...EXCEPT FOR GETTYSBURG...

Trust El Jefe del Mar-A-Lardo to never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity to not be a complete embarrassment to the species.

Robert E. Lee’s statue in Richmond finally bit the dust yesterday, and El Jefe del Mar-A-Lardo couldn’t stop himself:

“Robert E. Lee is considered by many Generals to be the greatest strategist of them all. President Lincoln wanted him to command the North, in which case the war would have been won in one day. Robert E. Lee instead chose the other side because of his great love for Virginia, and except for Gettysburg, would have won the war. He should be remembered as perhaps the greatest unifying force after the war, ardent in his desire to bring the North and South together through many means of reconciliation and imploring his soldiers to do their duty in becoming good citizens of this Country.

“If only we had Robert E. Lee to command our troops in Afghanistan... What an embarrassment we are suffering because we don’t have the genius of a Robert E. Lee!”

As with anyone else with the slightest knowledge of history, I thought of other might-have-been-greats, “...except for...”

Napoleon - great except for Waterloo...

Harold - great except for Hastings...

Hitler - great except for Normandy and Stalingrad...

MacArthur - great except for the Chinese intervention in the Korean War,,,

Trump - great except for the 2020 election...

Basically, all Trump’s rant does is confirm the 58 year old opinion of the Wharton professor whose class Trump was allowed to AUDIT, since he couldn’t qualify for admission to Wharton for his poor grades and low test scores: “Donald Trump was the dumbest fucking student who ever walked into my classroom.”

Many historians note that the strangest part of the contining personality cult of Robert E. Lee is the fact that few of the qualities his admirers claim to see in him he actually possessed. But then, given that most admirers of Lee are both Southern and white supremacists, that level of ignorance should be expected.

For those unfamiliar, the myth of Lee goes like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together. So, El Jefe got the myth right.

So far as his military genius is concerned, most Civil War historians consider him an accomplished tactician. However, his strategic decision to fight a conventional war against an opponent with far greater access to resources and manpower than the South could bring to bear (this is the main reason the North won), is generally considered a fatal strategic error.

However, whatever military prowess Lee may have possessed, he is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans while fighting to defend the authority of Southerners to own millions of human beings as property because of their race. Lee’s elevation into a mythological character is key to understanding the 150-year-old propaganda campaign to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederacy’s cause as noble. That ideology, known as the Lost Cause, provided the “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”

There are unwitting believers of this disinformation campaign - I, along with other schoolchildren of my age and earlier, were taught from books on American history that proclaimed tis myth as fact, even in non-southern schools; some of us only had the opportunity to learn the actual history later. This is how Trump’s belief echoes that of many of his supporters - who come from those generations of miseducation,

Then there are those whose reverence for Lee relies on replacing the actual Lee with a mythical figure who never truly existed. Praise for Lee of the sort Trump echoes has come from past historians and presidents alike, and is so divorced from Lee’s actual life it cannot even be classed as fan fiction; it is historical illiteracy.

White supremacy does not “violate Lee’s most fundamental convictions.” White supremacy was one of his most fundamental convictions. Lee’s explained his views on slavery in an 1856 letter that has since been often misquoted to give the impression Lee actually an abolitionist, since in the letter, he describes slavery as “a moral & political evil.”

However, he goes on to explain exactly what he means:

“I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy.”

His argument is that while slavery is bad for white people, it is good for black people, and - most importantly - it is better than abolition. Emancipation must wait for divine intervention.

Lee’s documented cruelty as an enslaver was not only physical punishment. He ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families, by hiring them off to other plantations, and by 1860 had broken up every family but one on his plantation, some of whom had been together since they were slaves of George Washington at Mount Vernon. Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”

Lee’s heavy hand at his Arlington plantation nearly led to a slave revolt. The enslaved had expected to be freed upon their previous master’s death, but Lee had engaged in a dubious legal interpretation of his will in order to keep them as his property until a Virginia court forced him to free them.

When two of his slaves who had escaped were recaptured, Lee either beat them himself or ordered the overseer to do so.Wesley Norris, one of the slaves who was whipped, recalled that “not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, General Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”

For those who claim the Civil War was not about slavery, there is the fact that every state that seceded mentioned slavery as the primary cause in their declarations of secession. Virginia’s declaration accused the federal government of “perverting” its powers “not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States.” Lee’s decision to accept a commission from the Confederacy and fight for the South can only be interpreted as a choice to fight for the continued existence of slavery in America, despite the fact that, for the Union, the Civil War was not at first a war for emancipation.

When Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia invaded Pennsylvania on its way to defeat at Gettysburg, free blacks were captured, enslaved, and taken to the South as property. Evidence links every infantry and cavalry unit in Lee’s army with the abduction of free black Americans, “with the activity under the supervision of senior officers.”

