Posted on 01/30/2007 11:33:39 AM PST by RayStacy
Robert E. Lee: Icon of the South -- and American Hero By H. W. Crocker III Published 1/30/2007 12:08:14 AM
January can be a depressing month. The Christmas decorations come down, the creche is returned to its box (save for those hardliners, like the Crocker family, who leave the nativity set up until 2 February, the Presentation of the Lord), and the tree is dragged unceremoniously from the house. If you've had any time off of work, it ends; the spirit of Christmas can deflate pretty fast, if you're not careful. Even if you are, and you're returning to a desk job, you might start day-dreaming (as I always do) about whether you could, in good conscience, risk the family finances and try your hand at farming or ranching or doing anything that would get you out of an office and away from the corporate crowd.
But we all have to buckle down to our responsibilities, and as we settle down to it, there comes along another anniversary, another date to mark, another birthday to celebrate. In traditional Southern households, four weeks after Christmas, comes the birthday of Robert E. Lee, icon of the South, "one of the noblest Americans who ever lived, and of the greatest captains known to the annals of war" (according to Winston Churchill).
This year marks the 200th anniversary of Lee's birth, and yet so far it seems to have been marked largely by silence. How many of you noticed, or celebrated yourselves, Lee's birthday on 19 January (or Stonewall Jackson's on 21 January)? Lee's birthday is still officially marked in some Southern states, but the great and good general seems to be slipping from America's consciousness, or at least from America's esteem.
Lee, in the mind of some, has become a sectarian hero, when he used to be a national one. Theodore Roosevelt, scion of a Yankee father and a Southern mother, thought Lee was "without any exception the very greatest of all the great captains that the English-speaking peoples have brought forth." On Lee's death in 1870, a Northern paper, the New York Herald, editorialized: "Here in the North... we have long ceased to look upon him as the Confederate leader, but have claimed him as one of ourselves; have cherished and felt proud of his military genius as belonging to us; have recounted and recorded his triumphs as our own; have extolled his virtue as reflecting upon us -- for Robert Edward Lee was an American, and the great nation which gave him birth would be to-day unworthy of such a son if she regarded him lightly. Never had mother a nobler son."
IT IS IRONIC THAT LEE was so respected as a national hero when the wounds of war were still fresh, but now, a century and a half later, he is considered discredited because of the cause for which he fought. Yet his cause, if anything, is another reason to admire him.
If that last statement sounds controversial, consider, without prejudice, the cause for which Lee sacrificed everything -- his life, his family, his career. It was a simple and eloquent one that every humane man should be able to rally round: "With all my devotion to the Union, and the feeling of loyalty and duty as an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home." In another letter, he wrote, "a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets has no charm for me. If the Union is dissolved and government disrupted, I shall return to my native state and share the miseries of my people, and save in defense will draw my sword on none."
Lee would have endorsed the view of General Richard (son of Zachary) Taylor who said that he and his fellow Southerners had fought not for the preservation of slavery -- regret for slavery's loss, Taylor noted after the war, "has neither been felt nor expressed" -- but rather, they had "striven for that which brought our forefathers to Runnymede, the privilege of exercising some influence in their own government."
That Lee believed that the Confederacy had only exercised its rights as guaranteed under the Constitution, defended by the founders, and invoked by states and statesmen "for the last seventy years," can be seen in his letter of 15 December 1866 to Lord Acton, in which he says precisely that. He wishes that "the judgment of reason" had not "been displaced by the arbitrament of war," but concludes it has been, and it is time for the South to move on, to accept "without reserve... the extinction of slavery.... [A]n event that has been long sought, though in a different way, and by none... more earnestly desired than by citizens of Virginia," and to "trust that the constitution may undergo no [further] change, but that it may be handed down to our succeeding generations in the form we received it from our forefathers."
This does not sound like a man whose politics should bar him from the admiration that used to be his due.
I THINK, HOWEVER, THAT THERE IS another, deeper reason why Lee makes modern America uncomfortable. It is his Christianity -- not the fact the he was a believer, but that he actually knew what it meant to pursue the imitation of Christ. Try reading the Gospel of Matthew and you'll find that it's arresting stuff. And Lee, though gentle in demeanor -- indeed a thoroughgoing gentleman -- could be equally arresting.
When a young mother sought Lee's advice for raising her infant son, Lee replied, "Teach him he must deny himself." Or how about this: "Duty...is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things.... You cannot do more; you should never wish to do less."
Lee always put others first; he believed that to lead is to serve; he believed that the "forbearing use of power does not only form the touchstone, but the manner ... of a true gentleman.... A true gentleman of honor feels humbled himself when he cannot help humbling others."
