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

Seidule decides to attend college at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, which is notable for its colleges (it also includes the Virginia Military Institute) and its monuments to the Confederacy, especially Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The university in its present form began with a donation from George Washington to a small academy, which later renamed itself Washington College in the donor’s honor. After barely surviving the Civil War, its trustees invited Robert E. Lee to become its president in order to attract students and donations. Desperate to settle his family after losing their home at Arlington, Lee served as president until his death in 1870. By all accounts he was a skilled administrator, expanding the curriculum and stabilizing both enrollment and finances. As an 18-year-old, Seidule saw Washington and Lee as the perfect place to achieve his dream of becoming a Southern gentleman.

During Seidule’s freshman orientation, the student leaders emphasized the role of Lee in shaping the culture of the college, sitting them in the hallowed Lee Chapel to teach them an Honor System which Lee purportedly authored. Lee ordered the construction of the chapel to accommodate the growing student population, and upon its construction he attended daily services to provide a moral example to students. Following his death, he was buried under the chapel, and the chapel quickly became a shrine both to Lee and the Lost Cause. It gradually shed any Christian imagery and instead framed Lee as a direct object of worship. Seidule wryly notes that even though Lee was an Episcopalian, and therefore eschewed the veneration of saintly relics, the chapel made Lee a saint and collected his relics, including his body, his office, and the nearby bones of his horse, Traveller, which for many years were on display as a recreated skeleton. The chapel’s sanctuary has a statue of “Recumbent Lee” rendering him in the style of a medieval Crusader. The statue is modeled after one for Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia, who suffered a grievous defeat against Napoleon, but by the time of Lee’s death, Prussia had revived and become the leader of a newly unified Germany and the dominant power on the European continent. The statue of Lee has his sword gripped and boots uncovered, suggesting a similar readiness to reemerge from apparent defeat and reclaim glory.

Over time, the Lee Chapel became an epicenter of Lost Cause mythmaking. In 1872, the University invited former Confederate general Jubal Early to speak on Lee’s birthday, in which he extolled Lee as the greatest commander in military history, who lost only because the North was willing to pour on its massive manpower advantage with no regard for casualties. For the centennial of Lee’s birth in 1907, the speaker was Charles Francis Adams Jr., the great-grandson of President John Adams and embodiment of the New England establishment. Despite his Northern origins, Adams championed Lee’s decision to fight for state over country, praised his military genius, celebrated his decision to surrender as the key to national healing, and condemned Reconstruction for upsetting the proper relationship between the races. Adams’ speech helped to solidify Lee as a figure of national reverence, not just in the South. When the University sought funds to renovate the chapter in the early 1960s, as the civil rights movement was reaching its climax, the Ford Motor Company donated millions and the Department of the Interior designated the chapel as a national historic landmark.

Upon further study, Seidule learned little-known facts about his school. John Chavis was the first Black man to graduate from college in America, and he would be the only Black alumni of Washington and Lee for 170 years, but during Seidule’s time as a student there was no commemoration of him at all. A wealthy donor willed the people he enslaved to the college upon his death, and many of those enslaved people were then sold elsewhere, breaking up many families in the process. Even so, the college still features numerous commemorations of the donor. Seidule regrets that he did not know a student one year behind him named Ted DeLaney, who had been a janitor at the college decades before, before enrolling as a student and later becoming a professor of history at the college and the founder of its Africana Studies program. In 2019, the same year DeLaney retired, the College refused a request to provide a diploma that did not feature Lee’s portrait, indicating that though progress has been made, the topic of Civil War memorialization remains hotly contested at the college.

Upon graduating, Seidule received his commission as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Army. He had not planned on a military career, and his family mostly discouraged him from pursuing it, but he sought a Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship to help pay for school. He swore his oath to defend the Constitution of the United States in front of Lee’s recumbent statue, surrounded by both US and Confederate flags. He later learned that the soldiers’ oath originated from the Civil War, and originally included a promise never to have supported any form of hostility to the US government. It still includes the vow to fight domestic as well as foreign enemies, a phrase which likely had the Confederacy in mind. Having begun his military career, Seidule was off to Fort Bragg, a base in North Carolina named after a Confederate general.