Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Ghost of Bobby Lee
[Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.\
Ken Burns' Civil War documentary makes note of the fact that General Lee was opposed to slavery. I basically took that as true, until--in all honesty--some of my commenters informed me that it, in fact, was not. One of the saddest, and yet telling, aspects of the War, for me personally, is that on the two occasions when Confederate troops headed North, they kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery. Ditto for black soldiers who were captured and "lucky" enough not to be killed. Anyway, if you have a moment check out this lecture a reader was kind enough to send to me. At about the 55:00 mark, Elizabeth Brown Pryor talks about Lee's relationship to slavery, and more interestingly, how the myth that he was somehow anti-slavery came to be.
It was sad to hear frankly. If the war actually weren't about slavery, I think all our lives would be a lot easier. But as I thought on it, my sadness was stupid. What undergirds all of this alleged honoring of the Confederacy, is a kind of ancestor-worship that isn't. The Lost Cause is necromancy--it summons the dead and enslaves them to the need of their vainglorious, self-styled descendants. Its greatest crime is how it denies, even in death, the humanity of the very people it claims to venerate. This isn't about "honoring" the past--it's about an inability to cope with the present....
I think this boils down to the problem of nationalism, and where we find our heroes. It isn't like Southerners are devoid of people who were courageous in all aspects. There's the great Virginian patriot George Henry Robert Thomas, who goes from slave-master in waiting, to leading black troops in brilliant military campaigns in Tennessee, and in his last days defends the rights of freedman. There's Elizabeth Van Lew, who emancipated all her slaves before the War, and used them as part of a Union spy network in Richmond, the Confederate capitol.
There's "The Boat-Thief" Robert Smalls, a slave who stole Confederate transport steamer, filled with armaments, and sailed it to Union lines. There's Andre Callioux, a manumitted slave turned Union soldier, martyred at Port Hudson in a kamikaze-like charge on the Confederate works. And a century later, there's Martin Luther King, arguably the modern founding father of this America. He was a product of The South, and his moral judgement didn't end at the Mason-Dixon line.
Finally, there's the question of how we claim ancestors, a question that is more philosophical than biological. Africa, and African-America, means something to me because I claim it as such--but I claim much more. I claim Fitzgerald, whatever he thought of me, because I see myself in Gatsby. I claim Steinbeck because, whether he likes it or not, I am an Okie. I claim Blake because "London" feels like the hood to me.
And I claim them right alongside Lucille Clifton, James Baldwin and Ralph Wiley, who had it so right when he parried Saul Bellow. The dead, and the work they leave---the good and bad--is the work of humanity and thus says something of us all. And in that manner, I must be humble and claim some of Lee, Jackson, and Forrest. What might I have been in another skin, in another country, in another time?
Read entire article at The Atlantic
Ken Burns' Civil War documentary makes note of the fact that General Lee was opposed to slavery. I basically took that as true, until--in all honesty--some of my commenters informed me that it, in fact, was not. One of the saddest, and yet telling, aspects of the War, for me personally, is that on the two occasions when Confederate troops headed North, they kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery. Ditto for black soldiers who were captured and "lucky" enough not to be killed. Anyway, if you have a moment check out this lecture a reader was kind enough to send to me. At about the 55:00 mark, Elizabeth Brown Pryor talks about Lee's relationship to slavery, and more interestingly, how the myth that he was somehow anti-slavery came to be.
It was sad to hear frankly. If the war actually weren't about slavery, I think all our lives would be a lot easier. But as I thought on it, my sadness was stupid. What undergirds all of this alleged honoring of the Confederacy, is a kind of ancestor-worship that isn't. The Lost Cause is necromancy--it summons the dead and enslaves them to the need of their vainglorious, self-styled descendants. Its greatest crime is how it denies, even in death, the humanity of the very people it claims to venerate. This isn't about "honoring" the past--it's about an inability to cope with the present....
I think this boils down to the problem of nationalism, and where we find our heroes. It isn't like Southerners are devoid of people who were courageous in all aspects. There's the great Virginian patriot George Henry Robert Thomas, who goes from slave-master in waiting, to leading black troops in brilliant military campaigns in Tennessee, and in his last days defends the rights of freedman. There's Elizabeth Van Lew, who emancipated all her slaves before the War, and used them as part of a Union spy network in Richmond, the Confederate capitol.
There's "The Boat-Thief" Robert Smalls, a slave who stole Confederate transport steamer, filled with armaments, and sailed it to Union lines. There's Andre Callioux, a manumitted slave turned Union soldier, martyred at Port Hudson in a kamikaze-like charge on the Confederate works. And a century later, there's Martin Luther King, arguably the modern founding father of this America. He was a product of The South, and his moral judgement didn't end at the Mason-Dixon line.
Finally, there's the question of how we claim ancestors, a question that is more philosophical than biological. Africa, and African-America, means something to me because I claim it as such--but I claim much more. I claim Fitzgerald, whatever he thought of me, because I see myself in Gatsby. I claim Steinbeck because, whether he likes it or not, I am an Okie. I claim Blake because "London" feels like the hood to me.
And I claim them right alongside Lucille Clifton, James Baldwin and Ralph Wiley, who had it so right when he parried Saul Bellow. The dead, and the work they leave---the good and bad--is the work of humanity and thus says something of us all. And in that manner, I must be humble and claim some of Lee, Jackson, and Forrest. What might I have been in another skin, in another country, in another time?