A BIT OF HISTORY
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t long last the New Year has arrived. Joe Biden (D-DE) is presidentelect; COVID-19 continues its sinister spread, and Virginia no longer observes Robert E. Lee-Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson Day. LeeJackson Day was established in 1904. “It is past time that we stop honoring the Confederacy,” Virginia Governor Ralph Northam said in 2020. The times—the politics—are ‘changin.’ Last October Virginia judge W. Reilly Marchant ruled Richmond’s controversial 1890 statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee can be wholly removed—from Monument Avenue by order of the Governor. Virginia Military Institute’s 108 year-old statue of Confederate General “Stonewall” Jackson was removed last month. Jackson was nicknamed “Stonewall” after his showing in the first Battle of Bull Run. Lee-Jackson Day—celebrated coincident with Martin Luther King’s birthday—included Confederate wreath-laying ceremonies, a Civil War parade and ball. The lore is “deeply entwined in the state’s selfimage;” the related monuments “erected by propagandists pushing a Lost Cause.” In 2017 white supremacists and Neo-Nazis gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, to aggressively defend a 1924 statue of Confederate General Lee. Robert Edward Lee was born January 19, 1807, the fifth child of overspent Revolutionary War hero General Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee and his second wife Ann Hill Carter, the great granddaughter of Virginia slaveholder Robert “King” Carter. Robert E. did not live the “legendary Victorian virtue” as “celebrated in a thousand marble statues across the South.” His sense of Duty, Duty before desire did not include the South’s “terrible hardening of the heart.” Lee emancipated his father-in-law George Washington Parke Custis’ Old Town Crier
©2020 SARAH BECKER
The Lee-Jackson Debate
to authority. With characteristic self-discipline, he put the past behind him and moved forward.” Post-war Robert E. Lee “promoted political harmony. He also became president of Washington College in
Left: Appomattox Statue in the heart of Old Town Alexandria Center: The removal of the Appomattox statue. Right: Pedestal of the Appomattox statue after its removal by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, June 2020.jpg
Photo: Ser Amantio di Nicolao
slaves on December 29, 1862; approximately three months after President Lincoln’s September 23 Emancipation Proclamation was published in draft. Congress renamed Arlington’s historic Custis-Lee mansion—the Custis’ family home—Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial in 1972. The name change first discussed in 1954. The War Between the States, America’s Civil War began April 12, 1861, when dissatisfied South Carolinians fired on Fort Sumter. Virginians— initially—were reluctant to separate from the Union. The mood changed when President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to quell the “insurrection.” Union General Robert E. Lee, forever loyal to Virginia, resigned his U.S. Army commission on April 20, 1861, and followed the Commonwealth. “After four years of arduous service, marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the [Confederate] Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources,” Confederate General Robert E. Lee told his troops on
April 10, 1865. “I need not tell the survivors…that I have consented to this [surrender] from no distrust of them; but, feeling that valor and devotion could accomplish nothing [more than] loss.” Reconstruction did not proceed easily. President Andrew Johnson, a southerner and Unionist Democrat, failed to win widespread political support. By contrast “[Lee’s] unchangeable sweetness, the absence of all rancour, of all bitterness of feeling so natural to the vanquished, raised him high above the prejudices and hatreds of the day,” author Edward Lee Childe then wrote. Defeated as of his surrender, former Confederate General Robert E. Lee declined an 1869 request to help mark the positions of the troops in the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg with granite memorials. “I think it wiser moreover not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife,” he said. Nephew Fitzhugh Lee also refused. “If the nation is to continue as a whole, it is better to forget and
forgive rather than perpetuate in granite proofs,” Lee told The Charleston Daily News on August 26, 1869. He was indicted for treason on June 7, 1865; entered his Richmond home a prisoner, applied for a pardon then later absolved. “In his captivity and in his humiliation Lee’s anxieties were still for his soldiers,” Union General Adam Badeau noted in 1887. “[Lee’s] specialty was finishing up,” Alexandria, Virginia school teacher Benjamin Hallowell said of student Robert’s studies. “He imparted a finish and a neatness, as he proceeded to everything he undertook.” “When Congress ordered the drafting of new constitutions in the former Confederate states and disgruntled southerners contemplated a boycott of the system, Lee announced that it was ‘the duty of the [southern] people to accept the situation fully’ and that every man should not only ‘prepare himself to vote’ but also ‘prepare his friends white and colored, to vote and to vote rightly,’” the Virginia Museum of History & Culture wrote. “Lee’s code of conduct demanded submission
Lexington, Virginia,” the Virginia Museum of History & Culture confirmed. President Lee died on October 12, 1870, one month before The Robert E. Lee Monumental Association of New Orleans was incorporated; a decade before The New York Times described The Lost Cause Regained. The economic downturn, combined with the emotion of Lee’s death resulted in a surge of southern sentiment. In 1880—in Virginia—72.7%, eight of the eleven Congressional office holders had Confederate roots. Of the eleven Southern States 75.8%, seventy-two of the ninety-five Congressional office holders were ex-Confederates. Their “greatest” granite “hero” was deceased Confederate General Robert E. Lee. In April 1885 Alexandrian Edgar Warfield, a pharmacist and former private in the 17th Virginia Infantry, asked the R.E. Lee Camp of the United Confederate Veterans to construct a monument on behalf of the Confederate dead. In 1888 the City A BIT OF HISTORY > PAGE 10
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