- History and memory are two different things.

One is built on facts and documents.

The other is built on tradition, myth, and often politics.

Today's guest dissects the history of the American Civil War, and the legacy of the myths it spawned about the cause of the war that killed more Americans than any other.

He's Ty Seidule, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with the Pell Center at Salve.

- This week we're joined by Ty Seidule, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general, who is the author of a forceful book, "Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause."

He joins us today from his home in New York.

Ty, thank you so much for being with us.

- Oh, great to be here, Jim.

Thank you for inviting me.

- I read your book with real interest, and enthusiasm because you tell a really compelling story about your own journey and sort of grappling with the myth of the Civil War and the Lost Cause, but this really begins with a question you answered in 2015, was the Civil War about slavery?

What was your answer?

- My answer was a simple one, which is that the citizens of the Southern states were fighting to protect and expand their peculiar institution of slavery, a repugnant institution.

It's sort of like real estate.

There are three reasons for the Southern states to secede.

It's slavery, slavery, slavery.

And that engendered an enormous amount of hostility both within the army, 'cause I was a serving army officer at the time, who investigated me for political speech.

I got death threats to my West Point email address, and I got hundreds of emails from my fellow citizens telling me how wrong I was.

And from that I really gathered that history is dangerous.

It's dangerous because it goes after our myths, and our identities.

And when somebody challenges those myths, the reaction as I found could be ferocious.

- So, I mean, I think, not to be too flattering, but I think a lesser person might have shrunk from this engagement.

The first week, I think you had five million views of this video, and now it's somewhere up over 32 million views when I checked last night.

Why didn't you just sort of say, look, I answered a question that's enough for me.

I'm gonna go back to being a university professor, and study history instead of trying to be history.

What compelled you to stay engaged in this debate?

- Well, I think it was really my service at West Point, and I looked around, and saw there were so many things named after Confederacy, particularly Robert E. Lee at West Point.

When I started this back in 2008, 2009, I was living on Lee Road by Lee Gate in Lee Housing area.

And I went by Lee Barracks.

Barracks are our highest honor.

We have named them after Washington, MacArthur, Grant, Sherman, and there's one after Lee.

I remember looking at that saying, gee, why does the United States Military Academy have this named after him?

And so I ended up running all over campus, finding over a dozen things named after Lee.

And that really started me to go back into the archives, and find out why these things were named after Lee.

So by the time I did that video in 2015, I'd already figured out that this was something that changed me.

It changed my life, it changed my research, it changed the way I saw the world, and I no longer could stop despite the criticism.

And I got criticism from the nation, a left leaning organization that said I was a propagandist for the army.

I had criticism from "Stars and Stripes" saying I was too close to a political organization.

And the army, man, that was what really scared me.

I thought my career was over because I said the Civil War was about slavery, but once you know the facts and you know you're right, it's hard to stop, and I just couldn't shut up about it.

- So why was that answer, yes, so controversial?

- Yeah, why is the answer because if you say the Civil War was about slavery, if that is the answer that destroys a couple of things.

It destroys this myth of the Lost Cause, which says that the Civil War wasn't fought over slavery.

That enslaved people were happy in their condition.

That Ulysses S. Grant was a butcher and a drunk.

That post-war reconstruction was an evil failure, which it was not.

And eventually that you get to Lee being the finest human.

These things can't be argued if the Civil War is about slavery because it's an inherently immoral war.

It is about slavery.

So the entire understanding that many Americans have is that the Civil War wasn't about slavery.

And if it's not about slavery, then the South, the Confederate states were honorable.

If it is about slavery, the Southern states were not honorable because they were fighting for an immoral, and evil institution based on rape, selling families apart for profit, the exploitation and torture, and murder of other human beings.

So the central idea is if the Civil War is about slavery, the Confederates, therefore, cannot have fought an honorable fight.

So it's a big deal to have everyone agree that the Civil War was fought about slavery, and it totally was.

- So do you have any sense of how many people then believed, and still believe that it was not about slavery?

