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242 reviews for:
Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause
Ty Seidule
4.4 AVERAGE
242 reviews for:
Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause
Ty Seidule
4.4 AVERAGE
(3.5/5) The author applies personal narrative to common myths about the “Lost Cause” to demonstrate how resistance to social change is hidden in plain sight through symbols, names, and stories. The author uses well known counters to the arguments that the Civil War was about states rights and not slavery, that General Lee was the greatest general in history who only surrendered to save the men in his army, and that confederate monuments were anything but coded messages to freed enslaved people and their descendants. At times the book is a uncomfortable read because the author goes into detail on how post Civil War politics sought to continue oppress and how those structures are visible today, but so engrained in society that there is resistance to change(!). I thought about my home state and home city where Robert Moses intentionally designed the parkways to/from NYC to prevent minorities from traveling to Long Island. It doesn’t have to be enslavement or illegal to be oppressive. The upshot to this the author notes is that the subtext of the monuments coming down is that groups who have had small political voices are being heard and visible change is occurring.
I’ve always found it baffling that we have monuments to Confederate generals, but I think this book could have offered a theory on how to memorialize both Northern and Southern enlisted casualties while respecting the history of why the Civil War was fought. I don’t have a clever take on how to do this, but it would have been a nice addition to the book because I believe we need to understand the human toll of civil war based on bad politics.
I’ve always found it baffling that we have monuments to Confederate generals, but I think this book could have offered a theory on how to memorialize both Northern and Southern enlisted casualties while respecting the history of why the Civil War was fought. I don’t have a clever take on how to do this, but it would have been a nice addition to the book because I believe we need to understand the human toll of civil war based on bad politics.
This book is so important because it directly refutes the idea circulating around some conservative circles that white children shouldn't be taught the truth about slavery and our country's history because it will make them "feel bad." Here you have a white, Christian, self-proclaimed "southern gentleman" career military man who once idolized Lee, experience a reckoning with the lies he was taught as a child and in school about the lost cause and who Lee really was.
Americans are not "cotton candy." We defeated Nazi Germany! We went to the moon! We can handle feeling uncomfortable. It won't kill us. If this guy can do it, any white American can do it, especially those of us with southern roots.
A couple things that were brand-new to me in this book: (1) the story of Samuel Tucker, an African American lawyer in Virginia who started civil rights protests in the 1930s, well ahead of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. (2) The government spends millions of dollars every year to maintain confederate monuments, graves, etc. I have an idea to cut government spending--stop maintaining all confederate stuff, asap.
Listened to the audiobook version read by the author, who was fantastic.
Americans are not "cotton candy." We defeated Nazi Germany! We went to the moon! We can handle feeling uncomfortable. It won't kill us. If this guy can do it, any white American can do it, especially those of us with southern roots.
A couple things that were brand-new to me in this book: (1) the story of Samuel Tucker, an African American lawyer in Virginia who started civil rights protests in the 1930s, well ahead of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. (2) The government spends millions of dollars every year to maintain confederate monuments, graves, etc. I have an idea to cut government spending--stop maintaining all confederate stuff, asap.
Listened to the audiobook version read by the author, who was fantastic.
I'm the descendant of slaveholders, of men who fought and died for the Confederacy in the Civil War. There's no question that I've always known that slavery is wrong but, deep in my heart, there was this little space where I felt honor for men who died for their convictions, and - I'm sorry to say - I enjoyed being able to say that my family looked, just a bit, like they belonged in Gone With the Wind.
My ignorance is hard to admit, and I've spent many, many years reconciling my love of family with my sadness that they lived their lives in such an abhorrent way, profiting from the labor of enslaved people while never seeing how wrong it was. This book gave me a bit of space to look deep, to wonder why I identify so strongly with my southern ancestors, certainly more than I do as a Californian, despite having been born there. And, as I thought about it, I realized that I, too, a well-educated white woman, had fallen, just a bit, for the myth of the Lost Cause and for what looked to me to be sadness in the eyes of Robert E. Lee. Ugh.
Ty Seidule grew up surrounded by the Lost Cause myth and the much-lauded heroism of Robert E. Lee. Then, one day, he stopped blindly believing and started doing the work. He learned, to his shame and dismay, that the culture in which he was raised was blinding him to the reality of Lee, of the Civil War, and of racism. His research blew holes in his belief system, including that the very best one could aspire to was to be a "southern Christian gentleman," much like Lee himself.
In Robert E. Lee and Me, he lays it bare. Lee was a traitor to the United States and fought to uphold chattel slavery in the south. There's more, but that's the core of the book: a solid takedown of Lee as a hero. Because "heroic" shouldn't be used to describe Lee as a Confederate general.
As for me, my feelings are still complicated, and that brings me a bit of shame. But I don't own the past, nor do I own the choices my ancestors made. I live here and now, and I do my best to be an ally at all times. Oh! And part of my allyship will be teaching my kids that the southern cause was nothing but slavery and treason. Because it was.
My ignorance is hard to admit, and I've spent many, many years reconciling my love of family with my sadness that they lived their lives in such an abhorrent way, profiting from the labor of enslaved people while never seeing how wrong it was. This book gave me a bit of space to look deep, to wonder why I identify so strongly with my southern ancestors, certainly more than I do as a Californian, despite having been born there. And, as I thought about it, I realized that I, too, a well-educated white woman, had fallen, just a bit, for the myth of the Lost Cause and for what looked to me to be sadness in the eyes of Robert E. Lee. Ugh.
