May 3, 2021
MEMORANDUM
TO: Andrew Roth, PhD. roth@jeserie.org
CC: Ferki Ferati , ED.D. ferati@jeserie.org
Ben Speggen, M.A. speggen@jeserie.org
Bill Steger, Erie CWRT bill.steger1137@gmail.com
RE: A Response to Andrew Roth’s article: “Robert E. Lee—Traitor?”
https://www.jeserie.org/uploads/Book%20Notes%20--%20Robert%20E%20Rinderle.pdf
I always find myself looking forward to the articles written by Jefferson Society Scholar-in-Residence, Dr. Andrew Roth. His eloquent prose, depth of knowledge, and wide array of interests and expertise make for not only interesting reading, but generally leave the reader more informed about the subject under his examination. Unfortunately, this was not the case with his recent opinion entitled “Robert E. Lee – Traitor?”—a praiseworthy review of Ty Seidule’s book, Robert E. Lee and Me. Seidule, a former history professor at West Point who was an undergraduate student of Washington and Lee University, visited that campus some years ago to urge the removal of Lee’s name from the school. The university has been in turmoil ever since. Like Seidule, Dr. Roth fully embraces the “woke culture” of today’s campus. I found it a bit surprising that in his review of Seidule’s book, Dr. Roth had no desire to present a balanced view on the contributions of Lee—a man whom countless American presidents and world leaders have held to be worthy of respect and emulation. Amazingly, Dr. Roth—a former college president—could not find a single word of praise for Lee. He chose instead to link the Confederate general to the solitary individual who—among the hundreds of thousands of persons who descended upon the nation’s capital on January 6th –dared profane Congress for a few hours by carrying a Confederate flag within its sacred halls. Roth deliberately chose not to mention the fact that former WWII Supreme Commander and president Dwight Eisenhower chose to defend his hanging of Lee’s portrait in Abraham Lincoln’s office just down the street for eight long years—an act which I’m sure he thinks was equally profane.
Perhaps it’s Dr. Roth’s long-time association with post-secondary ‘cancel culture’ institutions of higher learning that leads him to lecture, instead of fully educate, his readers about the now mostly forgotten life of Lee. Although Dr. Roth continually reminded his readers that Lee “renounced his oath and fought a war against his country,” there wasn’t much explanation why Lee was held in such high esteem by all Americans on both sides of the Civil War for generations. This was primarily due to the last five years of Lee’s life—a subject that both Seidule and Roth gloss over.
None of us should ever be cast in the position of Robert E. Lee—that of having to choose to wage war against his own family, neighbors, and state against the country he already served for decades and for whom he had already risked his life. Dr. Roth conveniently omits the fact that Lee was given the opportunity to command armies for either side and he takes the position of Seidule that Lee really resigned from the army in order to defend and perpetuate slavery. He makes it a point to portray Lee as an unprincipled man who broke his oath and thus deserves the epithet of ‘traitor.’ He writes, “For those who say Lee had no choice but to serve Virginia, Seidule points out that of the eight West Point graduates with Virginia ties, only one fought against the United States. That one was Lee.”
Lee the only Virginia West Point graduate to do so? Erie County Civil War Roundtable members probably raised their eyebrows at this statement. First, Generals Joseph E. Johnston, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Jeb Stuart, George Pickett, James Kemper, Jubal Early, George Washington Custis Lee, and Fitzhugh Lee—all Virginians—graduated from West Point and fought for the Confederacy. (This doesn’t count Lewis Armistead, who was famously expelled after breaking a plate over Jubal Early’s head, and others who didn’t rise to the rank of general.) Another mistake was Dr. Roth’s comment that the Confederate flag known as the “Stars and Bars” was carried into the capitol building on January 6 by that lone transgressor. A minor point, perhaps, but it was the battle flag for Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, not the official Confederate banner known as the “Stars and Bars” that media outlets across the nation flashed repeatedly to viewing audiences that day.
Dr. Roth wonders why one of the barracks at West Point is named after Lee when all the others are named for generals who served the United States military in combat—a distinction Lee never attained. The reader is left to wonder, along with Professor Seidule who taught there, why a West Point building would still bear his name. Roth neglects to inform the reader that Lee had many distinctions while serving in the U.S. Army. He graduated second in his class without a single demerit. Winfield Scott, commander in the Mexican War said of his service: “Success in the Mexican War was largely due to Robert E. Lee’s skill, valor, and undaunted energy.” Scott considered Lee the best soldier in the army and offered him command of all Union forces in 1861. Lee also served as the Superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy from 1852-1855. To not name a barracks after Robert E. Lee would be surprising.
