Why we need Lee
He and King held high ground
The current fracas over Robert E. Lee’s birthday is yet another example of what some call “political correctness” but which should be labeled “perverse presentism.”
In either case it comes from assuming that currently held beliefs are inviolate and universal. Therefore all previously accepted but now superseded ones are so reprehensible that they should be excised altogether from our glorious present along with everyone who ever embraced them.
So why give the axe to Robert E. Lee? Because he owned slaves? If that is the reason, then ban Presidents Day because at least eight presidents, from George Washington to U. S. Grant, were slave owners. As for Lee, his biographer states, “The maintenance of slavery meant nothing to him. He felt that if he owned all the slaves in the South he would cheerfully give them up to preserve the Union.”
Lee was ready to command the United States Army— that is, until Virginia chose to secede. “Duty,” he earlier had written his son, “is the sublimest word in our language.” He held that his first duty was to Virginia.
Before we continue along this line, a word on slavery is needed. The first settlers in the Americas practiced slavery. America was built upon both Indian and African slavery. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed in Abrams v. U. S. ( 1919), “time has upset many fighting faiths.” We can recall when drinking, gambling and marijuana were illegal and immoral; divorced women were not allowed to attend church; no filling stations were open on Sunday; and hunting and fishing were illegal on that day.
Before the Civil War, Southern ministers argued that God was the author of slavery and loved to quote Paul, “servants, obey your masters.” Even as the Confederacy was going down to defeat, Washington Telegraph editor Jno. R. Eakin asserted, “we owe it to God to sustain it.” At present an estimated 20 million persons are enslaved and that figure does not count those with massive student- loan debts they can never repay.
Anti- slavery was introduced into America by the Society of Friends, once ridiculed as “Quakers.” It became part of the Enlightenment that also gave us the separation of church and state. Today in Arkansas other dirty words include “progressivism,” “science” and “liberal.” The state Capitol may get a monument to some biblical commandments, but missing will be the moral obligation to be intelligent.
For those who look for the good and not isolated instances of bad, there is a great case to be made for “Marse” Robert. With defeat inevitable he did the honorable thing, a formal surrender. He opposed having that totally dishonorable thing— a guerrilla war. During Reconstruction, Lee turned his attention both to educating Southern youth and to national reconciliation: “All should unite in honest efforts to obliterate the effects of the war, and to restore the blessings of peace” with the result that we “will be advanced in science, in virtue and in religion.”
Lee did little to encourage the glorification of The Lost Cause; he never said, like some recent Arkansas legislators, that Lincoln was a tyrant and John Wilkes Booth a hero, or that slavery was some positive blessing. And in this he was not alone.
It well to remember that our own Civil War general, Patrick Ronayne Cleburne, went to his untimely death because he believed that African Americans were Southerners too and would fight for their country. Contrast that with Alabama’s Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, who celebrated the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act by calling it “a good day for the South.”
Whose South did he mean? Certainly it was not that of Rev. Martin Luther King.
We do not write to denigrate the celebration of King’s birthday, but a few caveats are in order. Most people think Jackie Robinson integrated baseball. Wrong: Moses Fleetwood Walker did this in the 1880s, and he was not alone. But what happened? A Republican Supreme Court gutted the civil rights acts. The 15th Amendment that supposedly gave blacks the right to vote was undone by poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses and now new restrictions.
Rev. King popularized Universalist minister Theodore Parker’s arc of the moral universe theme, but historical progress can easily be undone. Ask the Sioux who fell at the Battle of Wounded Knee, ask the Jews of Eastern Europe, or ask any of the victims from Africa or the Near East if they see an arc anywhere.
Yet the ideals are still worth recalling in hope that someday we may find in the better angels of our nature a world with malice toward none and with charity for all.
Lee and King alike held this high ground; so should we.