At the Battle of the Crater in 1864 Lee’s troops killed black Union soldiers who tried to surrender. Afterward, in a spectacle hatched by Lee’s senior corps commander A.P. Hill, the Union survivors were paraded through Petersburg to the slurs and jeers of the southern crowd. Lee never discouraged this behavior.

Historian James McPherson recounts in “Battle Cry of Freedom” (the best single-volume history of the war - I recommend it to you highly) that in October 1864, Lee proposed an exchange of prisoners with Ulysses S. Grant. “Grant agreed, on condition that blacks be exchanged ‘the same as white soldiers.’” Lee responseed, “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.” Grant refused the offer, telling Lee that “Government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers.” Despite its desperate need for soldiers, the Confederacy did not change this position until a few months before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox

After the war, Lee did counsel defeated southerners against rising up against the North. But even in this, in 1866 Grant, said that Lee was “setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized.”

Lee insisted later that the war was not about slavery, but if it was about slavery, it was only out of Christian devotion that white southerners fought to keep blacks enslaved. Lee told a New York Herald reporter, in the midst of arguing in favor of somehow “dispoing of” (his words) blacks from the South “that unless some humane course is adopted, based on wisdom and Christian principles you do a gross wrong and injustice to the whole negro race in setting them free. And it is only this consideration that has led the wisdom, intelligence and Christianity of the South to support and defend the institution up to this time.”

Lee had beaten or ordered his own slaves to be beaten for the crime of wanting to be free, he fought for the preservation of slavery, his army kidnapped free blacks at gunpoint and made them unfree, but he insist ed that all of this was only because of the great Christian love the South held for blacks. One is reminded of Frederick Douglass’s statement that "between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference."

According to correspondence collected by his family, Lee privately counseled others to hire white labor, observing “that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving.”

He wrote in another letter: “You will never prosper with blacks, and it is abhorrent to a reflecting mind to be supporting and cherishing those who are plotting and working for your injury, and all of whose sympathies and associations are antagonistic to yours. I wish them no evil in the world—on the contrary, will do them every good in my power, and know that they are misled by those to whom they have given their confidence; but our material, social, and political interests are naturally with the whites.”

Publicly, Lee told Congress that blacks lacked the intellectual capacity of whites and “could not vote intelligently,” that granting them suffrage would “excite unfriendly feelings between the two races.” explaining, “the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.” To the extent that Lee believed in reconciliation, it was between white people, and only on the precondition that black people would be denied political power and therefore the ability to shape their own fate.

As to his “work for unity” as an educator, when he was president of Washington College, students there formed their own chapter of the KKK, and were known by the local Freedmen’s Bureau to have attempted to abduct and rape black girls from the nearby black schools. In addition, there were at least two attempted lynchings by Washington students during Lee’s tenure, and “the number of accusations against Washington College boys indicates that he either punished the racial harassment more laxly than other misdemeanors, or turned a blind eye to it.” Lee was as indifferent to crimes of violence toward blacks by his students as he was when carried out by his soldiers.

The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866; there is no evidence Lee ever spoke against it. On the contrary, in his interview with the Herald that the South he said the South might be moved to violence again if peace did not proceed on its terms.

Lee is a pivotal figure in American history worthy of study, but neither the real man nor the fictionalized tragic hero of the Lost Cause are heroes due a statue in a place of honor. In 1903, when Pennsylvania was considering placing a statute to Lee at Gettysburg, one Union veteran of the battle wrote, “If you want historical accuracy as your excuse, then place upon this field a statue of Lee holding in his hand the banner under which he fought, bearing the legend: ‘We wage this war against a government conceived in liberty and dedicated to humanity.’” Sadly, in 1917 Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg.

The most fitting monument to Lee is that his Arlington plantation was taken by the federal government during the Civil War and turned into the national military cemetery for those who died in the service of the United States.

Describing Robert E. Lee as a “hero” requires one to ignore the immense suffering for which he was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield; ignoring his enthusiastic participation in the industry of enslavement; his betrayal of his country in defense of the right of white men to enslave black men and women; the dead on his battlefields; his hostility toward the rights of the freedmen; and his indifference to his students waging a campaign of terror against the newly emancipated. To admire Lee requires reducing the total of human virtue to a public sense of decorum and the ability to convey gravitas in a gray uniform.

If one wishes to laud former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves, there is really only one: James Longstreet, who is wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for the defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white supremacist paramilitaries in defense of a multi-racial democracy. In 1998, Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller statue at Gettysburg hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey.

The white supremacists who defend Lee’s statues have every reason to admire him. His devotion to white supremacy was greater than his loyalty to his country. He is the embodiment of everything they stand for. No wonder El Jefe loves him.

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