From Wikipedia
Like most Southern white boys of a certain age, I grew up with the conviction that Robert E. Lee was the paragon of virtues admirable in a man. He was the cadet who finished second in his class at West Point with no demerits. He was personally valorous, wealthy, handsome, Christian, the husband of George Washington’s adopted grandson’s daughter, Mary Custis Lee. He was the brilliant general of the Civil War who fought insurmountable odds to a standstill. He had a horse named Traveller, which is pretty cool. Personally opposed to slavery, he fought not for its preservation but for his homeland. The removal of Confederate statues throughout the South, and particularly in New Orleans, was a bit of a come to Jesus moment for me. As a boy I would have sought out that statue and admired it. As an adult I would have certainly paused for it, and brought reverence to the pause.
Library of Congress
Louisianans began raising money for the statue shortly after Lee’s death in 1870, the second year of Grant’s presidency and the heart of Radical Reconstruction. It was erected in 1884, seven years after the end of Reconstruction. It is a peculiar statue, with Lee not mounted but standing, arms crossed, atop a 60-foot column. It is a statue of a type, a victory column, not dissimilar from the statue of Lord Nelson in Trafalger Square. He is a commanding figure, overseeing the battle raging below.
Lee’s father, Lighthorse Harry Lee, was one of the Heroes of the American Revolution and the ninth Governor of Virginia. He was also one of the scoundrels of his age. He married wealthy, squandered the wealth, and served a year in debtor’s prison. He was a fraud who abandoned his family and absconded to the West Indies. Young Robert seems to have reacted to the disgrace of Harry by being uncommonly virtuous.
Portrait of Lighthorse Harry Lee, 1785, Charles Willson Peale, Bayou Bend Collection, Museum of Fine Arts Houston
Was Lee the great general of the Civil War? No. He was certainly brilliant, but Grant conceived and executed the plan that defeated the South. Grant was the better general.
Was Lee opposed to slavery? Yes and no. Lee’s wife, my fifth half-cousin only five times removed, was an abolitionist, as was her father, George Washington Custis, but like most Southern abolitionists of the age they were back-to-Africa abolitionists who owned slaves. They could not imagine that whites and blacks could live together on equal terms. Lee was tasked with freeing the slaves owned by his father-in-law at Custis’s death in 1857, and did so before the war, but he delayed their manumission until the last moment. He famously oversaw the beating of two escaped slaves. He seems to have disliked slavery because he disliked the burden of the oversight of slaves. He thought the institution was harmful to whites, but he did not accept the slaves’ equality.
Lee probably prevented the deterioration of the South into guerrilla warfare after the surrender at Appomattox. He was tired, old, in ill-health, impoverished, and burdened with the dead. He himself would be dead five years later. He faced possible execution for treason, and maybe that was the course that should have been followed.
Was Lee a virtuous man? In many ways I still think so. At the least he was the ideal soldier, but like many other things Grant got it right about Lee: “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” Whatever the virtues of Lee, there is no forgiving the cause.
NOLA.com / The Times-Picayune, Michael DeMocker
Should the Lee statue have been removed? In his speech about the removal, New Orleans’ Mayor Mitch Landrieu recognized that the argument for retaining the statues was a reverence for history, but concluded we could not re-write the reverence for the Lost Cause that erected the statues. That reverence is precisely the reason the statue should go, but for darker and more personal reasons I have my regrets about its removal. Once African slaves were brought into Jamestown in 1619, the Civil War was inevitable, and someone would be the South’s general. Without Lee it could have been like Jefferson Davis a man of few admirable qualities. Isolated as his moral failure is in a man otherwise so generally good, you can’t argue about what cause of the War was wrong, about states rights or other nonsense, and Lee becomes not a virtuous hero but a tragic hero. He becomes our Othello murdering Desdemona not out of misplaced jealousy, but misplaced loyalty. We should all face Lee and try to understand how any of us, even the best of us, can embrace the worst of causes.
Library of Congress