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signing up. For more from The Country, have a look at our most current issue. Travel With The Country Be the very first to find out about Nation Journeys locations, and check out the world with kindred spirits. Sign up for our Red wine Club today. The first time I walked inside Lee Chapel at Washington
and Lee University, I noticed an overpowering, musty odor before I identified the larger-than-life mass of marble in the sanctuary that illustrates a prone Confederate General Robert E. Lee in uniform, as if
asleep on the battleground. Ad Policy function load_article_ads ()
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; Symbolism can
leave a long-lasting stench. For over a century, the bones of the slave-owning Lee household have been kept in a crypt in the chapel’s cellar. Since of them and other antiques of the Confederacy housed there, the building reeks of the ruthlessness of slavery, of elitism and racism, and of the lies of the Lost Cause misconception that persists in honoring Lee, a guy who acted dishonorably throughout his life.
Lee’s image as a kind servant master, honorable but doomed warrior, and advocate of reconciliation between North and South after the Civil War is a prime example of the power of revisionist history– and an efficient PR machine.Perhaps as pernicious
is the other story of Lee, the fantastic teacher. It’s a misconception that has actually been perpetuated because 1870 by my company, Washington and Lee University, which bears duty for the miseducation of thousands of trainees through its deification of a man who betrayed his country and fought to keep millions of black people oppressed. Now, as people all over the world rise up to demonstration against
institutional bigotry, it is time for Washington and Lee University to begin to apologize for its function in pitching an incorrect narrative. It is time for the board of trustees to drop Lee from the university’s name. A little independent school in Lexington in southwestern Virginia, W&L claims
it can trace its roots to 1749 and credits its survival to George Washington’s timely donation in 1796 of shares of stock in the James River Canal Co. that would be worth millions today. To reveal their gratitude, trustees relabelled the school after Washington.It defies reasoning, 150 years after Lee’s death, for W&L to give him credit for making the university the first-rate liberal arts organization it is today. He doesn’t deserve it. The countless students, faculty, and personnel who came after him do. They consist of brave boys and ladies of color who typically found themselves alone, underestimated, and ridiculed as they sought their educations on an overwhelmingly white school. Current Issue< a href=" https://www.thenation.com/issue/june-29-july-6-2020-issue/" class= "no-target-blank" >< img src=" https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/cover0629.jpg "alt=" "> View our existing problem< div class=" magazine_text" id=" magazine_text_354332" >< div class=" cta magazine_button" id=" magazine_button_354332" >
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Lee is undeserving of acknowledgment in the university's name because he was a racist and a traitor. He broke up families of slaves, selling them off, in infraction of the dreams of their initial owners. And he is unworthy of respect as a college president because he looked the other way when his students were implicated of bothering female teachers in a Freedmen's Bureau school and taking advantage of young black ladies in town.
< aside class=" right hidden-on-mobile most-popular-plus-ad" >< div class=" most-popular hover_b_remove thenation-single-article-most-popular "> In an interview with the New York Herald after the Civil War, Lee stated he thought black individuals need to be "gotten rid of." He told Congress the black male was inferior and could not be informed. "I do not believe that he is as capable of acquiring understanding as the white male is," Lee testified.
For years, W&L had actually credited Lee with developing the school's fabled student-run honor system. He did not. A commission on the university's history debunked that depend on 2018. If Lee had actually created an honor system, he would've violated it throughout his testament prior to the Joint Committee on Reconstruction in Congress on February 17, 1866, less than a year into his term as college president. Lawmakers would like to know whether he and other Southerners supported reconciliation with the North. Lee's answers were disingenuous, as he "pleaded near overall lack of knowledge of political conditions and regional argument," historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor wrote in Checking out the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Personal Letters.
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" Lee's performance was a masterpiece of reticence," she composed. "in personal he penned political treatises that pulsate with regulated rage" as he went over with his buddies his resentment of the powers the nationwide government put in over Southern states.
The legislators likewise pushed Lee about whether he took an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy at the start of the war. "I do not recollect having done so; but it is possible that, when I was commissioned, I did," he affirmed. "I do not recollect whether it was required. If it was needed, I took it; or, if it had been needed, I would have taken it; however I do not recollect whether it was or not." Here was a man who hardly missed ending up initially in his class at the US Military College at West Point. His "I don't recall" defense rings as hollow then as it does today when major public figures utilize it to wiggle out of legal jams.
In the months after his surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court Home on April 9, 1865, Lee did not understand whether he would be charged with treason. According to Pryor, Lee worried when a judge in Norfolk urged an indictment that June. Lee interested Grant, a fellow West Point graduate, to reiterate the terms of his surrender and the accompanying amnesty that spared his life. The military college's "long gray line" of graduates and cadets had shielded Lee from a shooting team in Appomattox-- and did so once again.
Lee got the job as president of Washington College after a trustee overheard one of the general's children complain at a celebration in Richmond that her father needed work. In September, Lee mounted his horse, Visitor, and headed to Lexington, where he found a college heavily in financial obligation and having a hard time. It is real that Lee oversaw repair work, raised cash, hired trainees and injected the college with a practical streak of education by highlighting chemistry, engineering and mining. He even is credited with spearheading an effort to educate printers to progress reporters.
Pryor's extensive research study of letters composed by Lee and others exposed that much of the college's students were Confederate veterans who revered the basic. She also found that Lee had a "intense and violent temper, prone to severe expression." He was hard to please. He never said sorry when incorrect. One trainee remembered hiding behind a structure's column when he saw Lee pass, according to Pryor's book. Lee even beat up his old horse in a fit of rage, Pryor wrote.
But the most damning account of Lee the college president i s John M. McClure's essay, "The Freedmen's Bureau School of Lexington versus 'General Lee's Boys.'" In 1865, members of the town's black neighborhood had pooled their money to lease space for usage as a school. "Within a week of the school's opening, more than 3 hundred trainees-- ranging in age from very kids to grandparents in their sixties-- almost overwhelmed" the school's instructors with their enthusiasm for education, wrote McClure, who is presently director of research and publications at the Virginia Historic Society.
The white townspeople reacted by taunting black children as they strolled to school, threatening black workers for seeking education, and charging black clients higher costs in local shops.
Washington College trainees signed up with forces with cadets from the nearby Virginia Military Institute to bother the black trainees and their teachers. "The university student often threw stones at the school's windows and loudly sang 'rebel songs' during impromptu night 'parades,'" according to McClure's essay.
" Educators were called 'Yankee bitches' so frequently that the insult 'hardly impress [ed] them after the very first few months," McClure wrote. "Male frequently stood in the ladies's course as they strolled house from school in the night, forcing the instructors to push past them. On several events the trainees scrambled the women and made 'repulsive ideas.'".
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