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Robert E. Lee’s Black Family
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"In this stunning and well-researched book, Kevin Levin catches the new waves of the study of memory, black soldiers, and the darker underside of the Civil War as well as anyone has... Levin is both superb scholar and public historian, showing us a piece of the real war that does now get into the books, as well as into site interpretation."
David Blight, Author of Race and Reunion
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
wow. Great find.
It would be better to flog Neo-Cons with it if they were direct from Marse Robert.
Light Horse Harry was a ne’er do well and that he visited the slave quarters after hours in hardly shocking.
He did do good work in the Revolution but beyond that there is little about the man to laud.
Why do we have to worry about whether there is something to laud?
We look to the past for inspiration as much as for dry facts.
you yourself have often put people forward as examples to inspire and to emulate and honor.
If we didn’t feel the need to laud past people we’d never bother to build statues to them.
This sort of situation is probably far more common than many Americans, black or white, recognize today. The Custis men were somewhat infamous in their day for their close, er, relations with female slaves, and George W. P. Custis, Lee’s father-in-law, was even the subject of a bad pun made about it that reportedly found its way into the Congressional Record.
As you suggest, these revelations are really only troublesome for folks who choose to see historical figures as pure and unblemished heroes — or villains, as is sometimes the case. For the rest of us, who understand that people 150 years ago were just as complex as people are today, it doesn’t cause nearly as much indigestion.
A friend of mine did research on his Irish ancestry and found out that he was descended from someone who was a collaborator with the British who participated in the eviction of poor tenant farmers during the Famine, some of whom may have starved to death. He told me some of the people in the village his ancestor was from still were angry at the collaborator, although not at my friend.
I wonder how it might feel to be the African American descendant of a slave owner or defender of the slave republic.
My family tree consists entirely of petty criminals, alcoholics, an occasional suicide and a few mental patients. It’s colorful! But if I thought heredity was destiny I wouldn’t get up in the morning.
Back in the Kennedy years when genealogy was all the rage among Irish Americans tracing their heritage back to the High Kings, my mom used to laugh and say “If we weren’t bogtrotters, rebels and horse thieves why would we have bothered to come over to America?”