Lee and the Union Soldier: Debunking Obvious Nonsense

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to is "Memoirs of Robert E. Lee: his military and personal history, embracing a large amount of information hitherto unpublished," which is in the public domain.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.