Pointless Screed Department: Robert E. Lee

I’m not sure that Ezra takes the problem of Confederate nostalgia quite seriously enough. Sure, standing against slavery and the Confederacy hardly seems like a courageous point in some quarters. But, as Ezra acknowledges, there are lots of places where Confederate sympathy remains in vogue. If you think it’s all fun and games, head over to Orcinus once in a while and check out the kinds of things people do to other people in fond memory of the Confederacy.

This are the issues that were critical to the Civil War:

Slavery

That’s it.

Economic differences? Whatever. Lots of regions of lots of countries differ economically from other regions without resorting to war. The tariff? Please. State’s rights? Sure, as long what you mean is the right of a state to legitimize the enslavement of 1/3 or more of its population.

The Confederacy was not a noble cause. It was not the defense of an agrarian, traditional way of life against encroaching industrial capitalism. Southern landholders were extremely efficient and effective capitalists, and the economic productivity of agrarian slavery was not in decline. It was not the defense of a traditional, republican manner of life. Slavery stood, and stands, in stark opposition to the better principles that animate republican, democratic life. The Confederacy was not a Lost Cause. Most fought for it because they believed that it could win and that it should win. Others, mostly poor, fought for it because roving militias impressed them into Confederate armies.

The behavior of the North toward the South was correct in every way. Indeed, far harsher measures were called for. Lincoln made no effort to interfere in “state’s rights” before the states of the deep South seceded. After the war, the political, economic, and military elite of the South was not purged, as would have been proper and appropriate, but was instead largely returned to power. Once in control, this elite made every effort to turn back whatever progress the war had achieved.

The hagiography of Confederate heroes is nothing short of sickening. In 1960, the United States Navy commissioned a Polaris missile submarine named Robert E. Lee. Consider that for a moment. In the service of a rebellion launched to defend slavery, Robert E. Lee took up arms against the legitimate, elected government of the United States. By almost all accounts, Lee was an exceptional general. Had he fulfilled his duty as an officer in the United States Army, as he was asked to do personally by President Lincoln, and as many other Southern officers did, the war might have been shortened by years. Lee’s behavior is somewhat less defensible than that of Wilhelm Keitel; nobody offered Keitel command of the French Army in World War II.

The only word that can fully capture Lee’s behavior is treason. Not Jane Fonda treason; he didn’t just give aid and comfort to the enemy. Rather, he was instrumental in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Americans. For this, he deserves to be consigned, along with the other Confederate elite, to the historical equivalent of Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell, where he can hang along with John Wilkes Booth, Pierre Laval, and Vidkun Quisling. Instead, the nation he made every effort to destroy names a submarine after him.

Destroying Confederate nostalgia, there’s a noble cause. As long as a Southerner with a Confederate flag on the back of his pickup truck can claim that someone from Massachusetts in Un-American, there will be something dreadfully wrong with this country.