What's the Big Deal About Robert E. Lee?

Great Debates
181

I don’t completely disagree with you, but there was a great deal more going on than merely stealing candlesticks. While diaries and journals and letters have been published for quite some time now, allowing the material to speak for itself, there are only a handful of scholars who are digging deeper into the narratives, going beyond that and trying to find records that would supply more “hard evidence” as you say. I did name published work in my post.

I am not making an argument that these feelings among the women was the sole factor in Lost Cause Mythology, but just wanted to bring up that it is just a piece of the puzzle that often goes over looked. These were real people and places with a myriad of real feelings, and just to dismiss it all as White Supremacy, to me doesn’t wash out clean. There’s more to it than that.

And don’t underestimate family stories handed down, either. Not all of that is false. A daughter who grew up with a mother and grandmother who were suffering from crippling PTSD is bound to have some strong feelings about what caused it.

And I did say that most of the romanticized statues of the “Generals on Horses” type did indeed come later, but the emotional groundwork for that, I truly believe came from the 30 years or so right after the war. There were women and children who died from slow starvation over those years. Reconstruction and many multiple indignities all built up a mountain of resentment. And people didn’t exactly go see a therapist in those days, you just lived with it.

I don’t think I can type whole passages out of obscure books, and you wouldn’t want to read it anyway, but there are many layers to this to think about.

To me, it makes sense they would romanticize people like Robert E. Lee, however misguided their sentiments might have been. Who am I to say? It was a hostile world they were living in, and that causes you to cling to whatever protection you can find.

182

I would like to see evidence that Sherman’s soldiers behaved in any way not typical for armies at that time (including the Confederate Army when on Union soil).

183

I think the true reason is that no one wanted to see themselves as criminals who based their economy on the misery and death caused by human trafficking. Instead, they romanticized the South and made heroes out of their leaders and pretended that they were good guys with a really great culture that no one in the evil industrialized North could possibly understand much less appreciate. They virtually romanticized their racist slave state, and a goodly number still do to this day.

184

Well, it was never claimed otherwise. The bizarre claim was the Sherman was in favor of it. I’ve never heard that one before.

185

Well considering people didn’t speak in the same explicit terms in those days as they do now, and considering that the women were put in positions to have to report the assaults to the assaulters, it is indeed hard to pin down. You are not going to find specifically anything where he said “Go rape the Ladies, Men!” But he did set up an atmosphere where it could happen without consequences.

And as I said, I do seriously hope you are not, in this age of “Me Too” going to say it doesn’t count unless a penis was inserted in some orifice.

There are many ways to traumatize, and if you think they all behaved themselves as perfect Little Lord Fauntleroy Gentlemen, I would have to say you are deluding yourselves.

I mentioned the book by Kim Murphy, “I Had Rather Die” which I loaned out and never got back, I have got to replace my copy of that…I will have to get back to you with quotes from that one, as she does have more official records collected, but also Lisa Tendrich Frank’s The Civilain War specifically outlines it and makes a good argument that elite white women were targets of violation in multiple ways. The aim was to humiliate them.

On page 48: “On September 8, 1864, Sherman ordered the eviction of all civilians from Atlanta. The General insisted that families had no place in the Union command post that Atlanta had become. In addition, he declared that he refused to feed, clothe, shelter or otherwise support the feminine population, thus turning them into refugees.
Sherman’s Special Field Orders 67, as it was officially known, generated protests from Confederates inside and outside Atlanta. It violated the rules of war as understood by many observers, Confederate and otherwise. Sherman proclaimed “in war we have a perfect right to produce results in our own way, and should not scruple too much at the means, provided they are effectual.” The mayor of Atlanta complained to Sherman about such harsh treatment of Southern women and their families, but Sherman was not moved by their protests. He asserted that “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.” He was unmoved by their pleas for sympathy. White women’s active role in supporting Confederate soldiers, validated the Union’s treatment of them as enemies. In Georgia, Sherman was not willing to leave women outside of the boundaries of warfare, and he used gender ideas to undermine female enemies rather than protect them.”

I used this passage to show that an Army operating under these notions, and fanning out in a 60 mile wide path, is going to interpret these orders as they see fit. And you seriously think nobody, not one, violated anybody? Once they got out in the rural areas it was a free for all.

There is a letter from a Union soldier named James Leath who writes home that “If they all starve to death, I will not be surprised and neither will I care.” Yes, he sounds charming. I am sure he didn’t anything unapproved into anybody.

From page 58 the author does not name this solder but quotes him as saying “we gleefully destroyed all we could not eat, stole their niggers, burned their cotton and gins, spilled their sorghum, and raised Hell generally as you know only an Army turned loose can do.”

These kinds of quotes go an and on. Deliberate cruelty is certainly documented, how far it goes is open to interpretation. Do you seriously think Union solders would write home about sexual violence? And to wave it away as never happening is to live in denial.

