Ty Seidule's bona fides as a Son of the Southern Secession are without question: a childhood spent in Alexandria, VA, and Monroe, GA. where his high school was a private, white-flight academy; a college degree from Washington and Lee U. in Lexington, VA, the Mecca of the Confederacy (both R. E. Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson are buried there); a father with a college degree from "the University of the South" in Sewanee, TN. Author Seidule self-identified with the Old South to the extent that he chose to go to college at W&L to be educated as a southern gentleman.
His career path led him into the U.S. Army (via ROTC) and eventually to the faculty of West Point, where he recently retired as a brigadier general and professor emeritus of history. He is co-editor of The West Point History of the Civil War and other similar West Point histories (Warfare, American Revolution, World War II). The Civil War course is available to the public free via iTunes.
The present book describes the way in which his upbringing collided with his profession. The surprise to this reader is that it took so long, and yet that is one of the compelling aspects of the book.
From the outset it is clear where Seidule now stands: "[W]hite southern myths created my identity. The problem is that the myths I learned were just flat-out, fundamentally wrong. And not just wrong in a moral sense, as if that weren't significant enough, but wrong factually, whether through deception, denial, or willful ignorance. The myths and lies I learned promoted a from of racial hierarchy and white supremacy." (p. 7) As for R. E. Lee, a reckoning with whom is the proving ground of the book, here is Seidule's conclusion from the introduction (p. 9): "As a retired U. S. Army officer and as a historian, I consider the issue simple: My former hero, Robert E. Lee, committed treason to preserve slavery."
How was Seidule flipped? The example of his conversion serves as testimony to the power of Lost Cause mythology to lull the White mind into hypnotized acceptance of its cardinal tenets: that the U.S. Civil War was "about" states' rights, and that R. E. Lee was an exemplar of martial virtue and noble self-sacrifice.
By his own testimony Seidule, himself a historian, never looked behind the screen (as it were) until relatively late in his career, in 2004, when after deployments to the Mojave Desert, Italy, the Balkans, and Fort Knox, he was given a permanent faculty position at West Point. His new U.S. Army house "was on Lee Road in Lee Housing Area by Lee Gate." Then, a couple of years later, he describes his epiphany, which came to him while he was walking across campus:
As I strode past Eisenhower and Pershing Barracks, past Grant Hall, I stopped, staring at a sign that said "Lee Barracks." Then I looked east about twenty yards at a new memorial built while I was gone called Reconciliation Plaza. It featured three-foot-high relief monuments of Lee and Grant. I stood in front of the Lee statue for more than a minute. Finally, after too many years, I had my "aha!" moment. I understood the question but not the answer. I started running around campus looking for every monument, every memorial, to Lee and finding them everywhere. West PoInt might have more monuments to Lee than my alma mater, Washington and Lee University. How did this happen? I asked, but no one knew or cared. As a historian, I knew how to solve this problem. I went to the archives, and there I spent the next several years trying to understand when and why West Point honored Lee. And that process changed me. The history changed me. The archives changed me. The facts changed me.
What Seidule learned was what any number of historians are trying to tell us these days: the purpose of monuments is to glorify, not to reveal. Insofar as they blind us to a complex reality, they hide history, most often for political reasons.
This is especially true of Confederate monuments. It is a commonplace among their defenders to say that removing them is "destroying history" when the fact is that their very reason for existence is to destroy history for political ends. The monuments themselves are of no great antiquity and cannot claim value on those grounds -- they are less "antique" than my grandmother's Pontiac Tempest. Then, when someone starts looking into the circumstances of their creation, one finds the "history" behind them to be nothing more than the fervent desire to maintain the power structures of a racist society.
This, Seidule says, is the opposite of destroying history. In fact, it provides more of it, and this is what he sets out to do, providing example after example with West Point as his history lab. The USMA -- with its transition from postwar aversion to all things Confederate to its latter-day, less-than-virtuous acceptance of the energetic lobbying (and $$$) of the United Daughters of the Confederacy -- turns out to be a surprisingly accurate microcosm of America writ large.
The starkest and clearest template of the how and why of Confederate memorialization is revealed by the example of one of the few times the military academy was awakened from the spell of White Brotherhood. It was the early 70s, when then-president Richard Nixon badly needed to shore up his new Southern Strategy against the electoral college threat of George Wallace. Nixon wanted a big, Confederate statue in a prominent place, and what the commander-in-chief wanted, the commander-in-chief got. Usually. In this case the military academy superintendent -- then in the middle of an effort to increase the number of Black cadets -- decided to run the idea past the senior ranking Black cadet at the time. The senior cadet, Percy Squire, mobilized an organized response of his fellow Black cadets that took the form of a list of grievances against the academy -- which included that they should not be made to honor USMA graduates who had violated their oath -- and threatened to leave formation if ordered to march in any dedication ceremony for such a statue. The superintendent informed the White House that the proposed Confederate monument would, as Seidule writes, "hurt minority recruiting efforts and cause a publicity nightmare. The White House dropped the issue immediately."
The Black cadets' clincher -- that violation of the oath is perpetually disqualifying -- then becomes the keystone of the entire book, as Seidule brings it to bear on R. E. Lee himself and blows apart the argument that "Lee went with his state because that's what people did" was an acceptable response to a revolutionary situation. Unlike "people," Lee was a colonel in the regular U.S. Army. Counting Lee, there were eight Virginians who were colonels in the regular U.S. Army at the time the South seceded. Writes Seidule, "Only one colonel resigned to fight against the United States. Robert E. Lee." By placing the oath front and center, as had the Black cadets, and by examining its hold on brother Southern officers, Seidule concludes that Lee was "an outlier" as well as a traitor.
It is to be regretted that Seidule's argument will fall on deaf ears. Already on Goodreads a brief review from one reader sputters the "Lee went with his state" argument that Seidule just got through destroying. Look away, Dixieland. You always did.
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