Foner on Lee
For my Freethinker column this month I wrote about Trump’s idiotic claim that Robert E. Lee was one of the greatest generals ever and is universally revered by all the many generals Trump talks to in the White House. Eric Foner wrote about the legend of Lee in August 2017, after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville:
[O]f course, what interests people who debate Lee today is his connection with slavery and his views about race. During his lifetime, Lee owned a small number of slaves. He considered himself a paternalistic master but could also impose severe punishments, especially on those who attempted to run away. Lee said almost nothing in public about the institution. His most extended comment, quoted by all biographers, came in a letter to his wife in 1856. Here he described slavery as an evil, but one that had more deleterious effects on whites than blacks. He felt that the “painful discipline” to which they were subjected benefited blacks by elevating them from barbarism to civilization and introducing them to Christianity.
It’s interesting that he saw slaveowning as part of “civilization” as opposed to “barbarism.”
The end of slavery would come in God’s good time, but this might take quite a while, since to God a thousand years was just a moment. Meanwhile, the greatest danger to the “liberty” of white Southerners was the “evil course” pursued by the abolitionists, who stirred up sectional hatred.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. The real injustice isn’t injustice but the people who try to end injustice.
Lee’s code of gentlemanly conduct did not seem to apply to blacks. During the Gettysburg campaign, he did nothing to stop soldiers in his army from kidnapping free black farmers for sale into slavery. In Reconstruction, Lee made it clear that he opposed political rights for the former slaves. Referring to blacks (30 percent of Virginia’s population), he told a Congressional committee that he hoped the state could be “rid of them.” Urged to condemn the Ku Klux Klan’s terrorist violence, Lee remained silent.
But he was magicked into a hero all the same.
The 1890s and early 20th century witnessed the consolidation of white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction South and widespread acceptance in the North of Southern racial attitudes. A revised view of history accompanied these developments, including the triumph of what David Blight, in his influential book “Race and Reunion” (2001), calls a “reconciliationist” memory of the Civil War. The war came to be seen as a conflict in which both sides consisted of brave men fighting for noble principles — union in the case of the North, self-determination on the part of the South. This vision was reinforced by the “cult of Lincoln and Lee,” each representing the noblest features of his society, each a figure Americans of all regions could look back on with pride…
Reconciliation excised slavery from a central role in the story, and the struggle for emancipation was now seen as a minor feature of the war. The Lost Cause, a romanticized vision of the Old South and Confederacy, gained adherents throughout the country. And who symbolized the Lost Cause more fully than Lee?
So when you hear Trump burbling about Lee, that’s the well he’s drawing from. He probably has no clue that it is, because he doesn’t read a whole lot of Eric Foner, but it remains the well whether Trump knows it or not.
In the 1920s and 1930s, a group of mostly Southern historians known as the revisionists went further, insisting that slavery was a benign institution that would have died out peacefully. A “blundering generation” of politicians had stumbled into a needless war. But the true villains, as in Lee’s 1856 letter, were the abolitionists, whose reckless agitation poisoned sectional relations. This interpretation dominated teaching throughout the country, and reached a mass audience through films like “The Birth of a Nation,” which glorified the Klan, and “Gone With the Wind,” with its romantic depiction of slavery.
Trump has probably seen “Gone With the Wind.” He probably thinks it’s a documentary.
This is about 6 words too long.
We still hear this, of course. Black people don’t want to be killed by policeman for being black? Don’t divide the country, you’ll just annoy people, be nice and wait and it’ll be fixed. Women want full rights? In due time, when it ‘just happens’. Gun control advocates. Gay rights advocates. Teacher’s unions. Immigration proponents. Pro-choice advocates (well, actually, I don’t see many people saying just give that time and it’ll happen. They mostly seem to be saying good people on both sides, and after all, it is a baby, can’t you understand how someone else feels?).
The reactionaries are never the ones causing problems, it is always the ones wanting justice and equality, wanting people not to be enslaved, not to be killed, not to be treated like property, not to be shortchanged in the societal sweepstakes. It is the rich, the white, the male who must have their feelings assuaged, not the people who are actually being harmed.
Those who say that slavery would’ve died out eventually are comfortable with the millions who would’ve continued to toil for years, to live and die in bondage for generations more until the country’s pariahood made its slave-begotten raw materials unexportable. In short, they admit that they are comfortable with millions of black people dying in bondage over years rather than hundreds of thousands of Americans of all colours dying in the orgy of violence we got.
Whether you take their premise or not, it’s clear that they view some Americans as more equal than others.
It’s hard to see how this could have been even remotely possible, given that slavery formed the basis of the southern economy and that the state militias formed nightly “slave patrols” to enforce the system through intimidation and shows of force.
By which I mean to say, that thinking people couldn’t believe that. I don’t even think Trump could believe it. He’s speaking this way for fairly clear reasons, as you point out.
Seth @2,
And even the eventual slow death of slavery was unacceptable to the South. Apologists for the Confederacy love to point out that “the North didn’t go to way to end slavery, they went to war to keep the Union together — the Emancipation Proclamation was a P.R. move!” Which just makes the CSA look worse to me: they were willing to fight a bloody war just to prevent the possibility that slavery would not be allowed to extend into the west, meaning that as new states were admitted, they would be outnumbered and eventually slavery might be abolished.
On a related note, libertarians* are fond of arguing that it would have been cheaper for the North to just buy the freedom of every slave than to bear the losses of the Civil War, and therefore… uh, I don’t know, the Union offended the Gods of Economic Efficiency or something? In any event, there’s no evidence I’m aware of that the South was receptive to any such buyout program.
*who overlap considerably with the aforementioned Confederate apologists
@ Screech Monkey
To be fair, even Lincoln considered compensated emancipation. But as you said, the South refused.
Screechy, I’ve been reading a lot of people lately who claim (without offering evidence, usually) that slavery was becoming a financial burden for the south, and would have ended very soon without the war. Uh huh.
As John Green said in his excellent Crash Course US History, though, the US didn’t have the bureaucratic or brute financial infrastructure to afford such a program, nor the political will to develop one. People don’t remember what the US was like before the war; it had much, much less power than the individual states which comprised it. It had no income taxes, no central bank, and no real creditworthiness with other nations; a fractious and often dyspeptic Congress; and it had been built on the pretense of equality and yet through the brute force of slave labour.
Ironically, it was the South’s collective intransigence, and their cohesiveness, which forced the federal government onto the path that ultimately gave it the very power that the South was afraid of. War is an excellent motivator for innovation.