though I am not quite sure whether it’s Al’s or Robert E. Lee’s. Click here when you are finished crying.
Update: Just a few of the sources that Al Stone uses to interpret R.E. Lee.
Gods and Generals by Jeff Sharra
Killer Angels by Michael Sharra
The Last Full Measure by Jeff Sharra
The South was Right by James & Walter Kennedy
A view of the Constitution of the United States of America by William Rawle
When in the Course of Human Events by Charles Adams
Republic of Republics by Bernard J. Sage
Anyone surprised?
Per your instructions, I clicked when I was finished crying, and now I want to make a comment about your post regarding Lee’s decision to resign from the Army and accept a commission from Virginia.
I sympathize with your efforts to bring more balance to the historical consideration of this moment; I even sympathize with your tendency to chide men like Al Stone for their myth-steeped take on the Civil War.
But with the name of your blog in mind, I’m wondering if you could take the discussion a step further: What does this “rewriting” of Lee’s decision say about how and why we remember the Civil War?
Perhaps we are too quick to turn to “honor” as an explanation, but don’t we have a cultural (and for a time even political) need to exonerate Lee? To bring him back into the American fold by not judging his decision too harshly, by not — as unnamed critics do in the newspaper article you link to — calling him a traitor?
The myth of Lee may be bad history but it’s also played an important role in putting the country back together again.
I know there are all sorts of caveats and potential objections to that last statement, so I’m curious to know what you think.