Dr. Roth—along with Ty Seidule—also wonders “why are we honoring people who sought to destroy the United States of America and the ideals for which it stands?” They both seem to forget Lee’s stated words in his letter of resignation from the Army that except in the defense of his own state he was forever laying down his sword. Rather than break his oath, Lee and countless other Southerners resigned. Moreover, secession was still thought of as constitutional by many scholars in Lee’s day—another fact omitted by Seidule and Roth. The nation had several times before toyed with the idea of secession—once with the demands of the New England Confederation and again during the Nullification Crisis. Although Lee personally opposed secession as he did slavery, it was Lincoln’s call for Virginia to furnish troops to invade the South and the threat of Northern invasion that finally forced Lee and Virginia into officially joining the Confederacy. Dr. Roth conveniently omits all this as well as the fact Lee was no longer under his oath to protect the United States from invasion. Rather, the threat to Lee was the United States.
Dr. Roth, like Seidule and so many adherents of Critical Race Theory today, would have us believe that “racism is the virus in the American dirt, infecting everything and everyone.” He is greatly offended by Lee—who worked to “destroy the United States.” I’ll assume his liberal credentials never permitted him to inform his readers of the seventy-plus odd occasions that race-baiter Al Sharpton visited the White House to see then president Barack Obama. [When Rudy Giuliani spoke out about this and was attacked with four Pinocchio’s from the Washington Post for being reckless with the charge, even the Post had to print a correction and admit Giuliani was right.] Nor will we probably find any criticism from Dr. Roth of president Obama for proudly posing with—then covering up—his cozy portrait with the well-known racist and anti-Semite, Louis Farrakhan. Did the former college president object to the many times President Obama had meetings with Jihadist-linked individuals at the White House? Today, persons in the know within the nation’s Beltway confirm Barack’s influence within the Biden administration is a primary reason our nation is once again moving away from our strongest ally in the middle east and cozying up again with Iran. With such reasoning, should Roth’s and Seidule’s criticism of Lee be extended to our former president?
Dr. Roth further describes Ty Seidule as being ‘vaguely aware’ of Virginia’s racist past and the South’s racial lynching record. What he and so many other liberals today omit, however, is mention that over one-fourth of those lynched in the South were white. These were mostly white Republicans who defended Negro rights during the time when Democrats reinstated white Democratic Party rule in the South. Although the U.S. Senate apologized in 2005 for not enacting the anti-lynching legislation 100 years earlier, the Democratic Party has yet to do so. It was a Republican Congressman, Leonidas Dyer, who first introduced anti-lynching legislation in 1918. It was a Republican president, Warren Harding, who first spoke in favor of the bill. In 1920 the Republican Party Platform endorsed an anti-lynching bill—something FDR openly opposed, despite Eleanor’s being in favor of it. Through these decades, Southern Democrats used the filibuster to kill all attempts to make lynching a federal crime. It wasn’t as needed that the Senate apologize for slavery as it was that Democrats apologize. Perhaps we can look forward to seeing Dr. Roth using his personal influence with the Democratic Party to now correct this historical omission. Personally, I think it’s not such a bad idea to have today’s Democratic Party apologize for both its racial lynching of Blacks as well as its political lynching of whites.
Still another egregious error of Dr. Roth lies in his belief that any criticism of Robert E. Lee and Me must naturally come from the “nethermost regions of the internet” or that it might reside in one of Tucker Carlson’s “replacement rants.” (Interestingly, Dr. Roth is silent as to his own personal theory why our current president has refused to enforce current immigration law or why two separate Latin American presidents blame Biden—not Trump—for the current border crisis.) According to Dr. Roth, anyone attacking Seidule must have the “nerve to overtly defend racism.” Really? How about two other fellow Washington and Lee University students who—like Ty Seidule—now hold doctorates in the history profession? In their short YOUTUBE video, “Defending Lee and Rebutting Seidule,” professors Al Eckes and Neely Young attack Seidule’s book on many different fronts. They confront Seidule’s claim that Lee committed treason as “nonsense.” Dr. Young states, “When offered command of the Union army, he [Lee] declined saying, ‘I look upon secession as anarchy. If I own the 4 million of slaves of the South, I would sacrifice them all to the Union, but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?’ ” Dr. Eckes continues, “On a number of occasions before the war, Lee described it as a moral evil. There are numerous statements on the record for Lee that he did not resign from the army to perpetuate slavery, but instead to defend his native state.”
