To Reckon With Robert E. Lee
As he drove back home, the Confederate monument on Stone Mountain loomed above him and forced him to reckon anew with the myths surrounding the Confederate general.
Lead me to the rock
that is higher than I;
for you are my refuge,
a strong tower against the enemy.
—Psalm 61:2-3
As I drive into the scuffle of Interstate 85 South traffic toward Atlanta, Stone Mountain appears suddenly, mystically. It puts me in a fugue state like that great beginning of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “Somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert … the drugs began to take hold.” But for me, coming home to Atlanta, again, after decades away, it wasn’t drugs but tangled flashbacks that began to take hold.
Oh, right, Stone Mountain. Thar she blows. Gray Lithonia granite scored by America’s wounds like Moby Dick. In the Berkshires, Mount Greylock loomed that way in Melville’s window view while he wrote his masterpiece.
I knew from my Atlanta childhood about the bas relief carved into Stone Mountain’s side, the three ghosts of the Confederacy on horseback, Lee, Jackson and Davis.
My brain could click the negative of that image, the time-darkened bronze relief of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s memorial on Boston’s Beacon Hill to the U.S. Army officer Robert Gould Shaw on horseback, leading his Black volunteers in 1863 from Boston to the South. Stone Mountain seemed the South’s answer. Boston’s memorial was unveiled in 1897. Stone Mountain’s was conceived on a ridiculously grander scale in 1915. The first design was by the man who later gave us Mount Rushmore.
I had been in New England long enough for those flashbacks: 13 years with the Providence newspaper and, back in college, reading manuscripts in the old Atlantic Monthly brownstone by the Public Gardens. But I was no Yankee.
“You’re just a Yankee, Cumming!” Col. George Mercer Brooke III snapped at me leaving one of the church meetings we were having at R.E. Lee Memorial Episcopal Church in Lexington, Virginia. My late Virginia years. There were bitter meetings about the name of our church. They almost rent asunder that 175-year-old parish: A little civil war occurred there in the two years between the slaughter of Black members of a Bible-study class in Charleston on June 17, 2015, and the Tiki-torch march of the alt-right up the Valley in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017.
Five weeks after Charlottesville, completing what felt like my two-year Machiavellian campaign for a name change, I voted with the vestry’s 7-5 decision to change the name. Opponents wouldn’t speak to me for quite a while. In the meantime, I discreetly ordered four new welcome signs with “Grace Episcopal” for the highways into Lexington and drove to Lynchburg to pick up the new wooden sign that now hangs at the sidewalk entrance.
In 1865, eight months after he surrendered at Appomattox, Robert E. Lee came on horseback to Lexington and restored the fortunes of the private college (then called Washington College) and the Episcopal church (then called Grace). The college honored him upon his death in 1870, becoming Washington and Lee (where I taught journalism from 2003 until moving back to Atlanta last year). And he was honored by the church he saved (as a donor and senior warden) by its becoming, later, R.E. Lee Memorial.
Awkwardly, it became “R.E. Lee Memorial” in 1903, with no documented explanation. How Christian was that, when the former slave states were memorializing Lee, the Lost Cause, and the Confederacy? This period entailed spectacle lynchings in the name of racial purity and the rewriting of state constitutions to disenfranchise America’s concentrated Black population. Virginia had created its Jim Crow constitution in 1902. Just over 10 years earlier, the reburial and unveiling of a giant statue of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson in Lexington drew some 25,000 devotees of the Lost Cause to the historic town where Lee is also buried.
A history of our Lexington church, published privately in 1984 by Col. Brooke’s father, like him a historian at Virginia Military Institute and son of another VMI professor and church stalwart of the same name, is titled “General Lee’s Church.”
“I’m not a Yankee,” I told Col. Brooke III.
“Well, you went to Bennington College.” Yes sir. He had done his research. But I was sure he didn’t know about the five Cumming sons of attorney Henry Cumming of Augusta, Georgia (1799-1866), all of whom were Confederate officers, captured, killed or who became that silver-tongued Civil War memorialist, my great-great-grandfather “The Major.”
Stone Mountain can be a joke. To us who grew up in the Atlanta of the 1960s, it was a shabby theme park with a train that was attacked by “Indians,” picnic tables and a gondola ride to the top. It was just a crowded Georgia State Park, “the world’s largest granite outcropping” with a grandiose chiseling project somewhere on its flanks.
