Spencer Finley

Politics Editor

sjf5814@psu.edu

Monday, January 17, 2022, was Martin Luther King Jr. Day for most of the United States, but in the states of Alabama and Mississippi, the 17th marked another state holiday celebrated alongside Martin Luther King Day- Robert E. Lee’s Birthday. That these two men are celebrated on the same day is appalling; they could not have been more diametrically opposed figures. King was a patriotic American, a pacifist, and spent his life fighting for racial equality. Lee was a treasonous slaveholder whose greatest claim to fame was commanding the losing army in a war fought to preserve the institution of slavery. Robert E. Lee is not only not worthy of sharing a holiday with the inimitably great Dr. King, but he is not worthy of being commemorated with his own holiday. 

It has often been said by supporters of Lee that he was an almost saintlike figure. They have said that he was a staunch opponent of slavery on moral grounds, and that he was one of the greatest generals of all time; they have claimed that his biggest mistake was made because he could not bear to lift his sword against his home state of Virginia, and that he was repentant for his mistake so did his best to heal the divided United States after the war. Not much could be further from the truth. 

Lee was a slaveholder himself through his wife, and while it is true that he objected to slavery on moral grounds, it is not the kind of moral ground that one would be proud to occupy; in an 1856 letter to his wife, Lee says of slavery that “I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, and while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race and I hope will prepare and lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known and ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.” In this quote, Lee perpetuates the view that slavery was somehow worse for white people and that the superiority of white culture and civilization made black people better off as subhuman slaves in “civilization” than as free people in that uncivilized, godless wilderness of Africa. He further demonstrates his belief in white supremacy by saying that it is essentially the duty of whites to enslave black people against their will in order to teach them how to be civilized, which implies a belief in the inherent superiority of the white race; after all, this assumes that white people knew what was best for black people, and that whites should therefore be allowed to subjugate black people to their will.

Further, Lee’s supposed opposition to slavery never found its way to the frontlines of the Civil War; according to Ron Chernow’s biography of Ulysses Grant, when Lee attempted to arrange a prisoner exchange in October of 1864, Grant asked Lee if he would exchange black soldiers on an equal basis as white soldiers; Lee’s response was that people “belonging to our Citizens are not Considered Subjects of exchange,” meaning that he would free black prisoners in exchange for white prisoners at all, and cited the fact that they were fugitive slaves as justification. In response, Grant ceased participation in prisoner exchanges, and as a result Lee’s army was deprived of some much-needed manpower until less than three months before the end of the war. Additionally, according to The Atlantic, when Lee’s army invaded Pennsylvania in 1863, his army began taking free black people back to the South with them as slaves; Lee would have known about this happening, and did nothing to stop or condemn the practice. 

When Virginia seceded from the Union in 1860, they, like every Southern state, named slavery as the cause for their separation; in its Secession Ordinance, the State of Virginia says that “The people of Virginia… declared that the powers granted under the… Constitution, were derived from the people of the United States, and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression; and the Federal Government… perverted said powers, not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slaveholding States.” The use of the term “slaveholding States” is key in understanding what exactly it was the State of Virginia was fighting for- they are not talking about federal incursions on the rights of all states, but the rights of slaveholding states, meaning that there is one key issue where these states have been “injured” and “oppressed”- on the issue of slavery. This is the cause that Robert E. Lee fought so hard to defend. 

Further, Lee was not a great general. While the argument might be made that he was a solid tactician, he lacked a certain necessary strategic view. This is why he was beaten by Ulysses Grant- it is not because Grant had a greater number of troops or more equipment, it was that Grant was a more effective commander; after all, the other Union generals that Lee had faced during the war had those same advantages. Grant was simply a superior general who possessed the kind of grand strategic vision necessary to win a war; in fact, the strategy of total war that Grant pioneered remained in use by the U.S. Army through the Second World War. 

That Lee tried to assist in healing the nation after the Civil War is also an utter falsehood. Confederates attempting to expiate themselves did exist, and several other Confederate generals attempted to atone for the fact that they had fought for the wrong side; General James Longstreet, for example, endorsed Reconstruction and its moves towards racial equality, and went so far as to lead federal troops against white terrorists in 1873 and 1874 to ensure the safety and freedom of black people in Louisiana. Lee, however, did no such things, and in fact acted to oppose Reconstruction and efforts to move towards racial equality. Indeed, Ulysses Grant himself stated that he was exacerbating tensions through his silence on racial violence, because that meant that he lent it his tacit approval; according to The Atlantic, Lee, in his time at president of Washington College, allowed white students to set up their own chapter of the Ku Klux Klan and did little, if anything, to punish students for committing acts of racial terrorism. Lee also signed on to a manifesto authored by former Union Army general William Rosecrans in support of New York Governor Horatio Seymour’s anti-Reconstruction presidential campaign, stating that the Union army ought to vacate the South because “The change in the relations of the two races has brought no change in our feeling towards them. They still constitute the important part of our laboring population. Without their labor, the lands of the South would be comparatively unproductive… Self-interest, even if there were no higher motive, would therefore prompt the whites of the South to extend to the negroes care and protection,” and said that black voters should be disenfranchised because “At present the negroes have neither the intelligence nor other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.” Does this sound recalcitrant or egalitarian? Robert E Lee was a bigot who believed fully in the cause he fought for and made no efforts to heal America’s divisions in the aftermath of the war. 

Why, then, does this man share a holiday with one of America’s most celebrated heroes and civil rights activists in multiple Southern states? The answer to this question is, of course, racism. In the period immediately following Reconstruction, most Southern states made Lee’s birthday a state holiday. It is not a coincidence that in this same period, many Southern states began implementing Jim Crow laws. However, following the passage of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1986, most of the states with that holiday moved it, and in recent years some have done away with it entirely, including Lee’s home state of Virginia. However, Mississippi and Alabama have done neither, despite the fact that Robert E Lee was a violent slaveholding bigot and one of the most grossly overrated generals in military history. These states ought to do away with the holiday of Robert E Lee’s Birthday altogether, and any state that still celebrates him in any way should as well.