National Geographic is Going to War with Robert E. Lee. Here’s why I’m with Lee.
By: Dr. Eoin Lenihan
Tags: History, Civil War, Politics, Civil Rights, Race

My father was always a well read man. Among his many interests was the American Civil War. Both he and my mother did their best to pass on that same curiosity and discipline for self-education. In the sitting room of our house in rural West of Ireland there was a homemade bookshelf filled with all of the necessary material to satisfy the pre-internet child’s curiosity: The multi-volume Tree of Knowledge Encyclopedia, The Illustrated Science and Invention Encyclopedia, The Illustrated World War II Encyclopedia and of course National Geographic. I grew up reading the same NatGeo that prompted Toto’s David Paich to write “Africa” — glossy, inspiring and beautiful. A shelf higher sat an impressive array of hardbacks that I won’t pretend to have read, just skimmed: Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives by Alan Bullock, Courlander’s Treasury of African Folklore and importantly, Douglas Freeman’s definitive biography of Robert E. Lee. Too young to tackle such a massive book, my father gave me an oral history of the man. Ken Burns’ docu-series The Civil War as well as the movies Gettysburg and much later Gods and Generals rounded out my adolescent, broad-strokes understanding of the Civil War and its heroes and villains.

That broad homebred education allowed me, a teen from the west of Ireland — also well versed in the brutalities of our own not-too-distant War of Independence and Civil War — to understand an important fact. Every generation needs to make peace with their past or run the risk of being engulfed once more in the hate that fermented violence in the first place. That generational reckoning breeds empathy and glues societies together, allowing them to move forward without severing the link to the past.

NatGeo has previously produced terrific educational content on the Civil War that has stood the test of time. It was, then, extremely personal and saddening to see them support the destruction of historical monuments in the wake of the George Floyd killing by promoting a political cause, namely to rid the nation of reminders of its Civil War past. NatGeo will have a visually stunning image of the vandalised statue of Robert E. Lee on the cover of its January print edition. NatGeo and Robert E. Lee sat in an uncomplicated union on that shelf in my parents’ sitting room for decades.

Now NatGeo would have me choose sides. So I will.

The most recent anti-monuments article by NatGeo Here’s what might replace America’s Disappearing Confederate Statues — which is the focus of this article — takes up from their July piece entitled Toppling statues is a first step toward ending Confederate myths which outright supported the destruction of Richmond’s Confederate monuments. The title of this current article suggests that the destruction of these historic monuments is a forgone conclusion. This is NatGeo playing activist, not chronicler. The article focuses solely on the attempts by Virginia Governor Ralph Northam to remove the last remaining Confederate statue — that of Robert E. Lee — from the internationally famous Monuments Avenue in Richmond Virginia, the capital of the Confederate States during the Civil War. Already fallen are monuments of Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B Stuart and Confederate president Jefferson Davis among others. In June, NatGeo remarked approvingly: “In other instances, activists have done the removing themselves, as was the case with the Jefferson Davis statue in Richmond.” However, despite NatGeo’s politically fashionable stance, each of these men could rightly lay claim to being immortalised on their plinths as a reminder of the brutality and futility of civil war, especially a civil war based on the immoral defence of slavery. They are among the finest examples of courage under fire the world has known. These were complicated men in complicated times that teach us that life is, well, complicated.

However, let’s focus on Lee.

In short, National Geographic lends support to Gov. Northam’s call for the remaining Confederate statues to make way so that “Virginia…(can)…tell the true story of our past and continue building an inclusive future.” This is an admirable goal, especially Northam’s wish to make Virginia’s African American history more visible in public spaces. However, if this telling of history is to be achieved, as Northam makes clear, at the cost of the state’s Confederate history, then it is no “real history” at all and conflict is assured. Richmond mayor Levar Stoney, a 39-year-old African-American, has bowed to pressure from local BLM and radical left groups and is now a keen supporter of removing all Confederate monuments in the city. Last summer he was responsible for the removal of four Confederate statues in the city — including that of Stonewall Jackson — and he supports Gov. Northam in calling for the removal of Lee.

It is important to emphasise that the Confederate monuments on Monuments Avenue are controversial.

The Lee statue was erected in 1890, the brainchild of Lee’s own nephew Fitzhugh Lee who had fought under his uncle in the war. Fitzhugh, then governor of Virginia, was a member of a Democratic Party increasingly intent on ensuring a sharply segregated and unequal south enforced with violence if necessary. It was he who conceived of the idea to erect the grand monument to evoke sentimentality for the antebellum south and a sense of legacy and legitimacy to the postbellum Democratic Party. In this context, it is understandable that the statue evokes feelings of hate and anger even today. In this context, the statue is easily seen as a monument to white supremacy.

Broaden that context a little and there is yet another interpretation. Robert E. Lee stated several times in private that he wanted no monument of himself erected nor did he believe monuments of any Confederate soldiers would be useful in helping in the reunification and reconstruction efforts of the nation. He thought it “wiser…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”.

While his nephew Fitzhugh Lee cynically cashed in on his revered uncle’s name to promote his political party’s goals, the General himself did not share his nephew’s views. So why punish Lee for the propaganda efforts of his relatives and the postbellum Democratic Party? This monument has stood for 130 years and perhaps a more deserving legacy to the man depicted, if not the people who commissioned the monument, would be to rescue the memory of Lee from the clutches of Lost Cause revisionists.

Unveiling of the Robert E. Lee Monument in 1890

In reconsidering the Lee statue one should ask two questions. First, does Lee deserve to be commemorated in monument form? And second, can these existing monuments provide a useful public service?

I believe that Robert E. Lee always represented America’s best hope of walking that tightrope of acknowledging the past while learning from it how to build a more perfect union.

