Reëxamining the Legacy of Race and Robert E. Lee

In his new book, “Robert E. Lee: A Life,” the historian Allen C. Guelzo analyzes the career of the Confederate general, and attempts to understand the reasons behind his decision to fight against the Union. Guelzo is a longtime scholar of the Civil War and has written numerous books about Abraham Lincoln. In his telling, Lee was a complex person, with a keen intelligence about military matters, who used his powers in support of a cause that Guelzo calls a “crime.” Guelzo doesn’t shy away from criticizing Lee’s racial attitudes, but nevertheless seeks to understand his actions. He concludes that “mercy” might be “the most appropriate conclusion to the crime—and the glory—of Robert E. Lee after all.”

Guelzo also writes about recent controversies surrounding the ways in which we remember Lee, including the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, in 2017, which sought to prevent the removal of a Lee statue. Elsewhere, Guelzo has spoken extensively about how the legacy of racism has and has not left an imprint on our current age. In 2020, he appeared at a panel put on by the Trump Administration that sought, in part, to provide an alternative view to the Times’s 1619 Project, and has begun speaking out frequently against critical race theory, which he argues may open the door to dictatorship and genocide.

I recently spoke by phone with Guelzo, who is Senior Research Scholar in the Humanities Council at Princeton University. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Lee chose to betray his country, the debate over historical forgiveness, and whether Kant is to blame for critical race theory.

What in Lee’s life did you think had not been examined enough but was important for understanding him and his motivations?

One was the long-term habit Lee biographers had had of painting a halo around the man’s head, and, in doing that, portraying Lee as a very simple, straightforward, uncomplicated character who simply did his duty. I thought that did not ring true to anything that I had encountered about Robert E. Lee, so I wanted to explore this. The book, in that respect, is really an exploration of the man’s character, because most people who had written about Lee really had not penetrated that very deeply.

What I found was that Lee was a very complicated character and that people who met him at first came away with one impression of it. But, behind this impression of this man of marble dignity, there were a number of very complex currents, all of which would intersect in the decision that he made, in 1861, to commit treason. And I use the word “treason” very carefully, because I don’t want people thinking I’m just tossing it around as something nasty I can say about a historical figure. I’m looking at the constitutional and legal definition of what we call treason, and I don’t have a better explanation or description for what it was that Robert E. Lee did.

You focus a lot on Lee’s father. Why did you think he was important to Lee?

Something began to bother me the more I read Lee’s letters. He must have written something like eight thousand personal letters in his life. What I kept noticing was what you might call “the dog that didn’t bark.” In all these letters, only one of them before 1861 ever made any mention of his father. And that was his application letter to West Point. So, of course, he’s going to use his father’s fame and reputation as a Revolutionary War hero that way. Robert E. Lee suffered a real subtraction in his life when “Light-Horse Harry” Lee took off for the West Indies and Robert never saw him again. Robert was six years old. Robert, instead, became a kind of replacement for his father. Robert took over the management of the household. He stepped into his father’s shoes and, in some respects, never stepped out of them for another thirty-odd years.

That shows up in his perfectionism. He was extremely demanding of other people. I don’t mean in necessarily a difficult or irascible sense, although he did have a temper. He was very demanding in what he expected of himself and of other people. And what I see in that is Robert Lee attempting a kind of redemptive perfectionism for the failures of his father, and, in fact, not only his father. He had an older half-brother, who, if anything, made even worse of a botch of his life and a botch of the Lee name publicly, to the point where he became known as “Black-Horse Harry” Lee. Robert Lee seems to have the burden of cleansing the Lee name from the taints that have become associated with it.

How did these currents manifest themselves in the ultimate decision to commit what you call treason?

Part of that is a sense of his responsibility to his family. And that centers on what had become the family home, which was Arlington. People look today at Arlington House and its name, the Robert E. Lee Home, and people think of that as Robert E. Lee’s property. Well, actually, it wasn’t. He marries into the family that owns that property. Then, when his father-in-law dies in 1857, Robert is named the executor of the will, but the will cuts him out. Arlington House instead goes to Robert E. Lee’s oldest son, George Washington Custis Lee. It’s a scandal. And it’s to protect Arlington—and to protect his family’s title to it and the other Custis properties—that I think he really makes that decision to turn down the offer that is made to him to command Union armies in the field, to resign his commission in the U.S. Army. He then goes off to Richmond to talk to people who are making offers to him from this new secessionist government in Richmond. What is he doing? He’s trying to protect Arlington. Why does he do it? Because this is what is demanded of him in being the perfect man. He is so perfect that he is going to rise above the wrongs and the shortcomings that had been inflicted on him by others, like his father-in-law.

