Who is the Robert E. Lee honored across the United States? According to a partial list compiled for Wikipedia, there are five towns, eight counties, eight building, three military facilities, thirty-seven statues or historical markers, a bridge and a highway, two parks, two colleges, at least seventy-five streets, almost fifty schools, and a decommissioned Navy submarine named after Robert E. Lee. There have also been five postage stamps and a commemorative silver half dollar.
Colonel Robert E. Lee was a West Point graduate who served in the United States Army for over thirty years including as a field officer during the Mexican American War, as Superintendent of the United States Military Academy, and as commanding officer in the military response to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. Lee initially opposed southern secession, but when he was offered command of the United States Army by President Lincoln at the start of the Civil War, he chose to resign his commission and take up arms against the nation he swore to defend. In 1862 he was appointed General of the South’s Army of Northern Virginia and in February 1865 as General-in-Chief of all Southern forces. Lee served in that capacity until he surrounded to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in April 1865.
The Oath
As a 1829 graduate of the United States Military Academy, second lieutenant Robert E. Lee took a three-part oath approved by an Act of Congress on September 29, 1789.
- "I, __________, do solemnly swear or affirm (as the case may be) that I will support the constitution of the United States."
- "I, ___________, do solemnly swear or affirm (as the case may be) to bear true allegiance to the United States of America, and to serve them honestly and faithfully, against all their enemies or opposers whatsoever, and to observe and obey the orders of the President of the United States of America, and the orders of the officers appointed over me."
- "[T]he said troops shall be governed by the rules and articles of war, which have been established by the United States in Congress assembled, or by such rules and articles of war as may hereafter by law be established."
Lee violated the third clause of his oath in 1864 when after the Battle of The Crater at Petersburg, Virginia. After the battle, troops under Lee’s command massacred African American soldiers who had surrendered.
Robert E. Lee never apologized for his betrayals and in the post-Civil War remained an avowed racist who justified his decisions. In February 1866 testimony before the congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Lee was questioned by Senator Jacob Howard (Republican – Michigan) and Representative Henry Blow (Republican – Missouri) about conditions for emancipated African Americans and the attitudes of Southerners in the post-war era.
Congressional Testimony
In his testimony Lee claimed that the principle “desire of the people of the south . . . is for the restoration of their civil government” and that they express “kind feelings towards the freedmen,” “wish to see them get on in the world,” “induce them to engage for the year at regular wages,” “exhibited a willingness that the blacks should be educated.” However, Lee himself did not “think that he is as capable of acquiring knowledge as the white man is.”
Lee described African Americans as an “amiable, social race. They like their ease and comfort, and, I think, look more to their present than to their future condition.”
Don’t Let Blacks Vote
Later in his testimony, Lee argued that granting African Americans the right to vote “would excite unfriendly feelings between the two races. I cannot pretend to say to what extent it would go, but that would be the result . . . if the black people now were allowed to vote, it would, I think, exclude proper representation; that is, proper, intelligent people would not be elected; and rather than suffer that injury they would not let them vote at all . . . My own opinion is, that, at this time, they cannot vote intelligently, and that giving them the right of suffrage would open the door to a great deal of demagogism, and lead to embarrassments in various ways. What the future may prove, how intelligent they may become, with what eyes they may look upon the interests of the State in which they may reside, I cannot say more than you can.”
We Didn’t Commit Treason
When asked whether individuals like himself had committed treason by taking up arms against the United States, Lee responded that Southerners “look upon the action of the State, in withdrawing itself from the government of the United States, as carrying the individuals of the State along with it; that the State was responsible for the act, not the individual . . . I think they considered the act of the State as legitimate; that they were merely using the reserved right which they had a right to do” He defended his own actions claiming “the act of Virginia, in withdrawing herself from the United States, carried me along as a citizen of Virginia, and that her laws and her acts were binding on me.”
In response to Lee’s claims, Frederick Douglass wrote in 1871, “The spirit of secession is stronger today than ever. It is now a deeply rooted, devoutly cherished sentiment, inseparably identified with the ‘lost cause,’ which the half measures of the Government towards the traitors has helped to cultivate and strengthen.” When Lee died in October 1870, Douglass responded to obituaries, “We can scarcely take up a newspaper . . . that is not filled with nauseating flatteries . . . it would seem . . . that the soldier who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven.”
One hundred and fifty years after his death, the Black Lives Matter movement is forcing the United States to finally come to terms with Lee’s and the nation’s racist legacy. Confederate monuments and Lee statues must come down and street and place names changed.
Ironically, Lee did not support Civil War memorials and monuments. In a letter written in August 1869, he argued “I think it wiser, moreover, not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”
Robert E. Lee is a symbol of American racism too long ignored by the white population of the United States. Robert E. Lee is a symbol of a false narrative of American history, that slavery was peripheral and its impact ended with the end of the Civil War. To help the United States and the American people come to terms with their past and present and to build a more just future, tear down the Lee statues and purge his name from schools and streets.
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