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

Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause, is a 2021 book by former US Army Brigadier General Ty Seidule. The book began as a speech that Seidule gave in 2017 at his alma mater, Washington and Lee University. He delivered the lecture in the Lee Chapel, situated just above Lee’s burial site. To this day, many in the US South and elsewhere regard Robert E. Lee as a hero for his role in the American Civil War (1861-1865). Lee led the principal army of 11 Southern states that wanted to secede from the US to form the Confederate States of America. Seidule’s talk called for a more critical examination of the “myth of the Lost Cause,” which remembers the Confederate cause as noble and memorializes the Confederate defeat as a tragedy. The speech provoked controversy, and Seidule decided to turn it into a book in order to give his ideas a more systematic form and to provide a personal account of his belief that it’s necessary to confront the Lost Cause myth. Combining memoir, history, and analysis, Seidule uses his personal story to illustrate the way aspects of Lost Cause mythology have infiltrated American society in both the North and South. This study guide refers to the first hardcover edition published by St. Martin’s Press (2021).

Content Warning: The source material features discussion of slavery, rape, abuse, and racist violence.

Summary

The book begins with the stories that Seidule learned as a young child about Robert E. Lee waging a noble but tragic fight to preserve the gentility of the Southern agrarian system against the merciless advance of an industrializing North. In Seidule’s childhood, even stories for young children featured Black people whose main purpose in life was to serve white people. Growing up in the aftermath of the Civil Rights era, his home city of Alexandria fought bitterly to resist Brown v. Board of Education, and when a young Seidule finally had to take a bus to attend an integrated school, his parents removed him shortly thereafter; he spent the rest of his education in a nearly all-white environment. As a teenager he lived in Monroe, Georgia and Mobile, Alabama, two cities where gruesome white supremacist murders took place long after such overt brutality had become a relative rarity in Southern life. During his time in those cities, he was completely unaware of these events, even those which occurred during his time living there. As a student at Washington and Lee, he never learned about the role of Black Americans in the history of the college, whether as students or enslaved people. Seidule’s youth offered a carefully curated view of a history filled with gallant heroes and noble struggles against federal tyranny, hiding the lingering legacies of oppression from public scrutiny. Seidule grew up with pride in an artificial history.

Seidule’s reckoning with history, and his own past, began with his commissioning as an army officer upon graduation from Washington and Lee. He took pride in an institution which, however flawed, had helped to end oppression in America and many places throughout the world. His inquiry began in earnest during his appointment to teach military history at West Point. He investigated the origins of a building on campus and learned that it was named for Robert E. Lee. He soon discovered that the Confederate monuments—things he had taken for granted his whole life—were intentional reactions to efforts of Black Americans to achieve the equality promised them in the Constitution after the Civil War. The more Seidule learned, the more he found himself questioning important aspects of his own life, from Gone with the Wind to the street names in his hometown to the army bases where he had been stationed. It was painful for him to question himself and reexamine things that he thought he knew, but ultimately he found this preferable to living with a lie. When a series of high-profile acts of racial violence seized the nation’s attention, Seidule was a fitting person to address the complex legacy of American racism, as someone who had spent his entire life imbibing it. Having acquired a public platform, and no longer required to obey his superior officers following his retirement from the army, he has made it his mission to expose the myths of the Lost Cause and break the hold that they have too long held on the American psyche.