Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

After becoming a professor of military history at West Point, Seidule was touring the grounds when he came across a monument of a column surrounded by cannons, dedicated to the memory of US soldiers who died in the “War of the Rebellion.” At first, this display did little to shake Seidule’s lingering loyalties to the Confederacy. Even as the curriculum regarding the Civil War placed more emphasis on slavery and the contributions of Black soldiers, Seidule still regarded himself as a Southern, Christian gentleman who revered Robert E. Lee. Seidule left West Point for active duty and then returned for a permanent faculty position, and a few years into that assignment he noticed that memorials to Lee were everywhere on campus, more even than at Washington and Lee University. Investigating this question produced a massive shift in Seidule’s attitude regarding Lee and the Civil War.

West Point’s reputation suffered tremendously during the Civil War, especially because so many cadets and alumni opted to serve the Confederacy. Although the majority stayed loyal, there were enough defections to suggest that West Point was failing in its purpose—namely, to train America’s future military leaders. When the Civil War broke out, West Point ordered new cadets to take loyalty oaths, a tradition in military academies retained to the present day. For several years after the war, West Point refused to include Confederates in its annual register of officers and graduates. By the end of the century, the only memorial on campus commemorated not merely US soldiers, but those of the Regular Army rather than the volunteers who made up the bulk of US forces (as well as the bulk of battlefield monuments). The school’s motto of “Duty Honor Country” was introduced only in 1898, and was clearly meant as a repudiation of the Confederacy.

Upon West Point’s centennial in 1902, Congress was once again ready to fund a professional army to secure the empire taken from Spain in 1898. Some Confederates were invited to the ceremony, but mainly those who assisted the army’s occupation of the South after the war, or those who were willing to repudiate the cause they once served. Only in 1931 did West Point honor Robert E. Lee, under pressure from the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The Lee Prize goes to the top performing student in mathematics, and a portrait of Lee was placed in the dining hall featuring him in a US Army uniform from when he was superintendent of West Point. Seidule notes that this came shortly after the first Black students attended West Point in nearly 50 years, after being nominated by the first Black person elected to Congress in the 20th century. Black cadets endured terrible treatment from their peers, and not just those from the South. A Black student finally graduated in 1936, and the following year a new portrait of Lee adorned the Lee Room in the superintendent’s quarters.

A portrait of Lee in the library, this time wearing the uniform of a Confederate general, was introduced shortly after President Truman ordered the integration of the army. Seidule finds this latter case to be especially interesting. The artist who received the commission to paint Lee, Sidney Dickinson, flouted orders to paint Lee in the most flattering of lights. Instead, he depicted Lee in his moment of defeat, two weeks after surrendering to Grant, with a Black man leading a horse in the background. Seidule believes that this painting subverts the Lost Cause myth by tying Lee to slavery and showing a man who had just earned his freedom by virtue of Lee surrendering. The ceremony commemorating the painting and West Point’s sesquicentennial was replete with Lost Cause myths and lies, although they did block the UDC and Sons of the Confederacy from attending.

The centennial of the Civil War encouraged West Point to honor the martial valor of all its graduates who fought in the Civil War. Seidule also notes that the construction of Lee Barracks in 1970 came just one year after the largest ever contingent of Black cadets. As late as 2001, West Point built Reconciliation Plaza to commemorate how the bonds of West Point proved stronger than wartime divisions. Seidule again argues that this facile notion of unity applies only one to white people, and ignores the horrors of slavery and the enduring legacy of slavery, but he attributes this latest instance to an unfortunate if well-meaning effort to honor both sides, rather than backlash against specific examples of racial progress.

Seidule closes the chapter with an example of showing how much the issue of Confederate memorialization ties into the politics of the time. In 1971, then-President Nixon visited West Point and suggested a memorial exclusively for Confederate alumni. This was most likely part of Nixon’s ‘Southern strategy’ of appealing to white voters disaffected with the Democratic Party due to its recent embrace of civil rights. When news of the proposed Confederate memorial leaked, Black cadets organized and pushed back. They pointed out that Confederates violated their oath on behalf of sectional loyalties, and that a Black cadet would effectively do the same if they abandoned the army to fight with an organization such as the Black Panthers. Threatening to boycott the commemoration of any such monument, President Nixon abandoned the issue.

Following the massacre of churchgoers in Charleston, West Point debated whether to remove its memorialization of the Confederacy, but punted on the decision until the 2016 election. At the end of 2022, responding to a Defense Department directive, the academy announced plans to remove 13 memorials and rename buildings, streets, and other infrastructure.