Yes, you write in the book that slavery was an “abstraction” for Lee, and, about this incident, add, “It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that when his fury had cooled, he was sickened at himself as much for the damage done to his own self-image as for the cruelty inflicted on the three fugitives.” Can you talk about what you meant?
I think he was sickened at the fact that he’d lost control. He is supposed to be the perfect man. He is supposed to be the marble model, as he was called at West Point. Here he is behaving like Simon Legree. He’s behaving like some monster. When he reflects on it, this undermines the whole image of perfection that he had been trying to cultivate. What it looks like is not Robert E. Lee the marble model. It looks like Light-Horse Harry all over again because, during the Revolution, Light-Horse Harry had a reputation for dealing with people like that. And it’s at that moment that Robert E. Lee most resembles his father, that whipping—and resembling his father was what he had spent all of his life trying not to do.
You bring Lee’s story and legacy up through the present day, and you write, about the 2017 rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville protesting the removal of a Lee statue, “Yet less was heard after Charlottesville about Lee and treason than about Lee and white supremacy. Perhaps this is because in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of globalism, the notion of treason has acquired an antique feel, like blasphemy or transportation to the antipodes, as if modern individuals should no longer be held to the standard of absolute loyalty to a single political entity.” Can you explain what you mean here?
We live in a world that is so intimately interconnected and intertwined. I can be in instant communication. What does that make the nation-state seem like? It makes it seem like something old-fashioned. What is treason except the betrayal of loyalty to the nation-state? I think people have been less inclined to find fault with Lee on the grounds of treason simply because treason has just come to seem a little bit out of place.
Is it possible that the conversation about Lee after Charlottesville focused more on white supremacy because it was a white-supremacist rally in support of Lee?
Yeah, that certainly has a role to play in it.
I thought that might have some role.