Today, Self seems to be the great god of most people. They bow before the presumed truth that happiness lies in self-esteem and "self-actualization" -- a very self-flattering way of affirming that one's "inner self" is always right, and the source of all truth. Self-denial, unless it is in the form of a diet (to make us feel better about ourselves), is not much in vogue.
Well, Lee was the great anti-self-actualizer of American history. As Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Douglas Southall Freeman put it: "Had [Lee's] life been epitomized in one sentence of the Book he read so often, it would have been in the words, 'If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.'"
Today, many find that sentence too bracing, and Lee, who embodied it, becomes an affront, a perfect example of Mark Twain's apothegm that "Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example."
And it's not just that, of course. Ignorance is part of the problem too. For how many Americans today know the real Robert E. Lee or know anything about him at all, save that he was a general "who fought for slavery."
If we want an America of heroes, we need to cherish our heroes of the past. It is to the advantage of every Southerner, of every American, to renew his acquaintance with Robert E. Lee, because there simply is no finer American hero.
In general, until recently, Lee was portrayed by American history books in an almost uniformly positive manner. The Navy even named a nuclear submarine after him. I seriously doubt that could happen today, despite the fact that Lee really did embody so many positive traits about America as a whole, not just the South.
Actually, I'm not entirely comfortable with making a saint out of him, as some people are prone to do (and I say this as a native Virginian, and believe me, he practically IS a saint in many parts of the Old Dominion). If you view what faults he did have and what mistakes he did make along with his virtues and successes, I think it makes him all the more admirable. A man who could make the mistakes that he did at Gettysburg--mistakes that led to such a slaughter--and still lead brilliantly for almost two more years is a man to be admired.
}:-)4
The general bone of contention on these threads is:
a) The South shoulda/coulda/woulda won.
b) It didn't.
You are not allowed to say anything nice about anyone associated with the Confederacy or else the damnyankees will crawl out of the woodwork and screech about how eeeeevil Southerners were fighting to preserve slavery.
Not as many as I will eventually be blamed for. :)
That's the problem with the POS -- he could hardly treat the islamic head cutters worse than the defenseless women of GA.
There's a place and a time for a Lee, and a place and a time for a Sherman. Say what you will about Bill The Arsonist, he did what he said he was going to do, and he won.
Honestly, I don't know if scorched-earth is the best policy in the WOT. In some places, yeah, but not everywhere. We're doing OK in a lot of Iraq by winning over the population.
}:-)4
Lee IMO was the last "founding father" in the Revolutionary mode. Very similar to Wahsington in many ways. But times had changed.
Well, if you are a lover of genocide, you should celebrate Sherman's birthday. While he possessed a very sharp military mind, Sherman also tried to decimate and destroy the American Indians of the western plains. His one regret was that he did not kill them all.
Try Detroit. They actually LIKE it up there when you set fires. They do it every Halloween. :)
}:-)4
Yep, Sherman did it all on his own, didn't he? The noble Red man had lived a life of harmony with the whites prior to Sherman's arrival. Not a finger raised against him, he roamed free on the land his ancestors lived on before the white man ever arrived on these shores. </sarcasm>
Very interesting. Thanks.
Nice story. Apparently, it first appeared in a newspaper forty years later, in 1905. A lot of myths attached themselves to Lee in later years. Whether this story is true or not would be hard, maybe impossible, to say for sure.
Curiously, the spin attached to the story at the time is different from how it would be interpreted today. TL Broun, who made public his memory of the incident put it this way:
By this action of Gen. Lee the services were conducted as if the negro had not been present. It was a grand exhibition of superiority shown by a true Christian and great soldier under the most trying and offensive circumstances.
There are MANY "fine" American heroes equal to the celebrated Lee- and some above him, like Ronald Reagan. But all in all I agree with the article (I AM a historian).
The revisionists don't just stop with re-painting men like Lee, they are also quite busy trying to "taliban" memorials. Right now, they are trying to gin up interest in destroying the memorial at Stone Mountain. This just might be the beginning of "Civil War II"...
Well he did get a riverboat named after him.
Having been born and raised in the north (of England), I don't really have a dog in this fight (as we say here in my adopted homeland of Texas).
Nevertheless, I will throw a little petrol on the fire: If this happened today, there would be no question whatever of the Southern states' right to secede. It would be called "self-determination," an idea whose validity has been enshrined in global politics since the end of the First World War and Wilson's fourteen points.
Oddly enough, Woodrow Wilson was a Virginian and old enough (b. 1856) to have childhood memories of the Civil War period.
His son did sue for payment and won. He was awarded $150,000 if memory serves.
Lee's final years as the President of Washington College in Virginia, provide a very moving account of a man trying to make one final contribution to his society by molding the next generation of leaders.
Yup, and they're buried right in his front yard.
It's a sad irony, to have to curse the US for this travesty against property rights while blessing the place as "hallowed" as burial for many heroes.
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