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Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause
Top of the pile
95
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
94/100Critics
96/100Scholars
Author:
Ty Seidule
Publisher:
St. Martin's Press
Date:
January 26, 2021
Ty Seidule grew up revering Robert E. Lee. From his southern childhood to his service in the U.S. Army, every part of his life reinforced the Lost Cause myth: that Lee was the greatest man who ever lived, and that the Confederates were underdogs who lost the Civil War with honor. Now, as a retired brigadier general and Professor Emeritus of History at West Point, his view has radically changed. From a soldier, a scholar, and a southerner, Ty Seidule believes that American history demands a reckoning. In a unique blend of history and reflection, Seidule deconstructs the truth about the Confederacy.
What The Reviewers Say
Therein lies a main myth of the 'Lost Cause' — that the Confederacy wasn’t really about slavery — that Ty Seidule brilliantly and brutally deconstructs in his eminently readable Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause. Seidule, who spent over 30 years in the US Army and taught for many years at West Point (and is now at Hamilton College, my alma mater), is not only an excellent historian, but a native Southerner and former believer of these myths. The book benefits from both his professional and personal experiences, as he offers not only a history of Lee but an autobiography of sorts, weaving together these narratives to offer a powerful, necessary and timely rebuke of the Confederacy and those who still venerate it.
When debate about the property seizure reached the U.S. Senate, Charles Sumner, who led that body’s anti-slavery forces, railed against the slaveholding Confederate general, saying: 'I hand him over to the avenging pen of history.' That pen has now been wielded to dazzling effect by Ty Seidule in Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause. Few others could write this book with such sterling credibility. Only a man of the South, a Virginian, and a soldier with a Ph.D. in history could so persuasively mount the case against a national hero, and label him a traitor.
[Seidule's] new book, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause, offers hope that those who attempt to set the record straight about racism in the United States will indeed be listened to and believed.
... in Robert E. Lee and Me the author examines the power that the “Lost Cause” myth had over him when he was young and how he came to realize its fiction.