The letters of women document all kids of cruelty, and do the narratives of slaves in Georgia. I have a book “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks” with WPA narratives in it, and one former slave said, “them soldiers came up in their pretty blue coats, and then they proceeded to take everything off the place, all the food, the horses and wagons” and she talk about how they were very scary and frightened her tremendously. The Army seems to have left many people, black and white with nothing and no way to do anything about it except suck it up and deal.

The wife and daughter of a minister in Liberty County Georgia wrote that they were visited multiple times in late 1864 by Sherman’s Army, and neither the white hairs of the mother or the pregnancy of the daughter protected them from “wanton, animalistic cruelty” and being “violated in the worst possible way”. And to add insult to injury they also stole the only remaining well chain, leaving them without the ability to draw water. Women were not going to write to each other that they got raped. They would cloak it these kinds of terms, as such things were too unseemly to speak of.

What is one to make of all this? I could type more exerpts, mention more books, but you will interpret it in your own way. But you have to take human nature into account here. I think all this created a bevy of indignant women for generations, and that they did contribute to the legendary status of the Southern Gentleman because that is how they coped and that is what they wanted to believe. It doesn’t make them horrible people, it just makes them humans who lived in a certain time and place and who did the best they could within their social system and rules.

I am not arguing against anybody’s current ideas, just trying to add something else.

I don’t have time at the moment, but I could also quote a plethora of letters and diaries that shows many a Southern Lady was eager for slavery to end, for a variety of reasons.

186

You are arguing against a straw man. No one has suggested rapes didn’t happen, because of course they did. Your claim is that Sherman encouraged them, a claim you haven’t yet supported.

If I were to say Robert E. Lee supported and encouraged rape I am sure people would ask me for evidence of that. Confederate soldiers committing rapes isn’t good enough; that always happens in war. I’d have to show evidence Lee actually encouraged it.

187

It is not so much that he encouraged it, as he set up the line of thinking in his Army, by his own words and the issuing of Field Order 67, that white Southern women deserved no special treatment or protection.

This left the door wide open for some soldiers to take it as far as they pleased.

There exist many accounts of the delight the Union troops took in their cruelty as well, and that ranges all the way from breaking up glassware and busting windows to pulling sick people out of houses so they could burn it down.

This is the kind of stuff that sticks with people for generations, and what I can recall being told as a young child myself by older people, that Northerners will never understand because they never knew that kind of defeat.

Hey, I am thoroughly Southern Woman, I adore all things Southern, the history, the climate, the people, I would absolutely not live anywhere else, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be objective about history either. I am not an expert on battle strategies and such, I am more drawn to the female experience of the war, and I just thought I might be able to give another angle to the discussion.

188

So basically your cites are a couple books you remember. Nothing we can verify.

And your quote only show that Shermans march was pretty brutal. So were the various raids by Quantrill, Forrest, etc.

Rape happened during the Civil war. Many researchers have said it was actually less prevalent than in other wars.

Here is a review of one of those books, the author is interviewed:

Altho the author is trying to make a case that rape was more common that we think, as she herself say in response to this question:** You mention a lot of difficulties with determining what happened during the Civil War in particular—for example, many of the Confederate records were destroyed. How do you go about extrapolating what may have happened that was not reported?**

"Unfortunately, because we don’t have all the records, we don’t really know…"

And during her whole interview and review, not a single mention is made of Shermans march causing many rapes. (one instance is mentioned).

So, you have not been able to prove your hypothesis.

189

Well, unfortunately, not all books are on the internet in their entireity to be quoted from.

So if you agree that rapes occurred, along with all manner of other violations, and certainly death and grief were a factor in shaping the post-war psyche of War Widows.

My assertion wasn’t necessarily to argue whether or not rapes in all their forms occurred (I really sorta thought that was already understood), but to suggest that all of that left women with indelible scars, what we would today call PTSD, and they channeled those emotions, however misguided, into the building up Lost Cause Mythology and started the idea of commemorating their dead in a big way. Yes, it would grow beyond the placing of plaques and headstones, into larger than life statues and the like, but in the beginning it was a way to have a literal physical place to lay your grief and sadness. Some families never got any bodies back to bury, so these monuments (like the one on Savannah) was something physical to hold onto. That’s all I was trying to say. Grief, pain, loss, whatever the source, played a big part in starting to roll the ball forward into why we have all these monuments around now. I was just trying to say most people don’t know this.

I completely understand that the memorials may have totally out lived their usefulness today, they are relics of the past. But they have a wider story to tell than, oh, they are just monuments to White Supremacy put up by nasty hate-filled people. If a community votes to take one down, then fine, they should do it, I just think it would be a shame not to know and understand a few more details about how it came to be in the first place, which might actually help us not be so judgemental of each other.

