“So,” the man across the high-top cocktail table said, precise eye contact belying years of military bearing. “What’s your role in all this?”
Fishing my nametag from behind my tie, I replied with all the authority someone five weeks on the job could muster. “I’m the Naming Commission’s Lead Historian.”
“Oh,” he said, pausing and planning his words. “Well, as a historian, how do you feel about changing the name of Fort Lee? Isn’t it, sort of, erasing history, given all that Robert E. Lee did as a leader and a strategist?”
It was the late summer of 2021. I had been thinking about this question all that afternoon on my drive to Petersburg from Washington, DC. I had also marveled, as always, at how with a few gallons of gas and a cup of black coffee, it had taken less than two and half hours to cover the same ground that accounted for more than two and a half months of vicious fighting in the Overland campaign of 1864.
“Well,” I offered, preparing myself to hear words in the neighborhood of woke, “it isn’t erasing history. We should study Robert E. Lee, of course, but should we commemorate him as a military hero? I mean, he was fighting against the United States, and for perpetual enslavement. What would have happened if Lee had won? What would our nation look like?”
For a moment, silence reigned. My plate of crudité felt like grapeshot in my hands. Then the gentleman across from me, a Virginian and a decades-long veteran of civilian service to the military at Fort Lee, responded. “That’s really interesting,” he said. “You know, I had never thought of it that way.”
Crisis averted. The irrepressible conflict dissipated. The point was taken. Somewhere, an angel playing The Battle Hymn of The Republic got their wings.
Lest this vignette seem self-congratulatory, I desire no credit for any originality in my response. Such talking points are the warp and woof of seminars, lectures, podcasts and books on Civil War memory. Like all scholarship, they build on the efforts of others. I had most recently encountered the Lee counterfactual in Ty Seidule’s outstanding memoir Robert E. Lee and Me.[1]
But what struck me then—and has struck me again and again over the course of my work and reflections on the Naming Commission—was the sincerity with which the question was asked, and the ease with which the answer was accepted. Both demonstrate how much Civil War memory has changed over the past thirty years, due to the efforts of generations of scholars, teachers, and activists.