Cry the Divided Country

Amid the controversy this past week surrounding the decision of New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu to remove Confederate monuments from the city, especially that of Robert E. Lee, taken down by men in bullet-proof vests and at night, I would like to offer a phrase from a speech I gave at Harvard University some years ago. The occasion was a Festschrift (memorial) for the late Professor Ernest May:

The South's war, brilliantly fought, was not only a lost cause. It was a bad cause.

The South has never fully accepted this. Instead, its reaction has morphed into a kind of super-patriotism.

But the stain of slavery remains, as was evident in the repressed racism we saw throughout the presidency of Barack Obama and which was a factor in the reasons why Obama's term was not the unalloyed success that many hoped it would be.

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Robert E. Lee  had been in the Union Army and, together with his subordinate, Jeb Stuart, had put down the putsch of John Brown at the Harpers Ferry armory a few years before the Civil War. Lee made the fateful decision to leave the Army and join Virginia, his native state, when the war broke out. It was at a time when loyalties to the states was still strong.

During the Civil War, Lee turned out to be the equal of Ulysses as a Grim Reaper of men, though it was Grant, in the end, who overwhelmed Lee. Grant, despite his bibliousness in the field, was the author of a presidential autobiography that is a gem in American history.

Statements and views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author and do not imply endorsement by Harvard University, the Harvard Kennedy School, or the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.