What does it mean to be “socially conservative†as it was for southerners?
Memorialization of Robert E. Lee and the Lost Cause
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In the years post-obit the Ceremonious War, Robert E. Lee became i of the most memorialized figures of the erstwhile Confederacy. Memorials were not but statues and monuments. Well into the twentieth century, White Southerners created roads, museums, and books to celebrate Lee's character and accomplishments. But the memorials did not all tell the aforementioned story of Robert E. Lee.
The memory of Lee inverse over time as each new generation re-wrote the history of Lee and the Confederacy. For example, some sometime Confederates argued that Lee was a Confederate to his last breath. Other biographers highlighted Lee'due south attempts to restore the Spousal relationship later the Civil State of war. Between 1865 and the 1930s, memorialists transformed Lee from a Confederate icon to a figure of national unity. The changes in perspectives of Lee were particularly important in the creation of the Robert E. Lee Memorial at Arlington Business firm. Arlington House is i of the more dynamic examples of the changing meanings of Robert Eastward. Lee memorials.
Robert E. Lee's Thoughts on Confederate Memorials
The complex relationship between Robert E. Lee and memorials began in Lee'southward lifetime. He argued confronting creating Confederate war monuments on battlefields, which would "keep open the sores of war." [ane] Instead, Lee supported efforts by Ladies Memorial Associations to mark the graves of Confederate casualties.
"As regards the erection of such a monument as is contemplated: my conviction is, that however grateful information technology would be to the feelings of the South, the try in the nowadays condition of the Land would have the effect of retarding, instead of accelerating its achievement; & of continuing , if non calculation to, the difficulties under which the Southern people labour. All I remember that tin can at present be done, is to aid our noble & generous women in their efforts to protect the graves & marker the terminal resting places of those who have fallen, & await for amend times." [2]
These local groups led postal service-war efforts to establish Confederate cemeteries and concur remembrance ceremonies like Confederate Memorial Day.
Lee's Expiry and the Early on Lost Cause
Lee'southward death in 1870 inspired former Confederates to begin creating memorials to Lee. Equally the news spread, families hung blackness material and governments flew flags at one-half-staff. Onetime soldiers, politicians, and women's groups immediately formed Lee memorial associations in Lexington and Richmond, Virginia, and New Orleans. Each clan tried to control the legacy of Lee and his role in the Confederacy.
Former Amalgamated general, Jubal Early, was the most powerful effigy in Lee memorialization. He led Richmond'due south Lee Monument Association and co-founded the Southern Historical Society. Early was determined to create a pro-Confederate history of the Civil War that vindicated the Southern crusade. One contemporary wrote that, "no man ever took up his pen to write a line about the peachy conflict without the fear of Jubal Early before his optics." [3]
This pro-Confederate history was widely known every bit the Lost Cause. The main thought of the Lost Cause was that the S had fought a righteous war for states' rights. These former rebels blamed the conflict on Northern military aggression while praising the virtuous Southern secession. Confederate memorialists considered antebellum Southern agrarian order as morally superior to Northern industrialism. Slavery was nowadays equally a humane and Christian institution simply not the cause of the state of war. Veterans proclaimed that the Amalgamated armies were not browbeaten in battle merely subdued by the overwhelming weight of Northern materialism. [4]
The Lost Crusade became more openly accustomed amid white Southerners as federal power weakened towards the cease of Reconstruction. White Southerners began to openly justify the Confederate war effort and to express political hostility and racism towards the Reconstruction policies of Union military occupation and black political participation.
Lee was the central figure of the Lost Crusade considering his social status, armed services exploits, and personality. Southern writers highlighted his reluctance to secession and his family's Revolutionary War experience every bit proof that the secession move was well-considered. Early presented Lee every bit unparalleled in his military genius, leading the Army of Northern Virginia to repeated improbably victories against the Spousal relationship Regular army. In fact, Early on blamed all military defeats on the failures of Lee's subordinate generals or overwhelming material disadvantage. [v] Biographers presented Lee as the ideal Southern gentleman whose impeccable moral virtues were proof of the South'southward superior club.
Throughout the 1870s, these Lost Cause groups marketed Lee's glory across the Southward. Popular biographies and lecture series praised Lee's military and moral virtues. Southern families purchased pictures of Lee to enhance funds for monuments. Scholars have dubbed these early groups focused on Lost Cause memory and Lee's celebrity equally the showtime "Lee cult." [six]
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Edifice Public Monuments to Lee
The visual markers of this start Lee Cult came in a series of Lee monuments. The offset monument completed was the "Recumbent Lee" in 1883 in Lexington. In New Orleans, the Lee Monumental Association erected the beginning big public monument in 1884. The Lee equestrian statue in Richmond was finished in 1890, with 100,000 in attendance.