190

How many black women were raped? Before, during, and even after the Civil War?

When you start a war, you pay the consequences.

191

Well since they had no political power, the women didn’t start the war. And since they lack the necessary equipment, they also didn’t rape anybody.

I thought victim-blaming was out of style these days.

192

I have no doubt that Southern women were raped and otherwise sexually mistreated by Northern soldiers. But that’s not the reason for any of the monuments. We know this, because the people who put up the monuments told us their reasons. And their reasons were to oppress black people. They admitted it openly. To claim otherwise is to erase history.

193

“Set up the line of thinking” is about as vague as one can get.

It’s unfortunate that war causes suffering among the innocent, and that the South had to be crushed to stop its hideous agenda, and victory that brought with it all the misery war always brings.

The actions of the Union Army were not at all remarkable, though; rape happens in all wars. Positing that the romanticization of the South is because women were mistreated rather obviously raises the question as to why it was different from other wars, because women are ALWAYS mistreated. German women were subjected to the most horrific mass rapes at the end, and after, World War II, but there are no Heinrich Himmler memorials.

I am not downplaying the awfulness of rape and the locust-like nature of armies. But your proposed connection between rape and the uniquely loser-deifying nature of the post-war South just doesn’t ring true for me. Why did so many of the memorials go up half a century later, then? Why don’t other wars see a comparable thing? Why do so many of the memorials specifically cite the causes of white supremacy and Southern independence?

194

Again, almost all of these monuments were not put up by the survivors of the Civil War. They were put up in the 1920s, during the time of the Second Klan.

And the Confederate Flag was brought out of mothballs during the 1960s, as a symbol of resistance to civil rights.

195

Grumbacher Red: If you’ve ever read Sherman’s memoirs, he did say he wanted the March to the Sea to bring home to Southern women what war was like and break their spirit because they were infusing the Southern men with fighting spirit. He said nothing that could be construed as supporting rape.
Union soldiers did commit rape – soldiers in all armies have committed rape – but they were just as likely to rape a black slave as a white belle.

196

Sure they did. But women in the North were raped too- and there really arent that many statues of grant around.

And in the South, Black woman were particular victims, by both sides. In fact it wasnt until Lincolns orders that raping a black woman was always considered a crime.

Why would Black women want to put up statues to the men who enslaved them & raped them?

No, your hypothesis doesnt hold water.

197

And I did say that most of the Memorials, especially the statues, were put up after the 1920s, but the United Daughters of the Confederacy were formed in Nashville in something like 1894, and before them, there were informal ladies groups dedicated to marking graves and important sites, and their passion about these movements was certainly fierce. Much work in the way of memorials and monuments was done in the later 1800s.

I clearly said that they merely started what would BECOME the large memorials in later years. Also, I described Savannah’s Confederate Memorial in Forsyth Park, which also apparently started its’ life in 1875 as a grief piece, well before all the rest.

I am not saying scarred old War Widows put up all the fancy statues. I am saying they started the idea of it with their early memorials, and in my first post I said it was hijacked later for political reasons and the statues got bigger and more elaborate as time went on. However, some of those ladies did indeed live long enough to see things get quite fancy.

I also do not think it altogether right that so many places are named after and contain memorials to Robert E. Lee with which he has no connection and never went there. Virginia? Sure, that makes sense. Lee County Florida? Not at all.

And I am in total agreement with you about the battle flag. It was a retired symbol by the 1950s, hadn’t been seen since the 1930s when the last veterans passed away and were no longer trotting it out for Confederate Memorial Day. It was brought out and put on state flags under the guise of celebrating the upcoming 100th anniversary of The War, when in reality it was all about resistance to Brown vs. The Board of Education and Civil Rights. As for the Clan, the second coming in Georgia was spurned on by the murder of Mary Phagan, and the formation of a group that called themselves The Knights of Mary Phagan who went out to Stone Mountain and burned a cross for the first time.

198

There was no hardship of the Civil War visited on the south that the Confederate government would not have gladly inflected on Northern territory it had managed to occupy. Plenty of Northern families did not get the bodies of their loved ones back to bury either. Hell! there were officers’ wives interned in Andersonville. Of all the female survivors of the Civil War they should definitely be considered the most deserving of a memorial.

199

I have read parts of it and I do realize that. I have also read authors who strongly believe that Sherman’s tactics actually had the opposite effect, making Southern women even more dedicated Confederates, hence their penchant for glorifying their dead.

200

Well Black women wouldn’t have been involved in groups like the UDC anyway because of segregation. Look, I am not saying they were right, it is just a possible explanation for why they were so dedicated to the idea of Southern Chivalry and felt Robert E. Lee was the embodiment of it. And believe me, they were quite serious about it.