a good idea for the Confederacy to outlaw slavery.

GARY GALLAGHER: Those all sound very familiar, Brian. There’s a Groundhog Day tone to this.

BRIAN: This is Gary Gallagher, a historian at the University of Virginia. We asked Gary to help us sort out some of the myths he heard among those voices.

GARY GALLAGHER: Well, I think that the two most prominent myths about Lee are both represented in those comments. The first is that he’s all about Virginia. All you need to know about Robert E. Lee is that he was a Virginian, considered himself a Virginian, and you can explain his life, pretty much entirely, based on his devotion to Virginia.

The second one is that he either didn’t own any slaves at all, or owned very few and wanted to get rid of them as sort of a closet emancipationist. Those are two– I think those are the two most common myths about Lee.

NATHAN: Before we go any further, let’s review what’s called the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. It comes up a lot in our conversations about the Civil War.

Gallagher says white southerners began constructing the narrative of the Lost Cause in the ashes of the war between the states.

GARY GALLAGHER: So they’re trying to figure out how to hold their heads up in the wake of a catastrophic defeat that cost them the thing they most wanted to protect, which was their slaveholding society. How do we explain this to our children and grandchildren? And by the way, we lost almost a third of our military aged white males, killed.

Well, first, we never could have won. So there’s no loss of honor in fighting a fight you never could have won against Yankees who had too much of everything.

Second, it wasn’t about slavery. It was about high constitutional principle. So it was a noble fight in a cause, even though we couldn’t win, it was worth fighting. And look at Robert E. Lee if you want to see what kind of a cause we had. He’s central to the Lost Cause.

JOANNE: As the archetypal southern gentleman, Lee became the noble face of the Lost Cause. Gallagher says that many of the myths swirling around Robert E Lee were constructed by taking tiny truths and distorting them. Remember those voices we heard a moment ago, claiming Lee didn’t support slavery and maybe never even owned slaves at all?

GARY GALLAGHER: Lee did own a few slaves in his life. He inherited some from his mother, but he never owned very many slaves. He never had very much money. His only source of money through most of his life was his salary as an officer in the United States Army, which didn’t make anyone wealthy. But he married into the Custis family, and his father-in-law owned a huge number of slaves. He was one of the largest slaveholders in Virginia.

So although he didn’t own a lot of slaves, he still has to be reckoned a part of the slaveholding elite of the Antebellum South. There’s one statement he made in 1856 where he said, everybody knows slavery is wrong. And I think he meant that in a sort of Jeffersonian sense, that slavery in the long term will probably go. But then he very quickly said, but nobody should do anything to get rid of it. God will get rid of it in his own time.

In other words, he isn’t in a hurry to give black men the vote. He doesn’t think black people are equal to white people, and he’s not the lone ranger in that regard.

NATHAN: And what about the claim that Lee’s true allegiance was to Virginia and not the Confederacy? Again, Gallagher says that’s true, up to a point.

GARY GALLAGHER: I think Lee faced a very difficult decision in leaving the United States Army in 1861. He’d just been promoted to colonel. That had been his entire life’s work. But in the end, and I don’t see any reason not to take him at his word here, he didn’t believe that he could fight against his family and his state.

But once he got into a Confederate uniform, he became an absolutely staunch Confederate nationalist. And if it had ever been a case of Virginia needs A, the Confederacy needs B, he would have said, we’re going to do B because Virginia’s a subset of the Confederacy. And the Confederacy, in the long term, will protect the things we consider most important, including our slaveholding social structure.

BRIAN: So I asked Gallagher. If you can’t separate Robert E. Lee from the Confederacy and slavery, how did he become a national hero?

GARY GALLAGHER: I think initially, the former Confederates who decided to focus on Lee had very good material in Lee because he– they argued they fought against long odds. Lee did fight against long odds. He won famous victories against long odds. He’s a soldier, not a politician, so you can talk about Lee without talking about slavery.

He’s a good loser. The winner set the terms, accept the terms, and go forward. Don’t wallow in the past. He was against, for example, erecting monuments to the Confederacy. He thought that wasn’t productive. So go forward. Accept, and he–

BRIAN: Is that how he ended up with so many monuments?

GARY GALLAGHER: He’s a very monumented fellow. That’s the public Lee.

BRIAN: That public persona was consistently reconciliation.