Northern critics expressed concern for these big public monuments. The Minneapolis Tribune called Lee an "unnatural demigod of the slaveholding South." Black newspapers felt the statues re-opened old wounds and taught the young generation of Southerners a white-washed history of the Confederacy. [7]
In fact, during the 1890s, Lee and Confederate memorials became much more public symbols of Lost Cause history. A new generation of white Southerners were determined to gloat the cause of their parents and maintain a distinctive southern cultural identity. Several former Confederate states established Robert E. Lee Twenty-four hours to celebrate his altogether. Museums dedicated to Amalgamated history were created in Columbia, South Carolina and Richmond, Virginia. The about profound change came in the class of hundreds of public monuments to the Amalgamated expressionless.
This alter in public memorials is largely attributed to the work of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). The UDC was a more than national organisation than the older Ladies' Memorial Associations. The UDC spearheaded efforts to venerate the Confederacy and teach the message of the Lost Crusade. [8] Historians notation that, by the early twentieth century, Southern white women were the strongest voice in perpetuating Lost Cause retention. They used their public platform to praise their parents' Confederate devotion while instruction social and racist values to the next generation. [9]
Between 1895 and the 1920s, the UDC raised dozens of Confederate monuments across the South. Lee was often highlighted in these monuments, whether in statues or in the inscriptions. Children often participated in the unveiling celebrations. Scholars argue that these monuments were visible reminders of a pro-Confederate, Southern identity and of the Jim Crow South society in which Blackness citizens were considered second class. [x] They also served as mourning objects for the families and communities who had lost loved ones in the Ceremonious War.
The UDC monuments were too innovative in how public they were. They were not just memorials to the fallen but visible reminders for later generations. In addition to the numerous cemetery monuments of the Ladies' Memorial Associations, these new monuments were placed in courthouse squares, on the grounds of country houses, and in urban parks. [xi]
The well-nigh aggressive UDC monument took shape in Georgia. A local chapter led efforts to turn Stone Mountain into a "shrine to the South." The re-established Ku Klux Klan (KKK) had as well called the mountain as the location of their commencement ritual. The landowners, KKK, and UDC were committed to making the mountain a Southern, Lost Cause memorial. Robert E. Lee was the primal effigy carved into the granite mount. [12]
Lee's Transformation into a National Figure
While the UDC led this new generation of Lost Cause memorialists, a younger generation of white male politicians and businessmen, Due north and South, were spreading a Reconciliationist memory of the Civil War. Many Reconciliationists hoped to rebind the nation's wounds, and boost economic development, by ignoring the causes of disharmonize and instead memorializing the valor of the common soldier. In 1887, an Indiana Governor announced that, "The problems upon which that unfortunate struggle were based are buried." [13] At the fiftieth anniversary of Gettysburg, President Woodrow Wilson stated, "the quarrel forgotten, except that we shall not forget the splendid valor, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against ane another." [14]
Reconciliation events were ofttimes highly publicized. Blue-Grey reunions at battle anniversaries brought sometime enemies together. Reconciliationists even immune the creation of a Confederate section and Lost Cause-inspired Amalgamated monument at Arlington National Cemetery.
Some Amalgamated biographers used the Reconciliationist movement to transform Robert E. Lee into a national figure. A northern paper remarked that "the Lee Cult is much in vogue, even at the North, in these days." [fifteen] This new generation of writers celebrated Lee's war machine skills while avoiding Early'southward descriptions of Lee's invincibility and undying delivery to the Southern Cause. These writers focused on his personal virtues and his postal service-state of war success as a college president. Near chiefly, they touted Lee's love of the Union and his efforts at healing the state subsequently the war. [16]
Lee's transformation into a national figure was evident in a diversity of memorials. The U.S. Regular army established Camp Lee in Virginia in 1917 as part of an effort to gain local support for new military bases in the South during World War I. In 1923, the Robert E. Lee Memorial Highway, from Washington, D.C. to San Diego, became the outset southern transcontinental highway, a sister highway to the northern route named after Abraham Lincoln.
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Wedlock Veterans Challenge Lost Cause Veneration of Lee at Arlington House
A multifariousness of communities challenged the Reconciliationist movement. Many Wedlock soldiers never forgot that "we fought for Union and liberty [and] they fought for disunion and slavery." Southern veterans too refused to accept full reconciliation if information technology meant that the Southern cause was considered wrong. [17] UDC members besides complained that young Southern men were forgetting the sacrifices of the Confederate generation in substitution for business opportunities. Onetime abolitionists, like Frederick Douglass, feared that Northern Reconciliationists erased the promise of emancipation and racial equality from Civil War retention.
