January 19, 2007

Happy Birthday, Robert E. Lee!

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Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Robert Edward Lee. The WaPo gives a remarkably balanced (for it) summary of Lee's life and legacy:

Robert E. Lee was born Jan. 19, 1807, at Stratford Plantation on the Northern Neck of Virginia and was the fifth child of Revolutionary War hero Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee. He attended West Point and never received a demerit. By all accounts enormously handsome, tall, charismatic and humble, he had a long and illustrious career in the U.S. Army. In 1861, as Southern states contemplated secession, Lee privately ridiculed the idea. Still, when he was offered command of the Union Army, he turned it down once Virginia -- his "country" -- seceded.

During the Civil War, Lee's troops were often vastly outnumbered but managed to win or fight to a stalemate for years. Once the war ended, Lee resisted calls to continue the fight in the hills as a guerrilla and instead encouraged his soldiers to go home and begin rebuilding the nation. He retired to what was then Washington College, where he set about innovating the offerings, including the first classes in the country in business and journalism.

In other countries, leaders of failed civil rebellions are often reviled. But a strange thing happened to Lee after he died. He became beloved by many. Over the years, he has been praised by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had a picture of Lee hanging in his office.

Northerners, seizing on Lee's early ambivalence about the war, his gentlemanly sense of honor and duty, and his distaste of slavery -- he once wrote that it was a "moral and political evil" -- embraced the Confederate general as a way to foster reconciliation, said John Coski, a historian at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. In 1901, he was one of only 29 Americans inducted into New York University's Hall of Fame. Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the lyrics for the Battle Hymn of the Republic, composed a poem in Lee's honor.

At the same time, his former generals wrote of him as so perfect and his cause so noble that Lee became fixed as the tragic hero of a romantic "Lost Cause" and that cause became synonymous with white Southern identity.

"There's an old saw in the South of a little girl asking, 'Mommy, is Robert E. Lee from the Old Testament or the New?' " Coski said. "Lee has been so praised and distorted that they made him more than human, and in so doing, made him less than human. He's a complex figure. If we want to understand history in its complexity, we have to understand Robert E. Lee."

Alas, that complexity is lost on many of those who both revere and villify Lee.

Personally, I see him as a truly good man caught up in truly horrific circumstances, forced by his own convictions about duty and honor into taking what he knew to be the wrong side in the War. Shakespeare would have understood this perfectly, as would the classical Greek tragedians.

It's been more years than I care to think about now since I gradiated from Washington & Lee University (Law) so things may have changed, but what I remember chiefly from my time at W&L was the sense that Lee's ghost still very much walked the place. And by that I don't mean a bunch of redneck boys with rebel flags on their dorm room walls dreamily imagining what life would be like had Lee broken Hancock's line on the third day at Gettysburg. Rayther, it was the school's corporate embracing of Lee's ideals. He expected his students to be gentlemen. (That was, almost literally, the honor code under his presidency.) In my time, faculty and students still expected themselves to be ladies and gentlemen.

That's the legacy of Lee's that I value the most. And I'm pretty sure it's the one for which he'd most like to be remembered.

UPDATE: GroovyVic remembers the date she almost had with the Gen'rul.

YIPS from Steve-O: Darn my Yankee roots!

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Unfortunately, there is a limit to the size of the name on an image file; the original file name was "Robert E Lee buck naked with Susan B Anthony and a donkey in Tijuana"

Yips! back from Robbo: Just bear in mind that for all of Steve-o's "ayut, ayut" Yankee roots, he actually had an ancestor who took part in the 15 minute defence of Savannah. While I had one who was an officer in this outfit. Neener!

UPDATE DEUX: Yeek, we've been linked by the Puffington Host. Does this mean an Arianne-o-lanche?

Posted by Robert at January 19, 2007 09:06 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Probably the only one who had negative things to say about Lee was Pickett.

Posted by: rbj at January 19, 2007 09:22 AM

Feh. Show me a gentleman loser, and I'll show you a loser.

:-)

Relax, I'm just kidding. Lee was obviously a good man in a bad situation. Best general the U.S. ever produced, a dueling saber amongst blunt sledgehammers. And practically deified by his troops.

The U.S. is a strange place; we name army posts after the generals of a defeated insurrection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Lee,_Virginia

Though not Ft. Jackson -- that was named after Andy.

Posted by: The Colossus at January 19, 2007 10:45 AM

I'm always amazed by that sign for exit 118 (going south) on I-95. "Stonewall Jackson Shrine". I can't recall any other person outside of saints and Mary and Jesus who have shrines.

Posted by: rbj at January 19, 2007 11:20 AM

How about where his arm is buried?

Posted by: Little Gidding at January 19, 2007 11:41 AM