I mean, I'm guessing the numbers.

- Yeah, if you go, excuse me.

If you go to just like the Pew Charitable Trusts, or other online people that look at this issue, excuse me.

You find that sometimes it's 40, 50% of Americans don't believe that it's only slavery, so yeah.

And even if you take the citizenship test, it states rights or slavery, it's both, so you can still get this in high school.

So yeah, it's still a big deal.

People still don't believe it because it has to change your worldview if you believe it.

It's a central construct in American history in a way because the Civil War is our major war.

It's a major one that we fought.

It changed the way we think about ourselves.

And if you say it's about slavery, and just one Mississippi, when they do their secession declarations say we're fighting for African slavery.

South Carolina says it, Georgia says it, all these states say that's the reason we're going to war.

So you don't have to believe historian Ty Seidule.

You just have to look at the secession declarations.

They're very proud to say we're fighting for our social system of slavery.

- Ty, the story intertwines with your service at West Point, because in addition to being a professor of history there, you also served on, I believe, chaired the memorialization committee.

And you've told the story I know about the experience of the post 9/11 generation of West Point cadets who in about 2011 realized that they need a way of memorializing their classmates who have fallen in service to the country in the wars against the Islamic extremism and in Iraq.

What happened then that sort of ties into this story about how we memorialize Confederate War Veterans?

- Yeah, well, so I was chair of the memorialization committee, and we're really reeling.

We have lost over 100 graduates killed in the wars on terror.

Yale lost zero.

So we were really hurting, and we had no central place for memorialization.

So as the chair I came up with this idea to repurpose a room as a memorial room, and put the 1,550 some names, who as Lincoln said, gave the last full measure devotion to the nation.

Great idea, everybody agreed, got money, got design, but then there was this one question.

Should those who fought and died in Confederate Gray go in our memorial room, who graduated from West Point, but fought for the Confederacy?

And I argued, 'cause by then I completely changed, no, because they renounced their oath, abrogated their oath, fought against their country, killed U.S. Army soldiers to destroy their country for the worst possible reason to create a slave republic.

So I said, no, and I gave this argument to our leadership, and I failed, miserably did I fail.

They wanted to bring Confederates in.

They said they wanted to bring people together.

They didn't want to be like the Sunni and the Shia fighting for generations, which is the worst historical analogy in the history of the world.

So I failed utterly in my ability to convince them, even though I had a brilliant argument just ask me.

I had a brilliant argument.

The facts weren't enough to change them because they had grown up with this Lost Cause myth.

They were a bunch of white men mainly, and they would not accept my historical argument.

- So when you talk about the Lost Cause, it's folks who are deeply enmeshed in the history of the Civil War know what we're talking about, but for those who maybe have a more casual understanding of the war itself, what is the myth of the Lost Cause?

Where does it originate?

And how much resonance does it still have?

You write faithfully in your book, you grew up in the South enmeshed in this, immersed in this myth.

Can you just walk us through that a little bit?

- Right, well, imagine that the white South, remember, when we say the South the white is often silent.

The white South went to war to protect, and expand the institution of slavery.

And they didn't just lose, they were destroyed.

60% of wealth is gone.

A quarter of all white men age 18 to 45 are either dead or wounded.

So they sow the wind, they reap the whirlwind.

So they start in 1865, really before the smoke clears from the battlefield to try to understand why this war happened, and what it meant.

And so they come up with these reasons that are not true.

The war wasn't fought over slavery, not true.

Enslaved people were happy.

Slavery wasn't that bad.

In fact, it was the best means of labor for the South.

This is an absolute monstrosity.

That Grant was a butcher and a drunk.

Post-war reconstruction, that's the period from 1865 to 1877, which was our best chance at biracial democracy was a failure, no.

Thousands of Black men held high elected office.

It was our best chance at biracial democracy.

And at the top of the Lost Cause myth is Robert E. Lee, the finest human who ever lived, but the Lost Cause matters.

Why does it matter?

Because it really, between 1890 and 1920, the white South puts in Jim Crow laws.

