Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 28: Confederate icons were not popular nationally for decades after the Civil War

The Guardian reported in 2022 about history professor who had a decades-long career in the US Army, Ty Seidule.

Speaking specifically to US military facilities named for Confederate figures like Robert E. Lee, Seidule says:

“The first thing to know is that in the 19th century, most army officers saw the Confederates as traitors.

“That’s not a presentist argument. That’s what they thought. And particularly about Lee, who renounced his oath, fought against this country, killed US army soldiers and as [Union general and 18th president Ulysses S] Grant said, did so for the worst possible reason: to create a slave republic.

“So in the 19th century, they would not have done this … the first memorialisation of a Confederate at West Point is in the 1930s. So, why is that? [It’s about] segregation in America. The last West Point black graduate was 1889. The next one was in 1936. West Point reflects America. [The first memorials] were a reaction to integration.” [my emphasis] (1)

The civilian monuments to traitors who held leadership positions in the Confederacy began decades earlier. But what Seidule says applies to the civilian and military versions, when he rejects the notion that they could be seen a symbols for reconciliation among Americans:

“The problem with that is it was reconciliation among white people, at the expense of Black people.

“There had already been reconciliation. Magnanimously, the United States of America pardoned all former Confederates in 1868 … reconciliation is sort of an agreement among whites that Black people will be treated in a Jim Crow fashion. So no, it’s not a reconciliation based, I would say, on an America we want today.” [my emphasis]

More specifically it was Andrew Johnson, the first President to ever be impeached, who Abraham Lincoln chose for his running mate in 1864 as a “Union Democrat” but who was not at all friendly to serious Reconstruction in the South nor to holding high Confederate officials legally responsible for their crimes, who issued the pardons.

John Wilkes Booth had a serious effect of US history by his assassination of Lincoln.

Seidule is the author of Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (2021).

He discusses his general view in this video, on which I did a double-take because it’s from the conservative PragerU. Because most conservative Republicans today would not be thrilled with his puncturing of the Lost Cause narrative. (2)



Notes:

(1) Pengelly, Martin (2022): ‘Confederates were traitors’: Ty Seidule on West Point, race and American history. The Guardian 09/05/2022. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/05/confederates-traitors-seidule-west-point-race-history-ku-klux-klan-plaque-naming-commission> (Accessed: 2024-28-04).

(2) Was the Civil War About Slavery? PragerU YouTube channel. 08/10/2015. <https://youtu.be/pcy7qV-BGF4?si=R2qGkv3U8Y1ZGw0p> (Accessed: 2024-28-04).