You write in the book that “Lee’s attitudes and ideas on race were clearly on the side of white hierarchy, and cannot even be massaged into mere acquiescence with the post-Civil War Southern order. There were certainly many Southern whites in those years who recognized the evils of both slavery and race and who bravely linked themselves with the freedmen’s cause—and Lee was not one of them.” Can you talk about what role that may have played in his taking the side of the slaveholders?

On the one hand, you can catch Robert E. Lee, writing in the eighteen-fifties to his wife, saying, “Slavery is a moral and political evil in any country.” You look at that and you say, “All right. Yes, thank you. Good.” Then you see what he says next: that the real burden of the evil is the evil that it imposes on white people. Slavery is actually a school of manners almost, of civilization for the slaves themselves. At that point, you’re thinking, I wonder if he asked the slaves about that.

His father-in-law made provision in his will for the emancipation of the Custis slaves within five years. But, to do that, Lee has to make Arlington profitable, and old man Custis had really let the place run down to the point where the books were just a mess. So Robert E. Lee, Mr. Engineer, says, “All right, well, first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to make Arlington profitable again. Then we’re going to emancipate everybody.” And the Arlington slaves look at this and say, “Wait a minute. We actually believe that his will emancipated us on the spot at his death, not ‘Wait for five years.’ ” This sets up resistance, which Lee treats very harshly. Then, when three of the Arlington slaves run away and are apprehended in Maryland and brought back to Arlington, Lee just loses it completely. He tells the Arlington overseer, “Take the whip and lay it on.” The Arlington overseer refuses. And so he turns to the constable who brought the slaves back to Arlington. He says, “All right, you do it.” Which the constable does, but, at least in one account, it is said that Lee took a whip in his own hand and laid it on. Afterward, Lee does not want to talk about this. It gets into the newspapers. He is deeply mortified by it. And when he finally has to write to Custis Lee, he says, “Your grandfather has left me a very unpleasant legacy.” And, again, what I’m looking at here is the façade of this man. The perfect façade. It cracks at that point. And something really elemental comes out of that crack, which he at once stuffs right back in.

Yes, you write in the book that slavery was an “abstraction” for Lee, and, about this incident, add, “It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that when his fury had cooled, he was sickened at himself as much for the damage done to his own self-image as for the cruelty inflicted on the three fugitives.” Can you talk about what you meant?

I think he was sickened at the fact that he’d lost control. He is supposed to be the perfect man. He is supposed to be the marble model, as he was called at West Point. Here he is behaving like Simon Legree. He’s behaving like some monster. When he reflects on it, this undermines the whole image of perfection that he had been trying to cultivate. What it looks like is not Robert E. Lee the marble model. It looks like Light-Horse Harry all over again because, during the Revolution, Light-Horse Harry had a reputation for dealing with people like that. And it’s at that moment that Robert E. Lee most resembles his father, that whipping—and resembling his father was what he had spent all of his life trying not to do.

You bring Lee’s story and legacy up through the present day, and you write, about the 2017 rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville protesting the removal of a Lee statue, “Yet less was heard after Charlottesville about Lee and treason than about Lee and white supremacy. Perhaps this is because in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of globalism, the notion of treason has acquired an antique feel, like blasphemy or transportation to the antipodes, as if modern individuals should no longer be held to the standard of absolute loyalty to a single political entity.” Can you explain what you mean here?

We live in a world that is so intimately interconnected and intertwined. I can be in instant communication. What does that make the nation-state seem like? It makes it seem like something old-fashioned. What is treason except the betrayal of loyalty to the nation-state? I think people have been less inclined to find fault with Lee on the grounds of treason simply because treason has just come to seem a little bit out of place.

Is it possible that the conversation about Lee after Charlottesville focused more on white supremacy because it was a white-supremacist rally in support of Lee?

Yeah, that certainly has a role to play in it.

I thought that might have some role.

