ROBERT E. LEE and ME: A SOUTHERNER'S RECKONING with the MYTH of the LOST CAUSE by Ty Seidule

 

Published in 2021 by Macmillan Audio.
Read by the author, Ty Seidule.

Duration: 10 Hours, 45 minutes.
Unabridged

I have been studying the Civil War since I was in college 35+ years ago. My thoughts on Robert E. Lee have evolved over the years. I used to be a lightweight proponent of the Lost Cause theory of the Civil War. I never was comfortable with the concept of slaves being content with slavery, but I certainly believed that the Southern officers were generally a noble and heroic lot when compared to the Union officers and the most noble and heroic officer of them all was Robert E. Lee. 

My thoughts the war and Lee have changed as I have read more and gotten older and perhaps a bit wiser. This book will be the 131st book I have reviewed that has been tagged "Civil War" and the 42nd book tagged "Robert E. Lee". I have widened my readings to include more of the Antebellum Period and more of the Reconstruction Era. Reading the Declarations of Causes of Seceding States (documents designed to be much like the United States' Declaration of Independence in 1776) gave me additional insight. I like to think I have picked up a more informed perspective.

Ty Seidule

This mirrors the shift in perspective that the author of this book went through, although his was certainly more dramatic. He grew up in the South and Robert E. Lee was his hero. It was only when he was a history professor at West Point that he started to think about Robert E. Lee and what he actually did.

Seidule doesn't come at this topic as an outsider. He is a retired Brigadier General who served with the 82nd Airborne and as a member of the 81st Armor Regiment. He is a career Army man, something he notes over and over again. But, being a career Army man doesn't mean that he supports everything the Army has ever done - it means that he wants to support what the Army does right and fix what it does wrong and honoring Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee is certainly wrong.

Seidule notes that moves to honor Confederate leaders tended to follow Civil Rights advances, as a pushback against them. Despite being a former head of West Point, Lee was practically purged from the facility after the Civil War. But, when black students started being appointed to West Point, Southerners began to push for naming things after Robert E. Lee, mirroring a phenomenon in the larger American culture. 

But, Seidule goes farther and looks at Robert E. Lee as an officer of the U.S. Army. He notes that with every promotion, an officer takes an oath. Lee took this oath many times, including a little more than 3 weeks before the resigned to join the Confederacy (he was promoted to colonel on March 28 and resigned on April 20). Seidule has no tolerance for oathbreaking. He now finds it ironic that he proudly took his first oath at Washington and Lee University next to a memorial to Robert E. Lee.

There is a frequently made argument that Lee resigned to defend his state and that most officers did. Seidule dug through the Army records and discovered there were fifteen colonels from states that seceded in the U.S. Army before the Civil War (remember - the Army was much, much smaller back then). Twelve of the fifteen remained with the Union. Of those fifteen colonels, eight were from Virginia. Only one colonel from Virginia resigned to join the Confederacy - Robert E. Lee. 

Seidule's book looks at the entire "Lost Cause of the Confederacy" phenomenon that excused the Confederacy from any wrong-doing, downplays the central role of slavery in the conflict and similarly downplays the evils of slavery itself.

I leave this review with a comment for Union General George H. Thomas, a Virginian who stayed with the Union, provided an early Union victory, saved the Union Army from certain destruction at Chickamagua, participated in capture of Atlanta and literally destroyed a Confederate Army at Franklin, Tennessee:

[T]he greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedom, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for southern independence failed. This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains; a species of self-forgiveness amazing in its effrontery, when it is considered that life and property—justly forfeited by the laws of the country, of war, and of nations, through the magnanimity of the government and people—was not exacted from them.

— George Henry Thomas, November 1868

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. Highly Recommended. 

It can be found on Amazon.com here: ROBERT E. LEE and ME: A SOUTHERNER'S RECKONING with the MYTH of the LOST CAUSE by Ty Seidule.