MORE THAN A FEW monuments to the Confederate States of America fell in
the wake of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police on May 25. From
Richmond, Virginia, to Birmingham, Alabama, protestors vandalized,
toppled, and otherwise destroyed the obelisks and metal soldiers
commemorating a traitorous army whose attempted secession from the
United States caused massive bloodletting.
Yet since Floyd’s death, officials from the Deep South to even Delaware
and Arizona have voted or decided to protect 28 Confederate monuments.
“We just want to preserve history is all we want to do,”said Bill
Elliott
<https://www.npr.org/2020/10/06/919193176/confederate-statues-come-down-around-u-s-but-not-everywhere>of
the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “The Confederacy doesn’t mean that
slaves were part of it. That’s just a period of time is all it is.”
Therein lies a main myth of the “Lost Cause” — that the Confederacy
wasn’t/really/about slavery — that Ty Seidule brilliantly and brutally
deconstructs in his eminently readable/Robert E. Lee and Me: A
Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause/. Seidule, who
spent over 30 years in the US Army and taught for many years at West
Point (and is now at Hamilton College, my alma mater), is not only an
excellent historian, but a native Southerner and former believer of
these myths. The book benefits from both his professional and personal
experiences, as he offers not only a history of Lee but an autobiography
of sorts, weaving together these narratives to offer a powerful,
necessary and timely rebuke of the Confederacy and those who still
venerate it.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/stars-bars-and-memoirs/
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