So. As you might expect there is all sorts of agita over the
pending removal of the Robert. E. Lee memorial in Richmond. We are seeing the
usual tropes trotted out about Marse Robert's "honor" and
"character." My job here is not to litigate those, there is a lot of
good material out there on the Web.
I have pasted a couple of tweets from one such poster to
illustrate something I talked about earlier, using only information that
confirms our biases. The original poster, who has since locked down their
tweets, obviously finds the Lee monument beautiful and Lee a great American.
Again, there are places one can go to dispute these (this is a good start https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/)
But what was interesting is that they then trotted out a story to
demonstrate Lee's good character, the tweet pasted below. Anyway the
story goes like this: Lee encountered a wounded Union soldier on the
battlefield at Gettysburg. As a shout of defiance the soldier calls out
"Hurrah for the Union." Lee stops, gets off his horse, and approaches
the soldier. But instead of giving the soldier the death he thought was coming,
Lee says, "May you be well," and moves on.
That this was in something called "The Civil War
Treasury" set off my alarm bells, as this story has a whole "George
Washington and the Cherry Tree" feel about it.
So I did what I do in times of doubt. I Googled that shit.
Specifically, I Googled "Robert. E. Lee and the Wounded
Soldier," which led to a Reddit thread attributing this story to a Marcus
J. Wright. Who was he? A Confederate general who lived long enough to help the
War Department gather Confederate records and to write a bunch of books about
the Civil War and contribute to others.
One such book he contributed to is "Memoirs of Robert E.
Lee: his military and personal history, embracing a large amount of information
hitherto unpublished," which is in the public domain. I downloaded the PDF
and (mirabile dictu!) it was searchable. So I searched "wounded" and
on the 46th instance out of 143 in the text found myself on page 332, which you
can see below.
Oh noes! I have been pwned by the Neo-Confederate! Marse Robert
really was a kindly guy, no matter how much he liked to torture attempted
runaways!
Not. So. Fast.
I'm in the historian business and in the historian business it
is all. About. The citations. Where did this story come from? I know logically
I'm not supposed to impeach Marcus J. Wright because of his character, shown
when he fought for the Confederacy. But where. Are. The Sources?
It was then that I peeked up at the previous page. And there it
was the smoking gun:
"We cannot better end this somewhat extended chapter than by presenting the following incident, FOR WHOSE AUTHORITY WE CAN GIVE NO HIGHER AUTHENTICITY THAN THE COLUMNS OF A NEWSPAPER, yet which is so consonant with all THAT THE WRITER KNOWS of the character of General Lee that no better voucher for its complete truth could be offered (emphases added)."
So the source of this story that proves the character is,
"I heard this from some guy and take my word for it." In a book
written 20 years after the events it describes and when NONE of the principals
is available to comment. Is there any better summation of the entire argument of the Lost
Cause? "Take my word for it. It was really good."
Total time from first suspicion to debunking? About 20 minutes.
Anyway. Tear the goddamn statue down and drop it in the sea.
Then take Stuart, Jackson, Davis, and Maury down and throw THEM into the sea.
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