They write new constitutions to exclude Black people from the franchise.

They take away the voting rights.

They take away anything except to make them sort of peons, peasants in this new society.

And they enforce that with white terror.

5,000 Black men, women and children are lynched.

This is the same time the Confederate monuments go up outside courthouses because Black people in the South can only go into the courthouse as custodians, or as defendants.

So those monuments are to show that the whites are back in the saddle.

And what does this mean?

It is the creation of a racial police state.

That's the South I was born into, an apartheid racial police state.

Remember, we've only been a democracy for about 50 years because in the South, Black people were not allowed to vote, not allowed to really have any sort of high office until the late 1960s.

- So in the wake of asking that question, and all of the reaction to that, your wife fairly quickly discerned why this issue was particularly sensitive to you.

Can you discuss that, share that with us why?

- My wife is the hero of this book.

After this I lost this pipe at our academic board, that's our leadership at West Point.

I went back to her tail between my legs, saying that my brilliant argument failed.

And she said, "Well, Ty, did you tell them your own background about why you're so passionate about this?"

I said, "No, historians tell other people's stories.

They don't tell their own."

She said, "Listen, if you're ever going to have any success changing people's minds about that, you gotta fess up.

Be honest about your own background.

Tell them how you grow up.

Tell them why this is important to you now."

And she was absolutely right.

- So tell us a little bit more about your background.

- Yeah, so I was born in Northern Virginia in 1962 when the South was a racial police state.

And everything in my life made Lee the great hero.

I wanted to be a Virginia gentleman like Robert E. Lee.

Alexandria used to be part of the District of Columbia.

It retroceded back to Virginia in 1847 to protect the slave trade.

Alexandria was the major hub of the slave trade.

It was also a part of the massive resistance against integration.

It was the site of Northern Virginia 11 lynchings.

And I was bused across town from the white elementary school, Douglas MacArthur to the segregated all Black school.

And what was the name of that?

Robert E. Lee Elementary.

So I lived in part of that apartheid state, but I thought it was great.

Status, to be a Virginia gentleman meant status and power.

And that's what I wanted.

That was what I grew up in.

My first book "Meet Robert E.

Lee."

My first "Gone with the Wind, one of the most racist books in history was the first adult book I read.

And my textbooks designed by the state of Virginia said that slavery wasn't bad, and segregation was the best thing.

So I grew up in a society based on white supremacy.

- Ty, did that experience shape your decision to join the army to serve?

I mean, the adulation of Robert E. Lee, and sort of the martial virtues that are often associated with him, was that part of what drew you to service in the army?

- Well, frankly, I ran out of money, and I took an ROTC scholarship 'cause I had no money to stay.

I went to Washington and Lee University.

So I think maybe in the back of my mind that was there, but for the most part when I came in the army, and signed up for an ROTC in the early '80s, I mean, the army was not given high status in society.

So, no, it was mainly that, but at W&L when I was there, I did see these ideals of Washington and Lee.

And, in fact, I took my oath of office there in Lee Chapel with Lee and Washington right there and in front of, I took my commission in front of this recumbent statue of Robert E. Lee lying asleep on the battlefield in whitest of marble to show his purity that he was fighting for the white people in the South surrounded by Confederate flags, the enemy flag.

So, I mean, it's amazing to me just how W&L was the shrine of the South.

And that's where I went to become a Virginia gentleman.

- The question that leaps to my mind is, so you grow up in this experience.

You have this experience at Washington and Lee University.

When do you start piecing things together that Robert E. Lee is not the greatest individual to ever grace the land that is these United States of America, that he is not this great immortal hero?

When did you come to realize that this history, this myth was so problematic?

- Way too late.

I already had a PhD in history when I figured this out.

So I knew that the Civil War was about slavery, but I could still somehow honor Lee.

And when I was at West Point, living on Lee Road by Lee Gate, I went and found all these things named after Lee.

And I went into the archives as a historian to try to answer the question, when did they come?

Why were they there?

And I thought, oh, it's probably 1870.