GARY GALLAGHER: Yes. Yes, it was. It was consistently reconciliationist in a public sense. But after the war, and I should be more specific– after Lee died, he wouldn’t have countenanced this when he was alive, actually, but after he died, they not only– the Lost Cause people began to present him not only as a great soldier, but as kind of a perfect soldier. And they tried to explain away all of his deficiencies as a general, explain away his defeats at Gettysburg and elsewhere, find other people to blame. So he became this kind of a perfect model of the best that the Antebellum southern slaveholding society could produce. Let’s look at Lee.

BRIAN: I get why Lee works for the South, but why does he work for the North as well?

GARY GALLAGHER: Over time, he comes to work for the North because it’s– in that is where the reconciliationist thread becomes more impor– I mean, the point of the war, after all, for the vast majority of the white citizenry of the United States, was to restore the Union.

The restoration of the Union was the most important goal in 1861. It was the most important goal in 1865. Most white Northerners also accepted emancipation in the end as one of the tools that would be necessary to restore the Union. But if the point is to put the Union together, then you try to find ways to see that that restored Union works. And bringing Lee into the tent, so to speak, is one way to do that. And it began pretty early.

A lot of the obituaries in northern newspapers– he died in 1870. A lot of those obituaries were quite favorable in many ways. Frederick Douglass called them nauseating flatteries of Robert E. Lee. He was very upset with how quickly this started.

It gained steam later in the 19th century, and by the early 20th century, he was– he had been elevated to a position where he could be admired. As long as you don’t talk about slavery, and as long you don’t talk about who was right or wrong so much in the war, then you can kind of bring Lee into it. And so he becomes– he’s not only part of the Lost Cause stream of memory. He’s also part of the reconciliationist stream of memory by the early 20th century.

And in fact, the statue in Charlottesville, the equestrian statue of Lee, is a perfect example of that. It went up in 1924, which is one year before Congress passed legislation making Arlington a National Memorial to Robert E. Lee. And putting Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on a $0.50 piece minted by the United States Mint, not by some vanity Mint, by the United States Mint.

BRIAN: Gary, you’ve mentioned one thing that is left out of the current debates, let’s say, in Charlottesville, over removing the statue of Robert E. Lee. You talked about how Lee was embraced by the North, even put on coins with the US Mint by the 1920s.

GARY GALLAGHER: He’s been on five postage stamps, Brian. He’s been on–

BRIAN: Five postage stamps.

GARY GALLAGHER: –five United St– what I would love to know, and I’ve often said this and no one has ever given me a name, I’d love to know any other principle rebel leader in a major civil war who ended up with a National Memorial to him, and his visage on postage stamps and coins. I would love to know if there’s another example of that.

BRIAN: We will send that out to our listeners. They’re very attentive, so we’ll–

GARY GALLAGHER: Good.

BRIAN: –get some good answers.

GARY GALLAGHER: So it’s– I’ve watched this debate in Charlottesville with interest. To say that that’s just a Lost Cause statue really isn’t right, because it’s part of a much broader reconciliationist movement by the mid-1920s. And this is really important to understand because if we don’t understand the difference between history and memory, we’re not going to understand very much about the past.

BRIAN: So how do we go about correcting myths? How do we do that with Robert E. Lee?

GARY GALLAGHER: I’m not hopeless about whether people can get a better understanding of our past, because I’ve seen many people get it. I’ve had many gratifying notes, and emails, and conversations, not only with students, but also with teachers.

I work with groups of teachers every year, who say that they’re really looking at things in a different way. On the other hand, I’ve had students come up at the end of a semester and say, I loved your class. I just thought it was the greatest thing, but you’re wrong. The Civil War wasn’t about slavery, and my Uncle George knows that, and I do, too.

So I realize that you’re not going to reach everybody. If I can get students to take one thing away from a history course– I want them to take two. I want them to understand the difference between history and memory, and all of this Confederate memorialization stuff is perfect for that.

And the other one is, anyone who wants simple answer– just give me the– what is it? Is it black or is it white? Well, it’s almost never black or white. It’s never simple. It’s never easy. And if we can convey some sense of that to people, so they don’t jump as a result of their impulse to have a nice pat, easy soundbite, 24 hour news station answer for something, then I think we really have accomplished something.

BRIAN: Gary Gallagher is a historian at the University of Virginia, and Director of the now Center for Civil War History.

JOANNE: The statue of Robert E. Lee still stands in Charlottesville’s downtown. Whether it will stay or go will ultimately be decided in court. The question is whether the statue of Lee is a war memorial, or a monument to something besides soldiers who fought the Civil War. Under Virginia law, a war memorial cannot be removed.