And Lee is not free from the taint of white supremacy. As much as some people wanted so badly in the years after his death to free him from that and to absolve him from that, I don’t think they can get away with it. His comments on the subject of race, even after the Civil War, are not what anyone could possibly think of as being egalitarian or enlightened. He clearly regarded the future as a place where white and Black should occupy separate spheres. He’s not a Nathan Bedford Forrest. He’s not the Ku Klux Klan trying to make war on Black people. But, on the other hand, he’s not going to lift a finger to do anything to promote a new egalitarian society. He might avoid being the worst that he could’ve been, but he doesn’t really take any significant step toward doing anything better.

One thing that’s interesting about this critique you’re making of Lee is that you still conclude the book by writing, “There can be no true compassion without will, but there can be no true will without compassion, for without compassion no one can summon the will to live a true life or fashion a true art. Self-pity played a far larger role than compassion in Lee’s character, and his pursuit of perfection froze compassion into obligation. But that need not be the case in us. Mercy—or at least a nolle prosequi—may, perhaps, be the most appropriate conclusion to the crime—and the glory—of Robert E. Lee after all.”

First of all, we have to show will because any historian, any biographer, is required to make judgments. The very nature of history is the attempt to discover meaning. That’s what makes history different from mere chronicle. On the other hand, you have to also balance it with compassion, because compassion is about discernment and understanding. Now, the difficulty is compassion can often lead a biographer or a historian into a sloppy sentimentalism, sometimes even into maybe what is worse, and that is a kind of guilty empathy and sympathy with your subject.

Frederick Douglass spoke of the “nauseating flatteries” that were said and written about Lee.

Yeah. And yet, at the same time, Frederick Douglass also says, I am no minister of hate, but may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I ever forget who it was who fought on the side of liberty and who against. And I balance those two and I say, “But we must also not be a minister of hate ourselves,” because we have to show compassion—because compassion is what is superior to the defects in characters like Robert E. Lee. Compassion is not the same as giving a free pass. What compassion does do is to say, “We discern the complexities here. We judge them. But we also are not simplistic in our judgment. We discern them.” And sometimes that pushes us to a point of saying, “Nolle prosequi.” It’s a Latin legal term. It means “Will not prosecute.” And sometimes that is what we have to come to.

When we see white supremacy resurgent at Charlottesville and elsewhere, why would that be what we need to come to?

Because my fear is that hate begets hate begets hate begets hate. Tit for tat is great in game theory, but it’s not particularly good in human relations. And, at the end of the day, what is really the higher value, hate or compassion? If what we manifest is hatred, then inevitably we end up demeaning ourselves. I’ve reached for compassion because I think that compassion is what gives us victory over the hate and over the haters. Let me put it in the most simplistic fashion: I would not be a good hangman. I would not. I just simply would not.

Speaking on that theme of compassion and understanding people who have different ways of thinking than you do, you recently said, “People need to realize that there is no genuine compatibility between critical race theory and democracy. Critical race theory, by reducing all disagreements to power and questions of power, means that democracy cannot function.” You also said, talking about critical race theory leading to a lack of reason, “Those are the moments when genocide rears its hideous head.” Why are you so concerned about critical race theory?

Partly because critical race theory, as I’ve read about it, has some very troubling aspects to it. I have to preface this by saying critical race theory, especially over the last year, has become one of those terms that people have kneaded like dough, and it’s become now something which tends to mean a lot of things. A friend of mine said to me, “Why do you have a problem with critical race theory? It’s simply about understanding the importance of the operation of race in American history.” And my response was, “Well, if that’s all that critical race theory is about, well then we’re not really talking about anything we’re arguing about.” Of course, that is an issue of great importance. But when I read critical race theory as it’s promoted by the people most associated with its founding—people like Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic—what I read are people saying that critical race theory questions the foundations of the liberal democratic order and questions equality, questions legal reasoning, questions enlightenment rationalism, questions neutral principles of constitutional law. I do think that it poses serious problems for the operation of democracy and winds up equipping people with the kind of energy that leads to hatreds, and hatreds that lead to violence, and violence that leads to genocide.

Yes, you recently stated, “Critical race theory is a subset of critical theory, which has got long roots in Western philosophy back to Immanuel Kant in the seventeen-nineties. Kant lived at the end of a century known as the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, but he feared that experience had shown that reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives. There had to be a way of knowing things that went beyond reason, and for him that meant developing a theory of being critical of reason, hence critical theory. The problem was that critical theory got away. It instead justified ways of appealing to some very unreasonable things as explanations—things like race, nationality, class—and they gave us Karl Marx and Jim Crow, and every dictatorship in between. That’s especially true about race.” Can you say more what you mean here about Kant giving us these dictatorships and critical race theory?