Right after Lee dies that West Point will then honor him.

No, in the 19th century up 'til in the 19th century, West Point saw the Confederates as traitors.

And that changed my mind about it.

Article three, section three of the Constitution says that there's only one crime in the Constitution, and that is treason, waging war against the United States, which Lee clearly did.

So I went and said, well, when did these monuments to Lee come?

Well, in the 1800s all of them were anti-Confederate.

No Confederates in our cemetery, none in the Memorial Hall.

The person who founded the alumni organization said, I'll never forgive those who forgot the flag to follow false gods.

Even duty, honor, country, our great motto, anti-Confederate.

The oath I took anti-Confederate written in 1862.

So when did they come, huh?

So I went back to the archives looking at it.

They came in the 1930s, the 1950s, the 1970s as a reaction to integration.

When we bring African Americans to West Point, the first Black cadet, Benjamin O. Davis Jr. in the 1930s, the 1950s when the army is integrating, the 1970s when minority mission is starting, there is this rebound of Confederate memorialization.

It's a reaction to integration.

It's another form of white supremacy.

And that ticked me off and made me re-look at everything.

Excuse me.

- So, Ty, statues of Lee are coming down in many parts of the country.

Books such as yours are having an influence.

Do you see the mythology of Lee, and the Confederacy changing, meaning the truth coming out in terms of what people believe, and in terms of what is being taught in schools?

Where do we stand now?

- I do feel hope.

I mean, my bumper sticker is Treason for Slavery.

Lee chose treason to preserve slavery.

As a soldier anyway, I think that's an easy call, but yes and no.

So there are over 120 statues that have come down.

Still 1,700 Confederate statues still up, but major ones have come down.

If you had told me that the ones in Richmond would've come down, amazing, I can't believe it.

Most of what I have written about in my book will be whether it's in the army, West Point, at Washington and Lee, in Alexandria, Richmond, Charlottesville, all those will have come down.

Most of the ones I wrote about will come down by the beginning of 2024.

So I do see hope that this is true.

I see hope from the naming commission that I was on that changed the names of the army bases changed so many of these things.

So yeah, I do have hope that a more nuanced understanding, correct understanding of the Civil War is coming, but every time that there is a belief in this, there's a counterrevolution, and you certainly see that coming with the way particularly Southern schools are talking about high school history.

- Ty, you perfectly segued into where I wanted to go.

The interesting, really compelling postscript to the book is that after the book is published, you are named to a congressionally mandated commission to reconsider the names of American military bases that carried the names of Confederate generals.

Fort Bragg, Fort Lee in Virginia, among others.

Can you tell us a little bit about that work, and some of the American heroes whose names will now, or now grace those bases?

- Yeah, the proudest moment of my career really was to be able to take these nine bases that were named after traitors who killed U.S. Army soldiers, some of whom never served in the U.S. Army, and named them now after inspirational figures in our history.

So, for instance, Fort Lee is going to be Fort Walker.

Correction, I can't remember which one, is going to named after Mary Walker, who was the first and only woman to receive the Medal of Honor.

She was a surgeon, a doctor during the Civil War, stayed with her soldiers and was captured, spent time in a POW camp, amazing story.

Fort Polk in Louisiana is gonna be named Fort Johnson.

Henry Johnson, who was wounded 21 times in battle in World War I in a segregated army.

And when he came back to Harlem after the war, they started chanting his nickname through Harlem, which was Here comes Black Death, an incredible inspirational story.

Fort Hood will be now Fort Cavazos, a Latino who born on the King Ranch in Texas, went to Texas Tech with two Distinguished Service Crosses.

Amazing stories.

And Fort Benning, which is now named after the Moore family.

Hal Moore who is in "We Were Soldiers Once... and Young" and his wife who started the casualty notification process.

So, yeah, these are inspirational names that every soldier, and every American should be proud of.

- So, Ty, there are still a lot of schools and streets in other places named after Confederate generals, and other political leaders.

What can concerned citizens do in terms of having those removed or changed?