Ty Seidule grew up surrounded by the Lost Cause myth and the much-lauded heroism of Robert E. Lee. Then, one day, he stopped blindly believing and started doing the work. He learned, to his shame and dismay, that the culture in which he was raised was blinding him to the reality of Lee, of the Civil War, and of racism. His research blew holes in his belief system, including that the very best one could aspire to was to be a "southern Christian gentleman," much like Lee himself.
In Robert E. Lee and Me, he lays it bare. Lee was a traitor to the United States and fought to uphold chattel slavery in the south. There's more, but that's the core of the book: a solid takedown of Lee as a hero. Because "heroic" shouldn't be used to describe Lee as a Confederate general.
As for me, my feelings are still complicated, and that brings me a bit of shame. But I don't own the past, nor do I own the choices my ancestors made. I live here and now, and I do my best to be an ally at all times. Oh! And part of my allyship will be teaching my kids that the southern cause was nothing but slavery and treason. Because it was.
As a decidedly non southern gentleman, this was a great lesson in how the other half lives. Or… ANother 15% or so? Anyway it was fascinating and I really appreciated it.
informative
reflective
Chapters were incredibly long and it bogged at points but the message of analyzing your heroes through a contemporary antiracist lens as a history lover is important.
A must read.
This is a fantastic thought provoking book. Ty Seidule’s research of the romanticism of Lee and the revisionist history surrounding the Civil War helps to understand how the lies spread and why people believe them and encourage all who know better to do better.
History is uncomfortable, and accepting that gives the opportunity for learning and growing.
This is a fantastic thought provoking book. Ty Seidule’s research of the romanticism of Lee and the revisionist history surrounding the Civil War helps to understand how the lies spread and why people believe them and encourage all who know better to do better.
History is uncomfortable, and accepting that gives the opportunity for learning and growing.
The best aspect of this book is that, as I read, it sparked a lot of internal thinking about what I was reading – some in agreement and some with skepticism. Indeed, this book was certainly more thought provoking than most history books I’ve read. That’s probably because the current state of race relations remains mostly broken (as exhibited by nearly weekly headlines and news reports).
I expected this book to be about one man’s journey from southern-raised obliviousness to eventual realization. But, when this book was written, the author had already made his conceptual journey. And perhaps, as a history professor, that is why he mostly wrote the book from the aspect of a journey completed rather than as a journey in progress. I was hoping for a more personal story, but the book was written more from an “I didn’t think about it then but I know about it now” perspective. So it was the Epilogue that turned out to be the most personal chapter in the book.
The book occasionally lapsed into an overly preachy tone for a few pages – not surprising given the injustice imbued into the whole institution was slavery. Such outbursts were fairly short and not too frequent. But they detracted a bit from the book’s more evidence-based and morality-based exposure of past racial suppression.
I liked that the author tried to show how use of vocabulary can modify perceptions. History talks about slaves having to work on a plantation. “Plantation” may evoke images of rural southern charm. So he calls them “enslavement prison farms” (with a life sentence, I would add). That more realistically phrased description conjures no such charming images.
The author says the cause for the Civil War was slavery, period. The South likes to say it was to defend States Rights. The author argues: what was States Rights except the right to enslave others (because of their skin pigmentation)? I suspect that, among the leadership of the Confederacy, that was exactly the case because the leaders were probably the rich and powerful – and it would be the rich and powerful who owned the majority of the slaves. But I suspect most of the Confederate soldiers (who, like the Union soldiers, dies by the tens of thousands) didn’t own slaves but instead were simply defending their homeland from Yankee invaders. So for the common southern soldier, the war may have simply been perceived as States Rights.
Bottom line: Thought provoking, but more impersonal than I expected.
I expected this book to be about one man’s journey from southern-raised obliviousness to eventual realization. But, when this book was written, the author had already made his conceptual journey. And perhaps, as a history professor, that is why he mostly wrote the book from the aspect of a journey completed rather than as a journey in progress. I was hoping for a more personal story, but the book was written more from an “I didn’t think about it then but I know about it now” perspective. So it was the Epilogue that turned out to be the most personal chapter in the book.
The book occasionally lapsed into an overly preachy tone for a few pages – not surprising given the injustice imbued into the whole institution was slavery. Such outbursts were fairly short and not too frequent. But they detracted a bit from the book’s more evidence-based and morality-based exposure of past racial suppression.
I liked that the author tried to show how use of vocabulary can modify perceptions. History talks about slaves having to work on a plantation. “Plantation” may evoke images of rural southern charm. So he calls them “enslavement prison farms” (with a life sentence, I would add). That more realistically phrased description conjures no such charming images.
The author says the cause for the Civil War was slavery, period. The South likes to say it was to defend States Rights. The author argues: what was States Rights except the right to enslave others (because of their skin pigmentation)? I suspect that, among the leadership of the Confederacy, that was exactly the case because the leaders were probably the rich and powerful – and it would be the rich and powerful who owned the majority of the slaves. But I suspect most of the Confederate soldiers (who, like the Union soldiers, dies by the tens of thousands) didn’t own slaves but instead were simply defending their homeland from Yankee invaders. So for the common southern soldier, the war may have simply been perceived as States Rights.
Bottom line: Thought provoking, but more impersonal than I expected.
A product of the myth of the Lost Cause and the Southern gentleman, Seidule destroys the myths that have been perpetrated for centuries and unmasks Lee for the traitor that he was and the war as a means to maintain slavery and not about states' rights. Compelling read