Yes, Robert E. Lee Supported Slavery, the Confederacy and Its Battle Flag

Credit: NPS / Laurel Brodsky

​Originally published in the Mischiefs of Faction blog.

By Jonathan M. Ladd
​

"Where I'm from, we believe all sorts of things that aren't true. We call it history."
-The Wizard of Oz, in Wicked

Recently, in response to protests from black law students, Kenneth P. Ruscio, the president of Washington and Lee University, apologized for the school's past ownership of slaves and announced that he will remove Confederate battle flags from its "Lee Chapel." Lee's crypt is underneath the Chapel, and the flags are currently part of a memorial to Lee on the main level "where students gather for school events."

Petula Dvorak praised Ruscio's actions in her Washington Post column last Friday. Yet despite this praise, her column still spreads some pernicious historical myths about Lee. She says,

It was a bold thing to do. And you could hear the collective gasp below the Mason-Dixon Line as Southerners imagined messing in any way with their beloved general’s final resting place. Some said touching the flags near Lee’s body is a “desecration of his grave.” 

Baloney. Lee was all about Virginia, and he took over that university to help forge his commitment to reunification. College President Kenneth P. Ruscio was following in Lee’s footsteps when he acknowledged the concerns of a group of African American law students, who said the flags offended them and made them feel unwelcome.

This is an ahistorical description of Robert E. Lee. It is hard to see how caring about the welfare of African American law students is "following in Lee's footsteps." I hate to quibble, but his matters because depicting Lee, Confederate leaders, and slaveholders in general as sympathetic to African Americans is part of the "Lost Cause" tradition: a set of false claims about the Antebellum South, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, that for decades was used to justify the segregation and terrorism of Jim Crow.

To review some basic facts, Robert E. Lee choose to fight for the Confederacy, whose raison d'etre was the preservation of Southern slavery. When Lee's army invaded the north, it kidnapped any free blacks it encountered and sold them into slavery in the south. When black union troops attempted to surrender to confederate armies, they were either massacred or put into into slavery. Lee owned almost 200 slaves and treated them brutally. By any reasonable measure, Lee supported slavery. Honest modern assessments find him to be a "conventional white supremacist who was a beleaguered slavemaster." And of course, no one fought more major battles under the confederate battle flag than Lee.

As part of the Lost Cause tradition, denying the racial views of Robert E. Lee is closely connected to denying that the Civil War was about slavery and that the Confederacy seceded because of slavery. Of course, many parts of human history are remembered badly. But this point is especially important because the Lost Cause tradition has been used through American history to justify not enforcing the 14th and 15th Amendments in the South, aspects of which continue today. Contrary to the Lost Cause ideology, the consensus among historians, and the overwhelming bulk of original sources from the time, indicate that slavery caused the Civil War. I won't go into all of this evidence here, but the most compelling of it is the declarations of secession passed by the southern state legislatures. As an example, here is Mississippi's declaration:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth... These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.

If your stomach can't take wading through all the secession declarations, you can read Lincoln's second inaugural address, which is etched in stone on the north wall of the Lincoln Memorial:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war...

Robert E. Lee supported slavery, the Confederate government, and its battle flag. We can remove Confederate flags without imagining that somehow this is what Lee wanted.