Tribute to a Son of the South

And now a tribute to one of the Saints of the Confederacy, General Robert Lee

Robert E. Lee was born in 1807 and fought valiantly for states’ rights which allowed enslavers to continue human bondage in the Confederate States of America.

Unmolested by ideals of human rights for enslaved Africans, he was not a white supremacist as modern historians and contemporary blacks would claim. He simply believed that blacks were unintelligent and inferior as a race when compared to whites.

A bright and shining star. A symbol of our Confederate suffering.

A known gentleman

He vowed to never raise his hand against his relatives, his children, and his home. He extended this courtesy to humans he enslaved when they tried to escape to freedom, by having an overseer beat them and pour brine on their wounds.

A family man, by 1860, Lee had broken up every enslaved family but one of his deceased father-in-law’s estate, some of the families had been together since Mount Vernon days. He tore people’s families apart to keep his financially stable.

The trauma of rupturing families lasted lifetimes for the enslaved, but family is a sentimentality our Confederate nation bestowed on Confederate citizens. By law and social attitude, enslaved people were not considered citizens at the time.

But pobody’s nerfect.

A leader among men

Lee was a man of integrity, choosing to serve Virginia and the Confederacy “was a hard thing for him […] thinking as he did that Secession was foolish.“

As a deeply principled man whose soldiers kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery during both the Maryland (1862) and Gettysburg (1863) campaigns and whose subordinates paraded the bodies of black and white Union survivors after the Battle of the Crater in the streets for Southerners to jeer. As an example of his integrity and strength, Lee never spoke out against this. Historian Richard Slotkin wrote in No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, “his silence was permissive.”

One who was so rarely gifted with all the raiments of Southern Aristocracy, cast his lot with traitors, and devoted his tactical talents to the execution of a plot whose outcome, if successful, would have destroyed the Republic and continued a status quo of human bondage for millions of people.

A Devout Christian

We sift among the stories of his bravery, and his ashes.

Our fandom is forged in man and myth, an unnatural demigod of the slaveholding South. Our reluctant secessionist, who only suffered defeat because of overwhelming odds.

For whom excuses about the Southland and battles lost overflow like sweet tea from a full glass pitcher.

Blessed with unquestionable morals and Baptized in a form of Christianity that tied slavery to righteousness, fire to brimstone, and inhumanity to man. Those he enslaved and advocated to enslave prayed that their God would liberate them.

And following his restrained example, our silence is permissive. Perhaps, we will never question why the sons of poor whites felt the sting of economic inequality spearheaded by a government of men like Lee so badly that enslaving black people and denying their human rights provided them with a sense of self-esteem and societal standing. It was just the natural order of things that men with power, like Lee, built and ascribed to God or the supernatural.

Robert E. Lee, our uncrowned prince, who like so many buried in Confederate cemeteries only knew freedom by the measure of the right to deprive others.

Unlike the lyrics from the bards of Creedence Clearwater Revival, he was indeed a fortunate son. Fortunate was he, and all the planter class. They never had to answer for the table scraps of a fabled white future that rendered poor white people and communities poorer in family and economic advancements for generations. Instead we beatifically lionize the chains that bind us to an image of a history that never existed, a unified South.

And we promise to forever, and with great fervor when anyone points out the systematic oppression of blacks and other minorities who helped build the South, yell with exuberance, “Oh yeah, well Blacks owned slaves, too. And Lincoln was a racist, but they never tell you that in school!”