Within the last hour, the New York Times has broken another startling story that indicates the extent to which neo-Confederate thinking permeates the Trump White House:
“The email forwarded by John Dowd, who is leading the president’s legal team, painted the Confederate general Robert E. Lee in glowing terms and equated the South’s rebellion to that of the American Revolution against England. Its subject line — “The Information that Validates President Trump on Charlottesville” — was a reference to comments Mr. Trump made earlier this week in the aftermath of protests in the Virginia college town.
“You cannot be against General Lee and be for General Washington,” the email reads, “there literally is no difference between the two men.” “
The NYT reports that Dowd forwarded the email to “more than two dozen recipients, including a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and journalists at Fox News and The Washington Times.”
The email came from Jerome Almon who, according to the NYT “runs several websites alleging government conspiracies and arguing that the F.B.I. has been infiltrated by Islamic terrorists”.
Villanova University historian Judith Giesberg told the NYT, “The first states to secede drew a straight line back to the Revolution… They said they were the inheritors of this revolutionary tradition that traces back to Washington.”
The email contained the following list of bullet points, marshaled to buttress the claim that both Washington and Lee are among America’s foremost heroes and patriots:
“LEE IS NO DIFFERENT FROM WASHINGTON
Both owned slaves
Both rebelled against the ruling government
Both men’s battle tactics are still fought at West Point
Both saved America
Both were great men, great Americans, and great commanders
Neither man is any different than Napoleon, Shaka Zulu, Alexander the Great, Ramses II, etc.
You cannot be against General Lee and be for George Washington, there literally is no difference between the two men.”
There are, of course, a few notable differences. Lee did not fight to “save America”, unless one means, by the word “America”, a nation in which it was legal to own, sell, and rape one’s fellow human beings.
One of the more useful debunkings of the myth of the kindly, noble General Lee comes from a recent piece in The Atlantic, by Adam Serwer, which showcases a letter Lee wrote to his wife concerning his views on slavery. Lee called it a “moral & political evil” but then added,
“I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy.”
And while it had been a tradition established in part by George Washington (a slaveholder) to keep slave families together, Robert E. Lee broke radically with that century-old precedent. Serwer quotes historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor,
“Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families,” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.”
One can hardly overemphasize Lee’s brutality, on that count.
Per Serwer,
“Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.” “
That top Trump Administration officials are promoting such factually corrupt claims is now hardly a surprise, given that it precisely tracks Donald Trump’s own recent, controversial statement equating George Washington and Thomas Jefferson with Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. But it raises the bizarre question — can the federal government secede from itself ?
Also, Trump and his top lawyer are not even in the vanguard of pushing such neo-Confederate thinking. On Tuesday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson offered up a qualified defense of slavery by noting that back in the 17th Century,
“Slavery was the rule rather than the exception around the world. Indians were holding and trading slaves when Christopher Columbus arrived. And, by the way, he had slaves too.”
A graphic on Carlson’s show titled “Tucker’s Thoughts” read,
“
SLAVERY IS EVIL
UNTIL 150 YEARS AGO SLAVERY WAS RULE
PLATO, MUHAMMAD, AZTECS ALL OWNED SLAVES
SLAVEHOLDING COMMON AMONG NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS
“
All of which serves to support the neo-Confederate position that slavery was, at the time of the outbreak of the Civil War, established precedent and, indeed, a perfectly reasonable practice.
So, what’s the end goal here ?
