In 1922, when Lincoln was "enshrined" in his enormous "temple" on the National Mall, the United Daughters of the Confederacy tried to counter with a huge carving of Lee at Stone Mountain, Ga., unveiled two years later. Their effort floundered when the sculptor of the Lee carving, Gutzon Borglum, feuded with the UDC over finances and personality clashes and left to carve presidents, including Lincoln, at Mount Rushmore. Borglum’s Lee was later blasted off the mountain, making way for Henry Augustus Lukeman’s sculpture of Lee, Davis, and Stonewall Jackson.
In 1924, at the unveiling ceremony for Borglum’s short-lived Lee, Plato Durham—former dean at Emory University—gave an address in which he, too, deified the general. This time Lee was described not as the Son of God, but as a Roman sun god: “Oh Mountain, speak your message well…When the rain of heaven beats upon your majestic face, let all men say ‘Lee is weeping for the sorrows of a people.’ When the sun of morning strikes along your altitudes, let mankind behold a newer Sol Invictus and exclaim ‘The Invincible Light.’”
The deification of Lee had deadly consequences. Memorials to the general depicted him in uniform, exalting the Confederate cause and its faith in white supremacy—what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the religion of whiteness.” By honoring Lee as a martyr to a noble cause, Southerners could resist looking inward and reconsidering the truth about slavery and the Civil War. Instead, with Lee as their idol, Southern believers in whiteness unleashed a century of violence: from the white knights of the Ku Klux Klan, burning crosses and murdering Black Americans, to the white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va. in 2017, who came to rally round a statue of Lee, wielding torches and running down pedestrians.
Donald Trump responded to the violence in Charlottesville by saying that there were “very fine people” on both sides. And now that he is the Christlike martyr—whose faithful followers proved willing, on Jan. 6, 2021, to storm the Capitol, attack police officers, and threaten to hang then-vice president Mike Pence—Americans are left to wonder what further violence might emerge from such twisted faith.