A Southerner says: “Good Riddance!”

One day in the mid-80’s I’d flown home for a visit with my family in Nashville. My father picked me up at the airport and as we neared the house where he and my mother were living off Granny White Pike, Dad said, “There was a lot of fighting around here.”

I looked over at him and thought, “What the heck?” And then I realized he was speaking about battles that had taken place there during the Civil War — in other words, over 120 years ago. Yet, the conflict seemed fresh in the mind of my father.

That’s what it was like growing up in the South a generation ago and, of course, for all generations right back to 1860. The Civil War was ever-present: In monuments, in the names of streets or kids (how many boys are actually named Jefferson Davis?), in books and movies (Gone with the Wind is still considered the top-grossing film of all times), in celebrations and parades, in ordinary conversation.

I learned how to ride on two Shetland ponies — one named Traveler (for Robert E. Lee’s handsome grey steed) and the other named General Hood (for a less renowned Confederate General.) On vacation, our family went to Chattanooga — our destination was the most-publicized attraction in the state: Rock City. In the days before the Interstate, SEE ROCK CITY was painted on the side or roof of nearly every barn in the state.

But once we reached Chattanooga, we couldn’t pass up another of the city’s highlights — Confederama. The Confederama (as I recall after 50 years) was the name of a diorama that surrounded us with a 360 degree view of the battle of Chickamauga. When you pushed certain buttons, you could see a battalion of soldiers in grey light up while other buttons lit up the battalions of soldiers in blue. If you were a Civil War afficionado (as my brother was), you could sort-of grasp the entire configuration of the famous battle in the mountainous area between Signal and Look Out Mountains. A battle, according to Wikipedia, that was a major Union defeat and incurred almost as many casualties as Gettysburg.

No wonder it was sensational for a 12-year-old boy, in the pre-video game era, to re-enact the battle by pushing different buttons. (Later, I learned that the corpses on Missionary Ridge were so numerous, they were left rotting there all winter. But that tidbit of information was omitted at Confederama.)

As Shelby Foote, famed Memphis historian, once said, “The Civil War was our Iliad and our Odyssey.” By that, he meant that the Civil War was the mythology that informed our very being — we imbibed it like food or drink or air. It was all pervasive. It was the atmosphere we breathed. And a lot of what we learned was a lie.

This last fact has been brought home in an abrupt and shocking fashion by a new book called Robert E. Lee and Me by Ty Seidule, a former historian at the West Point Military Academy.

Like Seidule, my husband, John, grew up with what you might call cult worship of the demi-deity Robert E. Lee. As soon as my husband received Seidule’s book, he devoured it. John had grown up in Maryland and was named for a great-great uncle who was Lee’s roommate at West Point. Over the mantlepiece in his family’s dining-room were two crossed Confederate swords. On the opposite wall hung an oil portrait of Robert E. Lee. John was raised to believe Lee was a great general and, even more important, a superb human being — intelligent, brave, kind to his soldiers and to his slaves.

John no longer believes any of that. He was first disabused of his Lee worship by reading the recent biography of Ulysses S. Grant by Ron Chernow. In it, John learned that, after the war, President Grant offered Lee a way to lead the nation out of its vindictive anger towards black people and towards reconciliation between North and South. Lee turned it down. That one incident has had tremendous repercussions (many deadly) over the decades — and it destroyed John’s admiration for this “hero” of the South.

Seidule grew up in Virginia and Georgia and his family’s adoration of Lee was even stronger. It was only after he became a historian at West Point that he grappled with the mythology behind the so-called “Lost Cause” and “The War Between the States.” He came to understand is that this mythology basically denies the true cause of the war — slavery. Seidule renames the highly romanticized plantations as “forced enslavement camps.”

Just picture Tara as a forced enslavement camp.

Seidule destroys the “happy slave” mythology that’s pervaded numerous books, statues and even animated films like Walt Disney’s “Song of the South”. The Aunt Jemima perception of slavery as an jolly, enjoyable lifestyle.

In addition, the book highlights the role of Lee and other Southern generals, educated at West Point, in breaking their oath to defend the United States. In fact, in the course of the war, Confederate generals and rebel soldiers killed more United States Army soldiers than were killed in all other US combats combined.

However Lee and the other Confederate warriors were not honored at West Point until the early 20th Century when, for political reasons, they were accepted into the canon of those honored. Even worse, are the number of US Army forts still named for Confederates — including Fort Benning, GA and Fort Bragg, N.C.

It’s obscene that during the present era when people of color make up a large share of the US armed services, that these major forts bear the names of Confederate generals who gained their celebrity fighting to maintain slavery.

I thought I didn’t really need to read Robert E. Lee and Me. After all family was Southern but we are also Jewish. Jews, in general, didn’t fare well during the Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant attempted to force a segment of the Jewish population out of Kentucky, in the midst of the war, on charges of war profiteering. Since many Jews were peddlers and shop-keepers, it’s very possible they were selling to whoever was buying.

In fact I had two great-grandfathers who served in the war on the Confederate side. I now hate to confess but that used to be a point of pride for me. It made me feel as if I was a true Southerner who had some lineage in the South. (Lineage or who you’re related to is very important in the South). I didn’t want to be accused of being a carpetbagger, a rapacious newcomer, as Jews often are. Now I recognize how repulsive my attitude was.

I’m sure my ancestors weren’t slave-owners because they never had enough money. But the great majority of people who fought for the South weren’t slave-holders. Most probably didn’t even know what they were fighting for. They only thought they did. They imagined they were fighting for the sovereignty of their land and for their state — Virginia or South Carolina or Georgia. Actually they were fighting so the wealthy families in that state who owned slaves could keep them. In other words, they could keep their wealth.

I found that Seidule’s book to be fascinating and contained a lot of history I knew nothing about. For example, General Longstreet is a well-known Confederate general. After the war, however, Longstreet, took a different tack — he embraced a Reconstructionist South — an egalitarian South where blacks could participate in government, business and society — he even led a black battalion of soldiers as a U.S. General. Not surprisingly, there are no statues of Longstreet in the South.

So what are all these Confederate General statues about and the monuments and the Shetland ponies named Traveler? They exalt a past that’s nearly or just as reprehensible as that of NAZI Germany. My father’s long passed on, but if he was still here, I’d respond to his comment: “The fighting’s long over, Dad.”

Let it go and good riddance…..##