- Yeah, it's a great question, and, in fact, in the back of my book I kinda have a whole list of things that people could do for that, but the main thing is, remember, we're a federal society.

Where states and local communities put those up, and states and local communities have to take them down.

And we can't do like Hungary did, which is to put them all in one park.

The Stalin, Lenin, Marx statues are in one park.

It has to be done in each local community, but you can go and find out who has the ability to do that.

Usually it's a local community that does that.

Start a petition, go to your local council meetings, and start by getting signatures, so everybody can do this.

Except in a few states where Alabama, Tennessee, and others have passed laws that prevent this from happening.

Recently, two schools in Alabama changed their names.

They were 80% Black student body.

And so they had to pay a $50,000 fine to the state to be allowed to change that.

So there are problems in some of these former states of the Confederacy that need to be addressed, but the only way to do that is through civic action.

- Hey, Ty, what do you say to those who might hear this argument, or watch this program and respond, but you're stripping the South of a heritage?

- Yeah, well, remember, I'm not changing history.

We're changing commemoration.

Commemoration is about our values.

It's about who we honor, and if that no longer fits then we should change it.

These statues and monuments went up when the South was a racial police state.

Black citizens had no ability to protest this because they had no voice in government.

If by engaging in this history it doesn't make us weaker, it makes us stronger.

So we're not changing a heritage.

The American heritage is that we're the United States of America.

We're not the Confederate states of America.

Would you want to be the Confederate states of America that had enslaved people?

This is a terrible heritage, a racist heritage, a heritage that all Americans should reject, and instead take the heritage of the United States, United States Army, which, again, I was a proud member of for 36 years.

That's who we should be doing.

We have lots of inspirational heroes, and we should find those stories, not those who chose treason to preserve slavery.

- Ty, reading the book I found myself thinking about some recent events, January 6th and the insurrection, and the very famous photograph of a young man carrying the Confederate battle flag through the halls of Congress, something that never happened in the Civil War.

I think about the violent protests in Charlottesville in 2017.

I think about the shooting at the church in South Carolina.

And it seems like a lot of these dark forces are not completely expunged from the American experience.

How concerned are you about the continued appeal of those dark forces?

And we've got about two minutes left in the show.

- Well, I am concerned particularly about to be a social studies teacher in the South where they are now the state of Virginia is saying seven times in these new standard objectives of learning that you should mention Robert E. Lee, and Martin Luther King not at all.

So this history matters, and that's certainly something that we need to worry about, but on the other hand, we have changed so much in this country, we really have.

And there's so much that gives me hope.

This naming commission that we finished, we finished it not one member of Congress, or state federal, or local level has criticized our work in that.

I find that amazing.

There is a change that we understand that Confederates no longer represent the values of this country.

And if they no longer represent the values of this country, which is treason for slavery, then we should change how we honor things.

We're not there yet, but I always think about Winston Churchill who said that you can count on Americans to do the right thing after they've exhausted all other options.

I think we're on the right path, but it takes engaged citizens to fight it.

And there will always be a counterrevolution against equal rights.

There's always been that every time there is a movement toward equal rights, the counterrevolution comes, whether it's reconstruction, whether it's the civil rights movement, whether it's the murder of George Floyd, and what came after that, we've got to fight against that counterrevolution.

- Hey, Ty, we only got about 15 seconds, but I know you're at Hamilton College now, and you're doing some work to try to bring people together around divisive partisan issues.

Literally 15 seconds, tell us about that work.

- Yeah, common ground where we believe that those at a liberal arts college like ours need to hear conservative voices just like we need to hear liberal voices.

We need to have all sorts of voices to be able to come together to bridge the partisan divide, and think of ourselves as Americans.

And we can do that in an academic setting, and respect each other while we disagree.

- It's tremendous work.

The book is tremendous.

Ty Seidule, "Robert E. Lee and Me."

Thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square" you can find us on Facebook, or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For Wayne, I'm Jim asking you to join us again next time for More "Story in the Public Square."

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