The two historians argue that Seidule’s claims “are not proven by the historical record. . . . In every case where it was demonstrated that [Washington College] students acted badly, Lee reacted swiftly and appropriately either through suspension, expulsion or allowing a student to withdraw. He also cooperated fully with local and federal authorities and encouraged them to do their job. According to David Cox in his book, The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee, “his influence helped dissipate one lynch mob aimed at a black man and another aimed at a white. Lee specifically condemned bad behavior and on several occasions forbade students from participating in demonstrations or acts of violence.”
According to Young and Eckes, Seidule “largely ignores or minimizes Lee’s efforts to promote national reconciliation and better education after becoming president of Washington College. These were the primary reasons that so many leaders, north and south, honored Robert E Lee—individuals as different as General Grant and Booker T. Washington praised lee for his contributions to peace and national reconciliation.” When Congress ordered the southern states to submit new constitutions to Congress, Lee announced it was “the duty of the southern people to accept the situation fully.” When other Confederate leaders either talked of or actually did move abroad, Lee urged them to remain in their native states and work toward reconciliation. Among the thousands who wrote to Lee asking for his advice after the war was an embittered Confederate widow. He replied, “Abandon your animosities and make your sons Americans.” This is seen in countless letters from Lee in the period of time 1865-1870.
In defending Lee, the two professors cite the historical record to refute Seidule’s claims. To conclude, they argue Seidule is just as wrong as the “Lost Cause” historians who attempted to disguise the role of slavery as a cause of the Civil War. The new historians like Seidule incorrectly argue that everything was a result of slavery. They denigrate the economic differences between the sections, the Constitutional questions over secession, and sectional arguments over a strict v loose interpretation of the powers of Congress. Their belief that the underlying framework of 10th Amendment and that state’s rights played no role in secession is as wrong as saying that slavery was the only cause of war. Seidule—and professor Roth--operate in the narrow tunnel of ‘presentism.’ Eckes concludes: “It seems to me that much of Seidule’s narrative is based upon a hasty reading of several authors, especially Elizabeth Pryor’s book [Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Personal Papers]. . . . This book does not display the hand of an experienced Civil War era researcher. In attacking Lee’s reputation, Seidule embraces the woke history of racial justice as the central theme in American history. . . . Thus, he does not successfully attack the real reasons for honoring President Lee in 1870—his contributions to national reconciliation and education in the South.”
Professors Eckes and Neely are correct to point out that Seidule almost totally ignores the last five years of Lee’s life. What’s even less well known is the fact that Lee’s example has served our nation at times even after his death in 1870. For example, when LBJ urged Congress to approve the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he reminded Southerners of the legacy and personal example of Robert E. Lee. He remarked to his fellow southerners, “If we are to heal our history and make this nation whole…opportunity must know no color line. Robert E Lee…a great leader of the South—and I assume no modern-day leader would question him or challenge him—Robert E. Lee counseled us well when he told us to cast off our animosities and raise our sons to be Americans.”
When the nation was terribly divided during years of conflict in Vietnam, it turned to Lee again. When Lee’s lost Oath of Allegiance to the United States—dated after the war in 1866—was discovered in the National Archives in the last years of the Vietnam War, a national movement to posthumously restore his citizenship took our nation by storm. A bill was quickly passed by both Houses of Congress (nearly unanimously) and was eagerly signed into law by President Gerald Ford. Not long afterward President Carter pardoned and restored civil rights to an estimated 400,000 Vietnam War draft dodgers in a similar spirit of “national reconciliation.”
Once again it appears, Lee’s personal life story closely mirrors our own. Today, America is almost as divided as it was 160 years ago when a tragic Civil War destroyed half the nation and took an estimated 750,000 lives. Robert E. Lee’s personal efforts to reconcile the division in our nation at that time won him the praise of countless U.S. Presidents and world leaders and he continually serves as a future example to us all. Lee’s Christian faith guided all his actions; his desire to mend fences and not tear them down, find workable compromises, forgive his enemies, not harbor resentments from the past—all this and more serve as sound examples for Americans today.
This past year saw countless monuments to America’s heroes desecrated and destroyed on college campuses across the north—just as mobs were simultaneously destroying memorials to Confederate soldiers throughout the South. College cancel culture saw monuments to Lincoln, Grant, Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt, Wm McKinley, and countless others—including abolitionists—attacked and destroyed. Given Dr. Roth’s and Ty Seidule’s call to remove Lee’s name from barracks and schools, perhaps the City of Erie should revisit and remove the name of Anthony Wayne from the street, park, and school that bear his name. After all, it could be argued that our own local celebrity was even guilty of prospering under slavery than Robert E. Lee.
Jack Bovee
Erie, PA
Email: jsbovee@aol.com
