For a conquered people, there's always the satisfaction of hating. And so
the Confederate battle flag may be waved at a racist rally. Or it may be
tacked on or removed from a state flag for separate but equally confused
reasons. Is there any symbol of the South - from "Dixie" to the Southern
belle - that has not been commercialized, burlesqued, exploited, debunked,
by turns celebrated and frowned on?
Yes. There is one who has withstood it all: Robert E. Lee. Not that there
aren't always those who would use him for their own purposes, whether high
or low. One is not sure who's worse: the professional Southerners who hide
behind Lee or the professional debunkers who are always trying to expose
him. In both cases, it is the use of Lee for some mundane polemical purpose
that is the sin. Happily, there is always something unconvincing in such
efforts. They inevitably fall flat, like a contrived moral attached to a
fable so whole and complete that to comment on it seems superfluous, even
sacrilegious.
Lee is present still, but not in the way other historical figures are. The
mention of his name inevitably elevates, shaming his critics, calming his
admirers, reminding all of what is truly important. Not victory or defeat
but honor.
It's not clear just when the general left history and entered myth, but it
is clear that he represents something more than the sum total of his battles
or even his life. In the end, it is not what Lee did or did not do that
explains his appeal. It is what he was, and
still is. At least to some of us, the few of us left. You know who you are.
And even if we were Legion, it would still feel as if we were few. Every
January 19th, a stillness comes, and vainglory departs. A certain
perspective sets in.
It is not his victories that elevate Lee. It is Lee who elevates his
victories, and in the end elevates his defeat. It is his acceptance of all
things with honor that makes the conventional meaning of victory and defeat
inapplicable in his case. He was the same Lee after Chancellorsville as he
was after Appomattox.
The historians who have tried to crack the alabaster mystery that is Lee and
unveil some complicated mechanism whirring deep within have succeeded only
in shattering their own theories. They keep running up against the serenity
of the man and the myth, and can't be sure which is which, or even if there
is a difference.
Once fluency has replaced deliberation, and deconstruction supplanted
simplicity, of course Lee would become a mystery. His motives seem
inexplicable in this time because he explained them so simply in his own:
duty, honor, country. (His country was not even the South but Virginia - a
concept of loyalty beyond the mobile, modern bicoastal mind.)
Lee's was but the code of the gentleman. But who now can remember what a
gentleman was? Therefore we conclude that there never really was such a
thing. We assume there had to be some self-interest in Lee, and that we can
find it if we just keep chipping away at the marble man. Shard by shard, we
will yet explain him, until his spell lies shattered into a hundred
different pieces. Instead, it is we who are shattered, revealed as
incomplete, broken and, worse, unaware of it.
Modernity, which is another name for the American experience, is incapable
of seeing wholeness. And it is his wholeness that explains Lee's emotion
without sentimentality, his mythology without fictiveness.
Lee did not exult in victory or explain in defeat. At Chancellorsville,
arguably the most brilliant victory ever achieved by an American commander,
his thoughts seemed only of the wounded Jackson. As if he understood that
losing Jackson would be to lose the war, that nothing would be the same
afterward. At Appomattox, he was intent on the best terms he could secure
for his men. His own fate did not seem to concern him except for the ways in
which it might affect others - his family, his countrymen, the next
generation. From beginning to end, his circumstances changed, but he
remained the same. And does yet.
If the South is more than a geographic designation, if there is still a
South worthy of the name, it is because myth continues to shape her, and
Southerners may still be able to imagine what it is to be whole, all of a
piece.
When Flannery O'Connor was asked why Southerners seem to have a penchant for
writing about freaks, she would say: Because in the South we are still able
to recognize a freak when we see one. To do that, one must have some idea of
what wholeness would be. In these latitudes, the idea of wholeness has a
name:
Lee.