Well, how long do we have to talk? This is going to take a whole lecture. I love Immanuel Kant as a really critical hinge figure in modern European philosophy, because, on the one hand, he is definitely a man of the Enlightenment and that is the way most people read him. He is the über Enlightenment philosopher, the über rationalist. But there’s also an aspect of Kant that faces in a different direction and faces toward the Romantics, which applauds Rousseau. There’s a bright line that you can draw between Kant through the post-Kantians to Hegel. And, when we arrive at Hegel, here is where we really start to see the development of aspects that we can begin to describe as critical theory. Marx is a Left Hegelian. In Marx’s understanding of theory, there is only one kind of consciousness that can really be described as legitimate, and that consciousness does not bear question. It simply operates.

Just to be clear, though, the “Critique of Pure Reason” is not an assault on reason. It argues that experience would not be possible without reason.

Oh, oh, that’s right. And that’s true also of the “Critique of Practical Reason” as well.

Kant’s usually vilified as somewhat of an arch rationalist, in fact, no?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. When you look at Kant, there’s a great deal more variety in Immanuel Kant than we often credit.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Kant just saying that entities, like God, that don’t conform to the ordering principles of the human mind are hard to figure out, and that the mind can only know certain types of experience? But also that reason is a really important thing—

Yeah. He does make this distinction. There are certain categories of knowledge that reason cannot penetrate, and therefore we shouldn’t expect it to penetrate. There are many other categories where it does. He wants to make that distinction. Where I see the line that begins to point toward critical theory is in those areas where Kant wants to say, “Here’s where we cannot expect reason to operate.” And if that is the case then it’s going to become possible for people to say, “Well, then, we need to dispense with reason in this particular case, because reasoning is not going to get us where we’re going to go.” All I’m doing is simply saying that, if we want to look where the roots of this go, critical theory did not happen yesterday. Critical theory did not happen the day before.

Right, but the confusion I had was that Kant is famous for saying human beings can’t be used as a means to an end, which would seem to undermine almost all dictatorships we’ve ever had.

Right. Except that, at the same time, Kant really is a moral and metaphysical voluntarist for precisely that reason. And voluntarism, as opposed to rationalism itself, has, I don’t want to say a certain history, but people who have wanted to move toward ideas of a powerful state, a powerful class. So I keep my eye open. We’re talking family resemblances here. I’m looking for roots.

You talked about forgiveness and bad things begetting other bad things with Lee, and you also said, about C.R.T., “I’m fearful of the backlash, because when you indulge in unreason, then you let loose the beasts of other forms of unreason. If a particular theory cannot be reasoned with, then you give up on reason and you surrender yourself to what you hope will be an alternative to it, which turns out to be just as irrational in its own right. . . . The irrationality, for instance, of genuine white supremacy, of genuine Aryan Nazi fairy tales.” Is C.R.T. what drove people to Charlottesville?

I think some people are reacting that way. And what I’m afraid is that critical race theory—and, again, I’m defining it strictly in terms of the people who have formulated this. I think what they’re doing is they’re giving license, because they’re saying, “Well, we are not going to be bound by Enlightenment rationalism. We’re not going to be bound by the norms of constitutional legal reasoning.” At which point, people at the other extreme end of things say, “Hey, that’s fine with us. That’s how we’re going to behave as well.”

So the Charlottesville slogan didn’t have to be “Jews will not replace us.” There were other slogans out there, but those marchers got pushed into having to say that?

People will do that, and they will find themselves antagonized into doing it. And sometimes it won’t be antagonism. Sometimes it will be raw opportunism. You know, they always wanted to be white supremacists.

Yeah, that’s sort of what I was hinting at.

Yeah. Critical race theory gives us a reason for saying, “You’re not thinking any better than we do.” Because once we detach ourselves from legal norms, once we detach ourselves from the liberal project, then it doesn’t matter. In that case, you would have to say that one extreme is no different than the other. It all depends on whose self interests are being served. And that is when democracy begins to disintegrate.

When you have C.R.T. or Nazis?

