To erase history: Didn’t the Soviets try this?

Today marks the birthday of one of the true gentlemen--and one of the superior generals--of this country's short history

To erase history: Didn’t the Soviets try this?

The old story goes that General Robert E. Lee was having difficulty finding food enough to feed the prisoners of war in his charge. As his officers discussed how to overcome the problem, one of them bitterly suggested that the Union Army had plenty of food, and perhaps they could send a letter over the lines to General Grant, asking him to send rations to feed his own soldiers. To which General Lee quietly replied: “These aren’t General Grant’s prisoners.”

Word comes from below the (state) border that a particular town you might have heard of—New Orleans—is in the process of removing a statue of Robert E. Lee in, of all things, Lee Circle.

In New Orleans, mind you. The city that was protected by Andrew Jackson in early 1815 as the British closed in. The headquarters of the Louisiana National Guard is located in Jackson Barracks even to this day. How long will it be before somebody picks up a history book and discovers that Andrew Jackson was a man of his time, too, and begins scrubbing his name from history, and New Orleans landmarks? For that matter, who’s up for changing the name of this nation’s capital?

Today marks the birthday of one of the true gentlemen—and one of the superior generals—of this country’s short history. State governments all across the region don’t celebrate the Army of Northern Virginia today, nor do they celebrate Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, or the glorious, victorious—and idiotic—attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. But they celebrate Lee. Knowing that he’s a part of this nation’s history, and needs to stay that way.

No wonder the donor who has volunteered to pay to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee in New Orleans remains anonymous. We’d be ashamed, too. Didn’t the Soviets from time to time try to erase their past, and people in it? Try as they might, they never could completely push the past down the memory hole.

Writing about General Lee once a year—on his birthday—is one way to realize anew what a powerful symbol his is, and how all of us may find in him just what we’re searching for. Which happens to symbols and men from history. See how conservatives and liberals find what they’re looking for in Martin Luther King Jr., and more power to them.

A nation can’t erase its history, pliable though history might be. For a nation without a history would be no more a nation than a human being would be human without a memory. For example, Lee.

The uses of Lee’s name and symbol and character have been varied. To the old folks at home, he might still be an icon to be remembered fondly, the centerpiece of all those Confederate Memorial Day observances, the storybook knight beyond approach, the marble man of the Southern mythology—less man than monument. It does well to note that many Southerners will remember Lee on this day, but how many can remember on which day Confederate Memorial Day falls? Or even if there is one in Arkansas any more. The Confederacy has fallen, and down the hatch with it. But somehow Lee remains above it all.

The cynics and scornful can’t resist using Lee either. As a foil. As the personification of all Southern sins and hypocrisies. The hero as an anti-hero. Call this history one of the plastic arts. We go to the past not as students but as scavengers, on the lookout for what we can find and finding just what we always expected. Even if we have to plant it there ourselves.

“History shows . . .” says the historian, who then explains what he wants history to show. But the idea that the past is something complete, something whole, something that speaks for itself? How quaint. As quaint as an officer upholding the laws of war in an age of terror. As the terrorists make their own rules, some think that we might want to twist ours—hard—in order to fight them. Until, looking deep into the eyes of terror, we see ourselves. Robert E. Lee, it should be noted, was not so flexible. These are not General Grant’s prisoners, he supposedly said. As in, these are my prisoners, and will be fed. Because that’s what my values demand. No matter what the chattering brass around me might think.

The American Civil War is often hailed as the first modern war. It saw the introduction of not only new technologies—automatic weapons, ironclad ships, submarines—but of new strategies that did away with old qualms. William Tecumseh Sherman’s total war, an innovation in 1864, became the standard for the next century. His march to the sea, destroying whatever stood in the way, also destroyed the distinction between military and civilian targets. “War is cruelty,” he told the people of Atlanta, “And you cannot refine it.” In short, war is hell. Sherman certainly made it so. Which might be one reason why nobody remembers his birthday.

What began with the burning of Atlanta would culminate a century later with the incineration of Hiroshima. Say what you will, W.T. Sherman was a modern man.

But if the American Civil War was the first modern war, it also ushered out the old formal wars fought by a certain code. Robert E. Lee’s campaigns of mobility and surprise against forces superior to his own in every material respect may have been the last in a long line going back to Saladin’s.

The most celebrated and analyzed battle of the war still remains Gettysburg, a loss for Robert E. Lee and his army. Not just two armies met there, but the past and future of war. Pickett’s charge meets massed artillery. And there was never any doubt who’d win in that match-up.

But even before the battle was begun, before his army would limp back to defeat, before the Lost Cause was lost, Robert E. Lee—already a man of the past—issued an order on entering enemy territory. His troops would act like his troops:

“The commanding general considers that no greater disgrace could befall the army, and through it our whole people, than the perpetration of the barbarous outrages upon the unarmed, and defenceless and the wanton destruction of private property that have marked the course of the enemy in our own country. . . . It must be remembered that we make war only upon armed men, and that we cannot take vengeance for the wrongs our people have suffered without lowering ourselves in the eyes of all whose abhorrence has been excited by the atrocities of our enemies, and offending against Him to whom vengeance belongeth, without whose favor and support our efforts must all prove in vain.”

And they ask why we celebrate Lee on his birthday. His victories might have been great, but his honor was greater.

John Peterson 

Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber