The Myths of the war of Northern Aggression, Part I: Robert E. Lee, The Traitor and Oath Breaker

On Thursday, June 4th, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam announced that the Commonwealth would proceed with the removal of the statue honoring Confederate General Robert E. Lee, situated prominently in Richmond, "as soon as possible."[1] This decision represents more than a simple act of civic reorganization; it is a direct challenge to a persistent cultural narrative that has long attempted to reframe the legacy of the Confederacy as a matter of regional pride and historical heritage, rather than as a rebellion grounded in the preservation of human bondage.

Indeed, within modern American discourse, the imagery associated with the Confederacy is frequently sanitized and presented through the lens of tradition and regional identity—purportedly honoring the so-called “noble South.” However, this perception is not a reflection of historical fact, but rather the result of decades of deliberate historical revisionism, an intentional reshaping of collective memory aimed at obscuring the true motivations behind the Confederate insurrection. At the heart of this myth lies a curated fiction, one that selectively highlights romanticized elements of Southern culture while deliberately omitting the brutal reality of chattel slavery and the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.

Addressing this myth directly, historian Matthew A. Speiser writes:

“Specifically, they (Southerners) celebrated the South’s natural beauty and idyllic plantations, supported a white supremacist racial hierarchy in southern society, claimed liberty as a southern principle and the American Revolution as southern heritage, wrapped their sectionalism in a constitutional theory of state sovereignty, and nostalgically glorified the southern past.”[2]

This was not a defensive war to protect "heritage," nor a noble stand for abstract liberties. It was a calculated political and military effort to ensure the continuity of an economic system rooted in the dehumanization and forced labor of African-descended peoples. Poor White Southerners, many of whom owned no slaves themselves, were conscripted both literally and ideologically through relentless propaganda rooted in racial hierarchy. They were led to believe that their social standing and economic futures were inherently tied to the maintenance of White supremacy.

Moreover, even the language we use to describe the Civil War often obscures its reality. To frame the conflict merely as one between "the Union" and "the Confederacy" captures the political factions but blurs the actual national stakes. The war was, in the clearest possible terms, a rebellion by the Confederate States of America against the sovereign authority of the United States of America. It was a secessionist movement that sought to dissolve the Union in order to construct an entirely new nation—one unapologetically founded on the principles of slavery and racial subjugation.

Southern leaders and citizens alike were fully aware of their intentions. They did not secede in confusion or in defense of vague "state's rights" unrelated to slavery. Rather, they pursued disunion with clarity and conviction, believing deeply in the righteousness of their cause: the preservation of a social and economic order built on enslaved labor and racial domination. The so-called “state’s right” they championed was, in essence and in practice, the right to own human beings.

“The South was not leaving the United States because of the power of northern economic elites who in reality, as historian Bruce Levine observed, “feared alienating the slave owners more than they disliked slavery.” The secession of South Carolina, approved by the convention 169 votes to none, was about the preservation of slavery.”[3]

The invocation of sovereign rights by the Southern states was not born out of some principled commitment to constitutional theory or the sanctity of local governance. Rather, it emerged solely as a strategic mechanism to preserve the institution of slavery and uphold the rigid racial caste system upon which the Southern economy and social hierarchy depended. The underlying reality was this:

“By 1861 only about one-third of southern families in the 11 seceding states held slaves and the non-slaveholders always posed a potential problem for Confederate unity.”[4]

It is critical to understand that approximately two-thirds of white Southerners, an overwhelming majority, did not personally own enslaved individuals. Therefore, their participation in the Confederate cause was not motivated by the defense of their own direct economic interest in slavery. Rather, they were fighting for the preservation of a racialized social order, a strict and violently enforced separation of the races, that underpinned their understanding of Southern identity and way of life.

Propaganda served as a central instrument in this process. It was not merely a tool of persuasion but a calculated ideological apparatus designed to inflame anti-Black sentiment and reinforce White solidarity across class lines. By weaponizing racial fear and resentment, Southern elites convinced poor and non-slaveholding whites to invest in a system that, in material terms, offered them little benefit. The rhetoric framed slavery as a necessary safeguard for maintaining social stability and White supremacy, even for those who had no tangible stake in the ownership of human beings.

Historian James Oliver Horton highlights a particularly illuminating example of this propaganda machine in action. He draws attention to a special pre-Civil War edition of the Louisville Daily Courier, in which the ideological justification for slavery, and the broader racial hierarchy it supported, is laid bare. The publication stands as a testament to the strategic manipulation of public sentiment in service of a deeply unjust economic and social system.