When you have any kind of theory that says, “I am no longer responsible to be reasonable either with myself or with other people.” Because what else is democracy but reasoning, but standing in the public sphere, everybody with equal access to it, everybody able to say their say. The moment we begin to exclude, that is the moment democracy begins to be diminished.

Do you think President Trump was a response in some ways to this irrationalism?

I’m trying to think, because I never met Donald Trump. I never shook his hand. I don’t know. It’s a mystery to me, really. I haven’t been able to fathom a lot of what’s been happening in terms of politics over the last several years. I don’t know. We have found it easier and easier to sink into various kinds of irrationality, various ways of saying the democratic project doesn’t work. What we need is some substitute for it. On the left, I hear the substitute for it being race. On the right, I hear the substitute for it being nationalism. And I am troubled by both.

I read a column you wrote on President Trump, where you praised his COVID response, so I thought that you were in some ways a supporter of nationalism and of the President. And that’s why I was a little confused.

Oh, Lord love you, no. Oh my, no. No. No. No, no, no, no, no. I have been very critical of what’s called this nationalist movement among conservatives. I’ve written against this. I have said conservatives are putting themselves on the worst possible ground. And if that is what the future of conservatism looks like, then I’m resigning. I’m turning in my membership card. My conservatism is the Lincoln conservatism. That’s my notion of things. That could not be further removed from what I hear about what is called national conservatism.

I know you were on a panel for the Trump White House, and he represents a certain nationalist conservatism. I mean, he had trouble saying mean things about the Charlottesville rioters.

Yeah, he did have some trouble that way. What did I do with the Trump White House?

I thought you hosted a 1619 panel that the White House put on. Did I get that wrong?

No, no. The only panel I was on was at the National Archives for Constitution Day, and it was about American history. [Guelzo appeared on the panel but did not host it.]

We started with you talking about Robert E. Lee and all the positive books about him, and then a march at Charlottesville with white supremacists and the President of the United States not condemning it. Many of the things you’ve said and that we’ve talked about suggest to me that there is some way in which racism is very deeply woven into our country. Is critical race theory helpful in that sense?

I mean, it’s one thing to say that racism has been a chronic American problem. It has. Slavery itself was the birthmark of the American Republic. We paid a severe price for that. We continue to pay a price for it. And I suspect we will continue to pay that price into the future for, at least, some time. I don’t think it’s a question of: Do we demean the significance of race in American history? The question is: Are we going to make things all one single explanation? I think history is a lot more complicated than that. But, if we’re going to say that everything in American life is therefore rendered null and void because of race, then I think we’re dealing with an exaggeration. If everything is rendered null and void by race, how is it we’re able to talk about race at all?

What do you mean?

Well, if race has made any discussion of race null and void, nobody can really talk about it, because everyone is a captive of their particular race. Then why are we talking? Why are we having a discussion about race at all? We should not be able to rise above that, but we do. Happily, we do.

I think some people think that we can’t talk about these things because we’re all victims of circumstance, but I would imagine that’s a pretty small minority opinion, and that most people think it is important to confront these things.

Look, we are victims of circumstance, but we’re not only victims of circumstance. We’re more than that. And human beings are not only beings of will, not only beings of reason, they’re beings of moral perception. We can understand what truth is. Now, sometimes we use our will to deny the truth when it’s set in front of us. Lincoln used that, as a particular example, when he was talking about how slaveowners could deny the humanity of the slaves they were owning and working. And Lincoln’s answer was because they willed not to see it. And, in a sense, this is what I see happening with someone like Robert E. Lee. I mean, Lee, in that respect, confirms Lincoln’s judgment. Because here is Lee, who can see, logically, rationally, that slavery is this moral and political evil. And yet he looks at it, then he looks away. What we’re looking at there is the complexity of human motivation, which is a complexity that just about all of us encounter and perform on a daily basis on a variety of issues.

I totally understand that, and I think that many of the people who are in favor of C.R.T. are very much in favor of these kind of conversations, and are actually more interested in conversations then, say, genocide.

Well, I hope so. But, if I’m judging by what I read, then my hope for that diminishes dramatically, because it does not appear, in fact, that a number of these people can really talk about the hope of conversation. It’s about how some people are inextricably blinded or imprisoned by certain categories. If that is what we are, then there really is no hope for democracy. Because democracy assumes that people can rise out of immediate circumstances, find common ground with other people, despite their differences, and work forward from there. That, at least, is my hope of what democracy can and should be. I think that was Lincoln’s hope.