Few men encapsulate the story of the birthing pains of a nation so completely as Lee does. Married to Mary Custis Lee, great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, wife of George Washington, Robert E. Lee’s story spans the entirety of the history of the USA. Lee’s own father, Henry Lee, was governor of Virginia and even eulogised Washington at his funeral. Henry was a hero of the Revolutionary Wars serving as a cavalry officer.

Robert, then, came from impeccable patriot stock. Virginian patriot stock.

He proved his own loyalty to his nation by distinguishing himself as a young Captain in the US — Mexico War, completing daring reconnaissance missions deep into Mexican territory as well as essential engineering works for the advancing US forces. He saw out the remaining years before the Civil War as a superintendent at West Point and was appointed full colonel. Indeed, by the time it was clear that war was inevitable, Lee was so rounded and talented a soldier that both the Union and the Confederacy desperately wished to enlist him.

In Battlecry of Freedom, James McPherson recounts that General-in-Chief of the US army Winfield Scott believed Lee to be the best officer in the entire army. Scott, a fellow Virginian, pressed Lincoln to offer Lee field command of the newly founded Union army. In a letter to his wife in 1856 Lee stated he disagreed with the institution of slavery, calling it a “moral and political evil”. However, conversely one year later he inherited 189 slaves from his father-in-law and worked them hard for the next five years before they were released by legal stipulation as part of that inheritance. Lee resisted releasing them. This of course demonstrates rank hypocrisy and is today harshly scrutinised. However in 1861 his stance was similar to those who drafted the Constitution. He thought that slavery was evil and while he was no vocal abolitionist, he believed that the ‘Peculiar Institution’ of slavery would naturally burn itself out as a matter of conscience, social and economic expediency. That must sound like a hopeless racist from today’s perspective. But one must remember that for a white man of important social standing in the Upper South in 1861, in a state famed for its slave trade to the Lower South, and in a political climate dominated by the fanatical pro-slavery rhetoric of the Democratic Party’s ‘fire-eaters’, Lee was something of a moderate. He held views that would not have been wholly out of place in the Lower North and in all but the most ardent ‘Free-Soiler Republican’ areas.

It is then, in the post-George Floyd era, fashionable to bluntly state that Lee owned slaves, therefore he fought for the Confederacy to protect the institution, therefore he and especially his statue must be consigned to the scrapheap, and any attempts to interpret his standing in the past and the present is simply continuing the Lost Cause mythology. But history, like life, is never so black and white.

After the war Lee steadfastly asserted that he did not fight to maintain the institution of slavery in the south rather he saw the primary issue as that of State’s rights. This is consistent with Lee’s statements and actions directly before the war.

In January 1861, just four months before Virginia officially seceded from the Union, Lee — the steadfast patriot — remarked to a Northern friend that “The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labour, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation if it was intended to be broken up by every member of the Union at will…it is idle to talk of secession.”

However, just months later, Virginia seceded (unofficially) on April 17th and one day later, the same day Lee heard of the secession, he received the offer of command of the Union army — unlikely were he seen as a pro-slavery fanatic by his northern peers. Had Lincoln not been so heavy-handed in inviting war at Fort Sumter, perhaps Lee would have taken up the Union charge. Once again, history shows us that men are subject to their place and time. Because of Lincoln’s handling of the Fort Sumter affair Lee told a northern friend that “I must side either with or against my section…I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children.”

Lee is arguably the most poignant example anywhere in history of a man forced to choose between the land he loved and the people he loved.

The Confederate Stars and Bars being raised inside Fort Sumter after successfully taking it from Union troops on April 15, 1861. Image: National Archives

Given the chance I would ask Gov. Northam and Mayor Stoney to reflect more; to reflect upon the decision that Lee, a flawed product of his time, was forced to make; to reflect upon the personal sacrifices he made for Virginia. I would ask them to contemplate the moral conflict he must have endured in those fateful days and I would challenge them to consider the rational conflict also.

Lee knew that serving his home State, to avoid spilling the blood of the ones he loved, would likely result in the spilling of his own blood and the blood of those he loved, just by another hand. Robert E. Lee, son of a Governor, connected by blood and soil to Virginia, was forced by conscience and circumstance to renounce the nation his great-grandfather had shed blood to establish, a nation he had served with distinction.

Only history affords us the opportunity to engage with these weighty dilemmas. And that is why Robert E. Lee deserves his place in Richmond.

This returns us to Richmond and the badly vandalised and imperilled monument to Lee. Removing the monument demonstrates a lack of empathy and a capitulation by this generation to make peace with its past. By removing it we brush historical nasties under the rug and pretend that we have solved contemporary problems. We haven’t. More cynically, by removing historical monuments we deprive future generations of their chance to make peace with their past.

The Lee monument in Richmond has only survived because it was too large for activists to tear down. Instead they defaced it and erected encampments around it throughout the summer. The stunning image used in the National Geographic article of George Floyd’s face and BLM projected onto the monument is powerful. It is also, accidentally, the perfect reimagining of the Lee statue for right now.

Because it has not been torn down that statue currently stands as a place for the genuinely — as well as the professionally — outraged to vent their anger. It has proven cathartic for people in this moment in time and images of that meeting between the past and the present have been seen around the world.

By that measure the Lee monument continues to serve an important public service and the currently humiliated Robert E. Lee continues to mark an unbroken line from the founding of the US to the present in search of a more perfect union.

Lee’s monument has outlasted the white supremacists that erected it, and, for now, the social justice zealots that would topple it. If it is torn down, we deprive future generations of their turn to reimagine it, to make peace with the past and more importantly, the ability to develop empathy for both the past and one another.

As for National Geographic, it has strayed so far from its generations-long role as a bastion of wonder in any political climate that it now revels in the desecration of the past. It has gone from chronicler to activist. National Geographic has lost its way.