The central thrust of the Louisville Daily Courier article was to stoke the fears of poor white Southerners by positing that the abolition of slavery would precipitate a catastrophic upheaval in the existing racial and socioeconomic order. It argued that, without the buffer of African American enslavement, poor whites would be thrust into direct economic and social competition with newly freed Black people—a competition they were warned they could not afford to lose.

The article’s logic was explicit: emancipation would elevate Black Americans to a position “on the level of the white race,” thereby collapsing the fragile social hierarchy that had granted even the most impoverished white person a sense of superiority based solely on race. It warned that the poorest whites would find themselves not only adjacent to Black people in physical space, but dangerously close in social standing as well.

The rhetorical questions posed by the article were designed to provoke visceral discomfort: Do they wish to send their children to schools in which the [N]egro children of the vicinity are taught? Do they wish to give the [N]egro the right to appear in the witness box to testify against them? These were not merely legal hypotheticals—they were framed as existential threats to the racial and moral order that the Southern elite insisted was divinely sanctioned.

The article culminated in a final, incendiary appeal, invoking what it presented as the ultimate horror: racial mixing. It asked whether non-slaveholding whites would be willing to "AMALGAMATE TOGETHER THE TWO RACES IN VIOLATION OF GOD’S WILL." [5] Here, the argument reached its emotional crescendo, drawing upon theological and racialized panic to assert that slavery was not simply a system benefiting the planter class—but a bulwark protecting all whites from racial degradation and societal collapse.

In the end, the article concluded with chilling clarity: non-slaveholding whites had an immense stake in the preservation of slavery. For them, African American bondage was not merely an institution—it was the very thing insulating them from social oblivion. Without it, they would be forced into intimate proximity with the people they had been taught to despise and fear, vying for work, space, and dignity on an even playing field they had never been prepared to enter.

In other words, the words and actions of Confederate leaders and their sympathizers leave little room for ambiguity: their own testimony makes abundantly clear that the preservation of slavery was not a peripheral issue, but the central driving force behind secession and the march to war.[6] Beyond the defense of slavery as an institution, the deeper ideological motivation was the preservation of a rigid racial caste system, one in which Black people were not only deemed inferior, but often regarded as subhuman. Southern whites, in defending this system, sought to enshrine their belief in White supremacy as both a social norm and a divinely sanctioned order.

Their interest in slavery was far more important than simple economics. As one southern prisoner explained to his Wisconsin-born guard ‘you Yanks want us to marry our daughters to n____s.’ This fear of a loss of racial status was common. A poor white farmer from North Carolina explained that he would never stop fighting because what he considered to be an abolitionist federal government was ‘trying to force us to live as the colored race.’[7]

The undeniable truth remains: while the Confederacy may have been defeated militarily in 1865, the South ultimately prevailed in the cultural and ideological war that followed. We continue to grapple with the enduring social consequences of that victory even today. It has been barely half a century since the Civil Rights Movement, an era in living memory, sought to dismantle the deeply entrenched systems of segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial terror that arose in the post-Reconstruction South. And it is worth emphasizing that the Civil Rights Movement took place not merely decades, but a full century after the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. In effect, African Americans were only granted equal—not exceptional—rights under the law a hundred years after they were legally declared free.

What that century reveals is a profound failure—whether through deliberate revisionism or sheer omission—to integrate the African American experience into the broader historical narrative. For generations, textbooks, public monuments, and civic rituals perpetuated a whitewashed version of American history that either ignored Black suffering or distorted its causes. This legacy of erasure and distortion continues into the present day, where modern neo-Confederate voices attempt to reframe the Civil War, casting it in the language of noble resistance, state sovereignty, and cultural preservation—while obscuring its true foundation in racial slavery.

Which brings us to the so-called “Lost Cause” narrative. From the immediate aftermath of the war to the present moment, Confederate apologists and revisionist historians have perpetuated a myth that seeks to recast the Confederacy as a misunderstood, even virtuous, entity. According to this myth, the South was not waging war to protect slavery, but to uphold the sanctity of states’ rights. The Union, in this telling, becomes an aggressor—invading a region that was merely striving to defend its traditional values and aristocratic culture.

Central to this revisionist mythos is the elevation—indeed, the deification—of General Robert Edward Lee. Lee is often portrayed as a tragic hero, a reluctant warrior of noble bearing, devoted to duty and honor above all else. But this romanticized depiction conveniently glosses over the ideological cause he served: the preservation of slavery and the maintenance of a racial hierarchy.

To be clear, like all historical figures, Lee was a complex human being, shaped by the context of his time. But complexity must not become an excuse for moral obfuscation. Lee made deliberate choices—choices that aligned him with a rebellion committed to White supremacy. This complexity is perhaps best revealed in his own words, taken from a letter he wrote to his wife in 1856:

There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influences of Christianity than from the storm and tempest of fiery controversy.”[8]

On one hand, Robert Edward Lee expressed the belief that slavery was a moral evil—yet, in a troubling and revealing contradiction, he asserted that the institution was more harmful to white slaveholders than to the Black people who were actually enslaved. This paternalistic rationalization reflects a deeply ingrained ideology in which Black suffering is minimized or dismissed altogether. Lee further indulged in the familiar trope that enslaved Africans were “better off” in the United States than they would have been in their native continent—a line of reasoning steeped in colonial arrogance and moral evasion. This kind of rhetorical hyperbole, which seeks to reframe enslavement as a benevolent civilizing force, is disturbingly echoed in modern times by figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Candace Owens, and other alt-right commentators who perpetuate revisionist talking points under the guise of historical objectivity.

Despite these contradictions, Lee is often celebrated in the South for his loyalty—not to the nation—but to his home state of Virginia. This act of regional allegiance is frequently cited as a justification for his veneration, especially by those seeking to sanitize his legacy. Yet it must be said plainly: Lee’s loyalty to Virginia came at the direct expense of his oath to the United States. His decision to lead a military rebellion against the Union constituted an act of betrayal—not just of a political entity, but of the constitutional order he had once sworn to uphold.

When the young Robert Edward Lee graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, he took the same oath of commission as all officers in service to the nation. That oath, which should have bound him to the Union above any personal or regional loyalty, would have been as follows:

“I, Robert Edward Lee, appointed a brevet second lieutenant in the Army of the United States, do solemnly swear, or affirm, that I will bear true allegiance to the United States of America, and that I will serve them honestly and faithfully against all their enemies or opposers whatsoever, and observe and obey the orders of the President of the United States, and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to the rules and articles for the government of the Armies of the United States.”[9]

It should be self-evident—particularly when considered in light of the oath taken by all commissioned officers of the United States military—that any officer who abandoned their national duty to align with their home state in open rebellion committed an act of treason and became, by definition, an oath-breaker. And yet, this reality remains obscured for many modern neo-Confederates and their sympathizers. For them, loyalty to the Confederacy is reimagined as a principled stand, and figures like Lee are held up as exemplars of honor rather than insurrection.

These are the individuals who decry the removal of Confederate statues and symbols—not merely out of historical interest, but as part of an ongoing attempt to preserve a sanitized, mythologized version of the past. Their resistance to confronting the full moral implications of the Confederacy reveals an unwillingness to reckon with what these symbols actually represent: not regional pride or military prowess, but a violent rebellion in defense of slavery and White supremacy.

It is indeed true that General Lee was admired by many of his contemporaries, including those who remained loyal to the Union. His military acumen and personal demeanor earned him respect from his peers at West Point. However, admiration for his abilities should not be confused with absolution for his actions. Had it not been for the strategic magnanimity of President Abraham Lincoln—whose vision of reconciliation often tempered the calls for retribution—many within the Union command would have seen Lee and other Confederate generals tried and executed as traitors to the United States.

Chief among those who held this view was Brigadier General Montgomery C. Meigs, himself a fellow graduate of West Point and a former subordinate of Lee in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Meigs, who went on to serve as the Quartermaster General of the Union Army, came to regard Lee with deep contempt. Once a colleague, he later saw Lee not only as a betrayer of their shared oath, but as an active threat to the republic. In no uncertain terms, Meigs labeled him an insurgent. He wrote:

“No man who ever took the oath to support the Constitution as an officer of our army or navy...should escape without loss of all his goods & civil rights & expatriation,” Meigs wrote to his father. He urged that Lee as well as Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, who also had resigned from the federal Army to join the enemy, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis “should be put formally out of the way if possible by sentence of death [and] executed if caught.”[10]

According to the military code in force at the time—the Articles of War, adopted 10 April 1806 and in effect throughout the Civil War—the actions of any soldier or sailor who abandoned their commission in the United States Army or Navy to take up arms for the Confederacy were not merely acts of defiance; they were acts of treason punishable by death. The Articles made this unequivocally clear.

Specifically, under Article 7 of the 101 Articles of War, desertion in the face of duty—particularly when compounded by service to a hostile force—was to be met with the gravest of consequences:

Art. 7. Any officer or soldier who shall begin, excite, cause or join in, any mutiny or sedition, in any troop or company in the service of the United States, or in any party, post detachment, or guard shall suffer death, or such other punishments as by a court-martial shall be inflicted.

Yet, in his capacity as a forward-thinking statesman, President Abraham Lincoln chose not to pursue retribution against the Confederate leadership following their surrender. This decision, rooted in a desire for national reconciliation, ultimately spared the nation from the possibility of prolonged guerrilla warfare and insurgency that could have plagued the United States for decades to come. However, while the Civil War’s military conflict may have formally ended, the cultural battles it left in its wake are far from resolved. Indeed, these struggles continue to this day, particularly in the contest over the removal of symbols and imagery that venerate the vestiges of those who took up arms against the Union.

At the core of this debate lies a fundamental issue: Black Americans, as citizens of this nation, should not be compelled to endure public displays of reverence for those who fought to enslave them. The myth of the Confederacy as a noble defender of Southern culture must be put to rest once and for all. The truth is that the Confederacy was built upon a foundation of racial subjugation and a violent insistence on maintaining the institution of slavery. While these symbols may hold historical significance, they do not belong in the public squares or parks of our nation. They belong in museums, where history is preserved, but not glorified. Public spaces, where all citizens are meant to feel equal and valued, should not be sites of veneration for those who sought to destroy the United States in order to perpetuate human bondage.

The recent deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd (and the reactions to them) each represent a tragic reflection of the enduring racial inequalities that plague this nation. We are reminded of the divisions which festered during and after the Civil War have not been completley eradicated. What is different today is that African Americans are no longer enslaved; they are citizens with rights that must be recognized and respected in the same manner as those of any other citizen. The fight for equal justice, dignity, and freedom is ongoing, and it is incumbent upon this nation to confront its history, dismantle its monuments to treason, and ensure that the rights of Black, White and all Americans are upheld in practice, not merely on paper.

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[1] Bill Chappell, “America Reckons with Racial Injustice: Massive Robert E. Lee Statue In Richmond, Va., Will Be Removed,” NPR/WBEZ, June 4, 2020, (accessed June 5, 2020), https://www.npr.org/2020/06/04/869519175/massive-robert-e-lee-statue-in-richmond-va-will-be-removed

[2] Matthew A. Speiser, “Origins of the Lost Cause: The Continuity of Regional Celebration in the White South, 1850-1872” Essays in History Annual Journal, University of Virginia (accessed June 5, 2020) http://www.essaysinhistory.com/origins-of-the-lost-cause-the-continuity-of-regional-celebration-in-the-white-south-1850-1872/

[3] James Oliver Horton, “Origins of the Lost Cause: The Continuity of Regional Celebration in the White South, 1850-1872” Essays in History Annual Journal, University of Virginia (accessed June 5, 2020) http://www.essaysinhistory.com/origins-of-the-lost-cause-the-continuity-of-regional-celebration-in-the-white-south-1850-1872/

[4] Ibid

[5] James Oliver Horton, “Confronting Slavery and Revealing the "Lost Cause"” National Park Service Online (accessed June 5, 2020) https://www.nps.gov/articles/confronting-slavery-and-revealing-the-lost-cause.htm

[6] Ibid

[7] James Oliver Horton, “Origins of the Lost Cause: The Continuity of Regional Celebration in the White South, 1850-1872” Essays in History Annual Journal, University of Virginia, Ibid

[8] Emory M. Thomas, Robert E. Lee: A Biography. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995.) 173

[9] “Oaths of Enlistment and Oaths of Office,” U.S. Army Center of Military History, accessed June 5, 2020, https://history.army.mil/html/faq/oaths.html#:~:text=%22I%20_____%20swear%20(or%20affirm,set%20over%20me%20by%20them.%22

[10] Robert M. Poole, “How Arlington National Cemetery Came to Be” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2209, (accessed June 5, 2020), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-arlington-national-cemetery-came-to-be-145147007/