June 11, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Was Lee A “Traitor”?
Friends,
Were Robert E. Lee and the
Confederates “traitors” who violated their oaths to the Constitution and attempted
to destroy the American nation? Or, were they defenders of that Constitution
and of Western Christian civilization?
Over the past 158 years those
questions have been posed and answers offered countless times. For over a
century since Appomattox the majority opinion among writers and historians was
that Lee and the Confederate leadership were noble figures of a “lost cause,”
but sincerely mistaken about what they were fighting for. They were admirable
and valorous, even to be emulated, if in the end the “righteous cause” of
“national unity” was destined to triumph.
In the “the road to re-union” that
followed the conclusion of the War for Southern Independence, Southerners were permitted
their heroes and, up to a point, their history. Southern historians wrote and
published accounts of “the repressible conflict” (Avery Craven), of a war that
might have been avoided if reason and a spirit of compromise had triumphed (as
opposed to belief in what William Seward had called “the irrepressible conflict”).
We were “all Americans now,” united around one
flag. Former Confederate generals like “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, Fitzhugh Lee, Thomas
L. Rosser, and Matthew Butler served as US Army generals during the
Spanish-American War. Virginian Woodrow Wilson was elected president in 1912.
Southerners in Congress exercised a significant role in the direction of the
nation, even if the options open to them were always subsumed under the rubric
of national unity and limited by the invisible parameters of that unity. Hollywood
collaborated throughout the silent period, and up through the 1950s the South
and the Confederacy were treated generally with cinematic respect, if not
sympathy.
That post-war truce, that modus vivendi that recognized the nobility, sincerity, and
admirability of those Confederates, even if their “cause” and secession were
best interred with the past, began to break down by the sixth decade of the 20th
century. Actually, a kind of Neo-Reconstructionist perspective had never
completely been absent from the scene. Historians like Black Communist, W. E. B. de
Bois (Black Reconstruction in America,
1935), kept alive a narrative that insisted that the War was uniquely about
slavery and racism…and the oppression of black folk by a dominant white political
and economic power structure.
With the full-fledged emergence of a “New Left”
school of historians in the 1960s and the incredible success of what became
cultural Marxism, the tacit post-War settlement all but disappeared.
I remember my grad school time at the University
of Virginia in the 1970s: the old liberal narrative of reunion and unity, an
appreciation for the Confederacy and its leaders, was already under attack. Slavery—and
the increasing significance of racism, almost to the exclusion of all other
considerations—was becoming the prism by which to judge all history, not just
the Confederate odyssey and the brutal war of 1861-1865 and subsequent
Reconstruction. The texts in my “Civil War and Reconstruction” seminar included
works by Kenneth Stampp, Stanley Elkins, as well as C. Vann Woodward (The Strange History of Jim Crow), all pointing
to the direction in which we were headed. Even signs of
contradiction—historical demurrers like Time
on the Cross (1974) by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman—were eventually
either dismissed, or, more generally, ignored.
The “race and slavery” template has become
enshrined in our contemporary historiography about “the tragic years” (to use
Claude Bowers’ words). Marxist historian Eric Foner with his multiple works on
the epoch (e.g., Reconstruction:
America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 [1988], A House Divided: America in the
Age of Lincoln [1990], and The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American
Slavery [2010]) is now counted the major chronicler and interpreter of the
period. His works are standard in nearly every college history classroom. And
his minions and ideological allies now dominant academia and the historical
profession, to the practical exclusion of opposing views.
But in fascinating ways, even Foner’s perspective
is too mild for many current writers and pundits. (Foner even argued, after
the August 2017 incident in Charlottesville, that
Confederate monuments should not be removed, but instead more statues should be
installed to offer a “corrective” viewpoint.) Strikingly,
the most hysterical and unbridled attacks on the Confederacy and, in
particular, on Robert E. Lee and Confederate monuments, seem to come from those
who consciously proclaim themselves to be “conservatives,” that is, those who
are known as “neoconservatives.”
Basically, these “conservative” critics of the
Confederacy and Lee declare: “Robert E. Lee and other Confederate military
leaders who were in the US Army committed treason by violating their oaths to
defend the Constitution, and Confederate leaders led a rebellion against the
legitimately elected government of the United States.”
This accusation has become an ultimate weapon of
choice—the “ultima ratio”—for many of
today’s fierce opponents of the various monuments that honor Robert E. Lee,
Stonewall Jackson, P. G. T. Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, and other Confederate
military and political leaders, and for the belief that those monuments should
be taken down. And most especially, it is spewed forth as unassailable gospel
by many neoconservative writers, publicists, pundits, and their less
distinguished camp followers in the elites of the Republican Party.