The contend over Arlington House became an example of the widespread contest over Ceremonious State of war memory. In the 1920s, Southern women'due south groups sought to restore the house and ownership of the property transferred to the UDC. Proponents used Reconciliationist language: "Whatsoever our opinions and traditions may exist…we all realize now that Robert East. Lee was ane of the greatest generals and 1 of the noblest men who e'er lived." [xviii] The UDC also used the nostalgia of the Lost Cause to promote the house every bit "an case of the erstwhile home of the Southern gentleman and a memorial of the then possessor." [19]
Union veterans' groups, like the K Army of the Republic (GAR) fought against the endeavor to have the UDC take buying of the site. They feared the UDC would turn the firm into a Lost Cause shrine to Lee. In 1925, Congress passed legislation to restore the Arlington Firm. Only the Regular army avoided controversy past focusing interpretation on the Custis Family and George Washington rather than Lee. [20]
The legislation protecting Arlington House continued to change after the 1920s. From the time the site was transferred to the National Park Service in 1933 to the most recent legislative change in 1972, these updates often reflected changes in mainstream civilisation and new academic research.
Robert East. Lee in Twentieth Century Popular Culture
In the 1930s, nostalgia for the Old S and Lost Cause took over white pop culture. The Oscar-winning film, Gone with the Wind, invoked a chivalric Southward. Lee'due south position every bit a national figure besides became established with the Pulitzer-prize winning biography written by Douglass Freeman. Freeman merged many of the Lost Cause and reconciliationist motifs and shaped the twentieth century image of Lee. Freeman presented Lee as an invincible general and morally superior figure whose life was paced by a business firm sense of duty. A reluctant secessionist, he only suffered defeat considering of overwhelming odds. [21]
In the 1950s, federal legislation formally adopted this national vision of Lee in the site interpretation. The National Park Service began to emphasize the Reconciliationist and Freeman estimation of Lee's military genius and post-war efforts at reuniting the nation. Symbolically, the legislation was enacted on the ninetieth anniversary of the surrender at Appomattox. Legislation in 1972 further solidified this new focus on Lee by changing the site proper name from the Custis-Lee Mansion to "Arlington Firm, the Robert E. Lee Memorial."
Post-obit the Civil Rights movement, more than Ceremonious War historians began to challenge the Lost Cause retentiveness. Lee biographers accept begun to question how Lee became a "Marble Man," and arcadian southern planter and Confederate soldier by exploring a more complex portrayal of his life. Researchers have challenged Lost Cause ideas of slavery as humane and enslaved people as happy. Interpreters at antebellum historical sites homes are at present exploring the life experience of those who were enslaved.
In recent years, Arlington House, The Robert East. Lee Memorial has adopted this more wholistic agreement of the plantation community and of Robert East. Lee. Exhibits at present include pregnant inquiry and interpretation into the life of enslaved inhabitants, Lee's views on slavery and Reconstruction, Civil War memory, and the plantation created past the Custis family.
Today the National Park Service continues to translate the history and evolving significant of Robert E. Lee.
Notes
[1] Republican Vindicator, (Staunton, VA) September 3, 1869
[two] Robert Eastward. Lee to Thomas L. Rosser, Dec. xiii, 1866. Lee Papers, University of Virginia Archives.
[3] Gary W. Gallagher, Lee and His Generals in War and Memory (Billy Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 261.
[four] David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, (Cambridge: Harvard University Printing, 2001), Chapter 8.
[5] Jubal Early, "1872 Altogether oration," in William Jones, Personal Reminiscences of General Robert E. Lee (New York: Forge, 2003), 42.
Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Colina: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 143.
[6] Thomas 50. Connelly, The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Club (Billy Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977) 27.
[vii] Connelly, Marble Man, 156-8.
[8] Janney, Remembering the Civil War, 180.
[9] Karen L. Cox, Dixie'south Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 32.
Janney, Remembering the Ceremonious War, 234.
[10] Cox, Dixie's Daughters,xxii.
[11] John J. Winberry, "'Lest We Forget': The Confederate Monument and the Southern Townscape," reprinted in Southeastern Geographer, vol. 55. No 1 (2015), twenty.
Cox, Dixie's Daughters, 61.
[12] David B. Freeman, Carved in Stone: The History of Stone Mountain (Macon, GA: Mercer Academy Press, 1997), 57.
[13] "Feds and Confeds Fraternizing," Portage (WI) Daily Register, September 22, 1887.
[xiv] Woodrow Wilson, July 4, 1913. Address at Gettysburg
[xv] "The Worship of Lee," The Minneapolis Tribune, May 30, 1890, pg. four.
[16] Connelly, Marble Man, 115.
[17] Janney, Remembering the Civil War, nine; 103.
[eighteen] Michael Chornesky, "Confederate Isle upon the Union's 'Most Hallowed Ground': The Battle to Interpret Arlington House, 1921-1937," Washington History ,vol. 27, no. one (Spring 2015), 26.
[19] "U.D.C Notes, The Lee Mansion," Amalgamated Veteran, Vol. 29 (1921), 350-1.
[xx] Chornesky, "Confederate Island," 28.
[21] James McPherson, "Foreword," in Richard Harwell, ed, Lee (New York: Touchstone, 1997).
Source: https://www.nps.gov/arho/learn/historyculture/memorialization-of-robert-e-lee-and-the-lost-cause.htm
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