Virginia Governor Announces Removal of Robert E. Lee Statue

[JMadonna]

It was sad to read this headline - Forgive me but as a historian, I feel something has to be said in Lee's defense.

It is true that Robert E. Lee personally owned slaves that he inherited upon the deaths of his mother and his father and that he fought on the 'wrong' side during the civil war.

In an 1856 letter to his wife the deployed soldier wrote: “In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages.”

But his political opinion is never cited and his actions (honorable in its time) on behalf of his state is given as proof of his evilness. It is like saying the USSR soldiers fought for the glory of communism and Stalin rather than the fact that they were being invaded by Nazis.

Like many monument ceremonies, the unveiling of the Lee statue served as a moment of reconciliation for Americans. Union and Confederate veterans gathered together on the same platform, honoring a man many Americans, north and south, regarded as the epitome of military brilliance, bravery, and honor.

But Lee's greatest achievement was not on the battlefield, it was at Appomattox and afterwards.

Civil wars are the worst of all wars. They raise memories that are best laid quietly to rest. Their effects remain as scar tissue; often enough, as a matter of fact, the wounds they create really never do heal, the hatreds and antagonisms that caused and were increased by rebellion never die out but remain generation after generation to breed a sullen anger and suspicion that at last become wholly poisonous.

Davis wanted Lee to continue the war guerrilla style but he declined. Guerilla warfare, would have brought eternal enmity with crossroad ambushes and midnight reprisals, with armies harrying the countryside across state after state, increasing the pressure that would evoke another explosion. The war itself would have been ended, but it would not have been settled.

Lee saw that danger, spoke against it, flatly refused to countenance any suggestion that the struggle be kept alive after the formal fighting had ended, and threw his immense influence into the scales on the side of peace and reconciliation.

At Appomattox Grant and Lee set the terms for the peace: No reprisals on the one hand, full acceptance of the result on the other. Bear in mind here is that civil wars usually don’t end that way. They bring an imposed peace that has to be supported by force for years, sometimes forever, and the settlement usually intensifies the passions that brought the trouble in the first place.

Lee returned to his own army, composed a brief, temperate address telling his men to accept what had happened and to look to their future as citizens of a nation they had tried so hard to tear apart. Then he rode quietly off into legend.

The glorification of the Lee legend drew a great part of its strength from the fact that Lee admitted the loss of the war. He admitted it and accepted it. His action contained no hint that enmity should be kept alive and that the wrongs of war should be avenged.

It became a form of adjustment to a reality that was unpleasant; the passion that might so easily have poisoned American life forever spiraled off, or at least the major part of it did, into the enshrinement of a beautiful and romantic legend which over the years saved the country a great deal of trouble.

The memory of the Civil War did not become a divisive force in this country. Incredibly, the greatest and most terrible war we ever fought—the one we fought with each other—gave us a more enduring
unity. It gave us a common tradition that go to the very roots of our existence as a people.

Maybe the legend of Bobby Lee has outlived its usefulness but the mob demanding his ouster will never come close to unifying anything.