General Lee’s statue: time to drive old Dixie down?

In his excellent piece on the fate of General Robert E Lee’ s statue in Richmond Virginia, Benedikt Koehler quoted William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. It is not even past.” That is especially true of the American Civil War (the Union name), or the War Between the States (the Confederate version) or “the late rebellion”, as General Grant laconically put it.

This particular living fragment of the past arrived in my life in early 1961, when the centenary of the war’s outbreak was marked by a marketing blitz of blue Yankee hats and grey Rebel hats across America. In our suburban Washington DC neighbourhood, all the children fought relentless after-school battles. I preferred the grey-clad underdogs who, I decided in my childish wisdom, were the better soldiers, natural backwoods marksmen, led by incomparable generals like Lee, Jackson and Stuart.

My parents were friends with Sam and Mickey Pendleton, a charming and hospitable Virginian couple who lived at Forest Lodge, a real antebellum mansion set in 4000 rolling acres near Charlottesville. For the next nine years our family stayed there regularly. For me it was heaven. The house had somehow escaped being burnt by the Union cavalry in the later stages of the conflict, and there was a library full of books about the war, many of them dating from the decades immediately following. There were personal memoirs with close up accounts of campaigning, and even regimental diaries that poignantly charted the attrition of Lee’s Confederate units as the war wore on.

Sam Pendleton ’s distant ancestor built the house around 1800, but his father had been forced to sell it, having lost most of his money in the crash of 1929. There was enough left to put Sam through Princeton, after which he made a fortune on Wall Street and bought back Forest Lodge. He and Mickey, a daughter of another grand Virginian family, were liberal Democrats and supporters of John F Kennedy and desegregation. Though, as Sam told us, he could not integrate his (white) farm workforce because they would refuse to accept blacks.

Part of the joy of staying at Forest Lodge was that each time, Sam, my father and I would spend a day visiting a Virginia battlefield. One year we wanted to see Appomattox Court House, where Lee had surrendered to Grant in April 1865. Sam politely declined to accompany us: “That’s one place I do not intend to visit.” It transpired that his ancestor, Brigadier General William Pendleton, had carried the white flag across to the Union lines to commence surrender negotiations. Pendleton had been in Lee’s class at West Point, before becoming an Episcopalian priest; he had an undistinguished war record, and by the time of Appomattox was an administrator on Lee’s staff.

As a 13-year-old romantic, I understood this instinctively. The key factors were family and Virginia. So far as the Civil War went, Sam’s loyalties were not to country but to state. In this he followed Robert E Lee himself. In 1861, Lincoln offered Lee the command of the Union armies defending Washington, but Lee declined because Virginia had seceded, and his highest loyalty was to his state. He was not in favour of secession but wrote to Lincoln’ s adviser Francis Blair:

“I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four millions of slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?”

Lee ’s views on slavery were complicated, if not muddled. He felt the institution was a moral evil for whites, but an acceptable condition for blacks, who were the inferior race. He expected that slavery would eventually end as part of God’s unfolding purpose, but was not susceptible of political solution. Yet he provided in his will for the manumission of all his own slaves.

Lee was a great general, though he made mistakes, especially at the pivotal battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. He was loved by his soldiers, who referred to him as “ Marse (Master) Robert ”, and always tried to drive him away if he got dangerously close to the action. After Gettysburg, his leadership enabled the South to hold on for nearly two more years, but he and the Army of Northern Virginia were ground down by his nemesis, Ulysses S Grant. At Appomattox, Grant offered Lee generous terms, allowing his men to return home on parole, with their own horses and mules. Grant’s generosity embodied Abraham Lincoln’s noble words at his second inaugural address a month earlier:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

As Lincoln ’s words presaged, Appomattox was seen as a profound moment of national reconciliation, and so it was – between white Americans, north and south. Lee lived five years in honourable retirement, and the legend of his brilliance, his courage and his courtesy grew ever more potent.

Lee Chapel, Lexington (Shutterstock)

However, for four million newly liberated black Americans the war’s end was a moment of opportunity that flowered briefly in the period of Reconstruction, before being crushed by the oppressive Jim Crow laws imposed across the south in the late 19th century and beyond. To quote again from Lincoln’s second inaugural address:

“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ “

The glaring racial inequalities and injustices that persist in the United States show that the bondsman’s 250 years of toil and the drops of blood drawn by the lash remain unrequited.

My boyhood friend Jeff Steele served as a master sergeant in the US Marines and a lieutenant in the San Diego police. He is descended from a west African brought to Virginia as a slave in the 1720s, who purchased his freedom after four years. As Jeff says, the Steeles have bowed to no man since then. But they have not been immune to racial humiliation. His mother, heavily pregnant with her first child, was caught in a snowstorm in Richmond just before Christmas 1944 and was refused shelter in a restaurant. The place was full of German prisoners of war enjoying a slap-up Christmas dinner, courtesy of the US War Department.

For black Americans, the Confederate statues that rose across the south, the flying of the Stars and Bars above courthouse and senate, and the self-indulgent celebrations of southern courtesy and courage, have infinitely delayed the justice they deserve, and which Lincoln desired.

So, though I am a sentimental old Civil War buff, I agree with the Virginia Supreme Court that it is time for Robert E Lee to stand down. There is a moving scene in the 2012 film Lincoln, where Lee emerges from Appomattox Courthouse and mounts his faithful horse Traveller. Grant steps forward, and doffs his hat, followed by all his staff officers on the porch: Lee gravely tips his hat, and rides slowly away. Let it be.

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