Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

One of the most common defenses of Confederate monuments and other forms of memorialization is that they represent history, and that to remove them is to erase or rewrite history. Seidule argues that statues say much more about the person who built them than the person they commemorate. Rather than representing history, Confederate statues and other forms of memorialization are political attempts to advance a particular interpretation of history, which erases the history of anyone who does not fit into the narrative. Statues indicate who has the power to write history.

This is evident from the circumstances in which Confederate monuments were erected. Seidule provides examples showing how the building of a statue or the unveiling of a painting was not simply about honoring the subject. Naming a nearly all-Black elementary school after Robert E. Lee was a way to remind those children of their supposed “inferiority” at an early age, honoring someone who fought to keep millions of Black Americans in bondage. Alexandria, Virginia mandated naming the city’s streets after Confederates only when the courts were entertaining challenges to segregation. Military bases were not named after Confederates until the First World War, deferring to local sensibilities to secure their support. Commemorations of Robert E. Lee at West Point all coincided with social progress for Black Americans, such as the largest class of Black cadets or the desegregation of the Army.

In each case, the memorial serves to entrench the status quo against the prospect of change. To remove them is not to suppress history, but to acknowledge a necessary and desirable shift in social mores. In the Soviet Union, statues of Lenin sprang up during the reign of Stalin, to convey the message that one man has always ruled the Soviet state and always should—even though Lenin rejected personalist dictatorship during his lifetime. To tear down those statues is not to erase Soviet history, but to turn the page on a dark era of totalitarianism. One does not look to Vladimir Putin’s revival of the Stalin cult as somehow favorable to historical learning.

The second aspect of backlash is the real history that it erases. The experiences of enslaved and emancipated people and the victims of Jim Crow are no less real than those of Confederate generals, and probably more deserving of honor, but such efforts have been halting at best. Only a tiny roadside marker notes the site of the 1946 Moore’s Ford massacre, compared to a large nearby monument for Confederate soldiers built in 1906. Alexandria has attempted to bury its past ties to slavery, and West Point recognized the role of slavery in the Civil War only by accident, when the artist commissioned to paint Lee’s portrait defied the wishes of Lee’s biographer and included a freedman in the background. Those genuinely interested in history should seek to uncover these long-buried stories, and reevaluate the figures who deserve the public’s esteem, but all too often the battle for history is really a struggle to define the social hierarchy.