Somehow these critics forget to mention that Lee
and the other Confederate leaders resigned their commissions in the United
States Army and from Congress prior
to enlisting in the defense of their home states and in the ranks of the
Confederate Army, or assuming political positions in the new Confederate
government. They did not violate their oaths; their states had formally left
the union, and, thus, the claims of the Federal government in Washington had
ceased to have authority over them.
Recently, we have witnessed the spectacle of Rich
Lowry, editor of the neoconservative National
Review, apparently “channeling” Robert E. Lee and declaring that if Marse
Robert were alive today he would happily join in the chorus to bring down those
monuments honoring Confederate soldiers and leaders. [http://nypost.com/2017/08/14/why-robert-e-lee-would-be-ok-with-mothballing-confederate-monuments/ ] Thus, according to Lowry, the great general would
be there demonstrating right beside the “Antifa” Marxists and Black Lives
Matter vandals.
Even more obtuse views come from Mona Charen, a
long time Neocon publicist and Never Trumper, who fears that the GOP is “being
taken over by Trumpists and Neo-Confederates”! [https://townhall.com/columnists/monacharen/2017/08/18/is-the-party-of-lincoln-now-the-party-of-lee-n2370182?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad
]
But it is from the mouths of such “conservatives”
as Andrew Bacevitch, Max Boot, and Victor Davis Hanson that the worst venom
emits. And, fascinatingly, it could just
as well have come from a member of the communist Workers’ World Party as from
Bacevitch (who writes for The American
Conservative, but voted for Obama twice), or from Boot (who was John
McCain’s foreign policy advisor during McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign), or
from Hanson (who is considered a respected conservative icon).
Just a few quotes from Bacevitch:
“My complaint
about Lee—I admit this to my everlasting shame—was not that he was a
slaveholder who in joining the Confederacy fought to preserve slavery. It was
that he had thereby engineered the killing of many thousands of American
patriots who (whatever their views on slavery and race) wished simply to
preserve the Union. At the beginning of the Civil War, Lee famously remarked
that he could not bring himself to take up arms against his home state of
Virginia. This obliged him to take up arms against the very nation that as a
serving officer he had sworn to defend? No less than Benedict Arnold, Robert E.
Lee was a traitor. This became, and remains, my firm conviction.” [http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/robert-e-lee-at-west-point/?mc_cid=68a893d52f&mc_eid=136a65c873
]
And then this from Boot:
“…what is it that we are supposed to
be grateful to the Confederates for? For seceding from the Union? For, in the
case of former U.S. Army officers such as Lee and Jackson, violating their
oaths to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all
enemies, foreign and domestic’? For triggering the most bloody conflict in
American history? For fighting to keep their fellow citizens in bondage?” [http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/18/the-difference-between-george-washington-and-robert-e-lee-trump-sedition-slavery-confederate-monuments/amp/ ]
But it is from the rabidly anti-Confederate, Victor Davis Hanson,
in his fanatical defense of William Tecumseh Sherman’s infamous “March to the
Sea,” that these passions are summarized:
“…the attack on [Southern] property
and infrastructure [by the North] was permissible, [as] the war was an
ideological one against treason and slavery…. Terror, as a weapon to be
employed in war by a democratic army, must be proportional, ideological, and
rational: proportional--Southerners, who fought to preserve men as mere
property, would have their property destroyed; ideological–-those who would
destroy property would do so as part of a larger effort of abolition that was
not merely strategic but ethical as well; and rational–-burning and looting
would not be random, nor killing gratuitous, but rather ruin was to have a
certain logic, as railways, public buildings, big plantations, all the visible
and often official infrastructure of a slave society, would be torched….” [“Sherman’s March,”
November 9, 1999, http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?p=5133 ]
Now, these individuals are well-educated, with valuable university
degrees, writers of some repute. But their hatred-laced and furious animus for Lee
and the Confederacy is flagrantly ideological, an inheritance of their own undeniable
genealogy and origins on the zealously Trotskyite Marxist Left…a legacy that
continues to characterize and color their thinking and world view.
It was Lee, Jackson, Davis, and others like them and with them who
stood foursquare for the original Constitution, for the vision of the Framers,
and, in effect, for the continuance of the inheritance of Western and Christian
civilization. Their defeat was an incalculable blow to that inheritance.
The
latter-day neoconservative historical narrative implicitly, if not explicitly,
furthers the goals of an historical Marxism that threatens to overwhelm and
displace the culture and traditions of the West with a vision that owes far more
to Leon Trotsky than to George Washington. In
essence, the neocons collaborate in that dissolution.
They may protest not, but, in reality and through their views,
they effectively do so. And, as such, they are the enemies of those who do
defend that European inheritance from those who went before us, the legacy of
Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. They must be called out and their vision denounced
for what it is: the neoconservative “Fifth Column” of the progressivist
Revolution that seeks to radically remake the world and man…and that remade
image is not one that comes from God.
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