Reviews - Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

239 reviews for:

Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

Ty Seidule

4.4 AVERAGE

martha_g's review

4.25

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

rikeuvan's review

4.5

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

themily394's review against another edition

4.0

A fascinating and enlightening read. I think it should be read in addition to other materials about the civil war, but it provides a different view I haven't heard much of before.

storyframe's review

5.0

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

daschneider's review

3.0

challenging hopeful informative medium-paced

This does what it says on the tin. The author is a career Army officer (82nd Airborne, then a history professor at West Point), and he likes the US Army a lot more than some readers (e.g.: me). That said, I liked his autobiographical approach to why the Myth of the Lost Cause is so embedded in American culture, especially but not entirely in Southern culture. I thought the double vision of Seidule's upbringing and what he learned (Lee = the best, Confederates = underdog heroes) alongside the history that wasn't getting taught (the Jim Crow laws, Civil Rights history, lives of Black citizens before after and during the Civil War). The book covers primary education, university, and the US Army, and how each remembered and now remembers Lee specifically and the Confederacy generally.

I had known the outline of how the memory of the Civil War had changed, and how the memorialisation of Lee and the Confederacy tended to be a backlash against civil rights advances, so none of this was completely new information to me. However, especially in the West Point section, the blatancy of "Oh, we're allowing a Black person in, quick name something after Robert E. Lee!" was stunning. I also liked how Seidule expanded on the contemporary response to the memorials, including from the Black community. The overall drift of the book is that there have always been many points of view on these events, and that the ones of protest deserve to be remembered too.

The final section of the book is basically a longish reassessment of Lee's career, especially his views on slavery (for it!) and his reasons for joining the Confederacy (probably because of the slavery thing). I had heard more modern takes on this, but hadn't realised that so few American Army officers actually did join the Confederacy, making Lee's sectional choice remarkable, rather than a foregone conclusion. Seidule is quite angry about all of this.

Overall, this book isn't doing anything fancy, but what it does it does well.