Re-Evaluation
We have re-evaluated the “story” of the American Civil War in recent years. While Americans still recognize the “pathos” of a struggle that set brother against brother, the “new revisionist” history of the War creates a clear moral position. One side was fighting for the “right” to enslave others: the other side was fighting against it.
That was clear to those in the 1850’s before the War, and it was clear during the effusion of blood that was the War. It was only in the 1890’s, after the Union Reconstruction troops were withdrawn from the South and the now older Confederate leaders began to write their stories that the first “revision” of the history began. “It wasn’t about slavery,” they claimed, “It was about the right of states to determine their own course.” And they added that the North benefited mightily from slavery, perhaps even more than the South, so there was no moral “high ground”.
Like all good excuses, the “Lost Cause” Confederates had just enough truth on their side to sound convincing. The North certainly benefited from slavery. The textile mills of Massachusetts needed the raw material of slavery, cotton, to feed into their giant looms. Even during the War itself, Southern cotton still found it ways across the tenuous border into the North. But if it weren’t for slavery, there would have been no war. And if the South had won, slavery would have remained. All the “Lost Causes” in the world couldn’t change those facts.
Lost Cause
I too have walked the line from Seminary Ridge to “the Copse of Trees” at Gettysburg, the line of Pickett’s disastrous Charge and the “High Water Mark” of the Confederacy. Southern author William Faulkner (a wonderful writer and a “Lost Causer”) described the “dream” of every fourteen year old Southern (white) boy: to stand at the ready on Seminary Ridge, the flags unfurled, before the order, and change the awful results of that charge. It’s romantic, it’s compelling, but what Faulkner never describes is that the “dream” is one of enslaving his fellow fourteen-year old boys who were black.
So when we think about Robert E. Lee, the leading Confederate General, we need to revise our “eighth grade history class” view. We were taught that Lee, a career military officer and the rising “star” of the pre-war Army, struggled to determine whether to stand with the Nation he spent his career defending. And we eighth graders somehow justified the fact that Lee turned on his Nation to defend “Virginia”. Had Lee taken the commission offered as the leading Union General, perhaps the four years of Civil War and the 600,000 dead might have been only a fraction. But he didn’t. He stood for slavery.
Appomattox
But there still is one moment when we can look at Lee and find honor. After four long years of struggle, when Lee saw he could find no legitimate path to continue the fight, he surrendered. At Appomattox Courthouse, Lee chose to give up, rather than continue the slaughter.
He did have other options. He could have led his Army of Northern Virginia to “fight to the death”. His depleted and starving troops would have followed Lee into the rifles and the canister shot once again, until they were all just bodies lying in the April Virginia sun. Lee had plenty of officers who wanted it to end that way.
Or Lee could have taken the advice of his younger staff. They laid out a plan of guerilla warfare. He could have “dissolved” his Army, sending them up into the Blue Ridge and the Appalachians to hide, regroup, and continue the war as small groups of “terrorists”. The “cause” would have continued for years, perhaps decades or even longer. America could have become a land of perpetual fighting, like the Middle East, or the centuries in Ireland.
Legitimacy
But Lee knew the fight for a “legal” Confederate nation was over. The “peculiar institution”, slavery, which served as the foundation of the Confederacy, was done. To become a “guerilla force” would not change that irrevocable result of loss on the battlefields. So he surrendered, and ultimately ended the bloodshed. He went to Lexington, Virginia, to Washington College, and lived the remaining five years of his life as its President. His last act as a General was to allow for an actual peace.
Donald Trump has arrived at such a moment.
In all the “legitimate” ways he has lost the 2020 Presidential election. Even the states like Georgia, where the Republican Party controls all of the levers of electoral power, acknowledge that Joe Biden won the election. And in the Courts, Trump’s attorneys are being more than laughed out of room. Judges are disparaging their arguments, and seeing their “evidence” for what it is: propaganda.
Trump can find a way to accept the loss, and allow the institution of the American government to continue. Unlike Lee, Trump won’t be going to some university retirement: perhaps he will even look to run again in 2024. But he can maintain the legitimacy of the election, and keep it as a means for his own regaining power.
Ruin
Or he can follow the strategy the he has set upon now. He can delegitimize the election. Today, tens of millions of Americans really believe that the election was somehow “stolen” and the results are tainted beyond acceptability. Those millions could be like those Confederates who would go into the hills, to fight on as guerilla forces. But instead of acts of terror and attacks in the middle of the night, the Trump “guerillas” would simply deny the validity of anything a Biden government might do.
In the end, Democracy is a cooperative effort. The winners govern and the losers plot to become winners once again. But all participate in the process of governing, legitimizing the system. But Donald Trump is flirting with a path where there is no acceptance, no moving on. Republicans who depend on Trump’s support cannot be allowed any cooperation to govern. That cooperation becomes “traitorous”, and to do so means political suicide.
The Choice
We see it happening today. Even the “moderate” Republicans cannot utter the words “President-elect Biden” without risking political exile.
Our view of Robert E. Lee is less “mythical” than it was forty years ago. We see him more clearly as a man who stood for an unacceptable institution, a man who could have made a morally right choice, but didn’t. But there is still the one “honorable” act of Lee: the act of allowing the nation to move on. We have a lot lower expectations of Donald Trump. But Trump only exists because those in power around him allow him to continue by their silence.
Their legacy and our Democracy are at stake. Should those Republicans standing silent remain so, the “revision” of their actions by history will be brutal.