But in this era of racial reckoning, Stone Mountain is a problem. If you don’t think it’s a problem, you need to watch a documentary released last month by the Atlanta History Center, “Monument: The Untold Story of Stone Mountain.’’
The 32-minute film is the equivalent of a good afternoon spent in the luminous modern spaces of the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead. No, it’s better than that. For one thing, “Monument” is Southern history gone fully digital, consciously designed for broad consumption. You can watch it for free without going anywhere.
Some of its “untold” story, I knew.
“It’s not about the Civil War,” as Emory University history professor Joseph Crespino says in the film. “It’s really about a much more recent period in our nation’s past.” I knew that Stone Mountain was where the Ku Klux Klan was reborn in 1915 with mountaintop cross burnings, and I knew that the United Daughters of the Confederacy began organizing the memorial project around that time.
But I hadn’t realized the direct connection with something I knew well: Georgia’s howling, rabid resistance to public school integration and the Civil Rights Movement. My father, Joe Cumming, had covered those years in the Atlanta bureau for Newsweek magazine, from Little Rock to Memphis. The Brown v. Board of Education rulings of 1954 and 1955 were, according to Georgia’s political leaders, a Communist plot, a stab in the heart of “the Southern way of life.” The Stone Mountain carving is really about massive resistance to school integration and to civil rights. That’s its meaning even today, even as this history fades and confuses, until another meaning can be conjured up.
Georgia’s anti-Black governor, Marvin Griffin, was inaugurated in 1955 with the promise that the state would buy the mountain and finish the carving.
The original carving in the 1920s was a private endeavor that petered out as Confederate veterans died off and the money ran out during the Great Depression. Massive resistance to Brown v. Board of Education inspired a state-sponsored revival of the project in the 1950s. Georgia’s anti-Black governor, Marvin Griffin, was elected with the promise that the state would buy the mountain and finish the carving. In the same spirit, the state legislature in 1956 added the Confederate flag to the state flag, and white folks began sporting “Forget, Hell!” rebel license plates on their cars. I remember that angry spirit, but didn’t realize how much it connected with Stone Mountain.
In 1958, the state bought the mountain and its surrounding land and created laws to protect its message: the Lost Cause of Dixie as a stand-in for 20th century segregation. Those laws for Stone Mountain are still on the books, and in fact, were strengthened in 2001 when Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes purged the state flag of its Rebel flag remnant. This “compromise” surprised me, as did the fact that most of the carving on Stone Mountain today began in 1964, right after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and that the final ribbon cutting didn’t happen until 1972, when I was in college.
The new documentary’s high production values reflect two years of work on the film itself, and six years of research. It is a balanced story told by professors at Emory, Spelman College and the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, historians from the Atlanta History Center and people with passionate connections, such as the daughter of Roy Faulkner (the monument’s final carver), former Gov. Barnes (whose replacement of the 1956 flag ended his political life), and a Black student who helped force the removal of a Confederate obelisk from the town square in Decatur in June 2020. The film is not propaganda, but you might call it advocacy.
It advocates not for specific policy changes, but for what the Atlanta History Center has tried to advance in Georgia since 2016: context and conversation. In 2016, the Center produced a “Confederate Monument Interpretation Guide” for communities wrestling with protests against such monuments. The Center advocated then, as it does in “Monument,” informed discussion, public understanding and historical context.
“We understand that this history can be complicated, challenging, and difficult,” says the Atlanta History Center on the documentary’s website. “We also understand that talking about complex history with empathy and respect for all points of view is the only way to move forward with present-day challenges.”
The controversy around removing Confederate statues or changing the name of streets, a church or a U.S. military base has been hard. I know. The proposal to ditch the name “Lee” for Washington and Lee University was favored by many students and most of the faculty when I was teaching there. The Board of Trustees voted against the change, but decided to de-emphasize Lee’s name and legacy in other ways. That infuriated conservative alumni, who organized as “The Generals Redoubt,” called for the president to be fired, and bought billboards just outside Lexington demanding that the name “Lee Chapel” be retained and Gen. Lee’s 1882 marble statue not be walled off. (So far, the proposed wall has been halted as a fire-code violation.)
“We understand that this history can be complicated, challenging, and difficult,” says the Atlanta History Center on the documentary’s website. “We also understand that talking about complex history with empathy and respect for all points of view is the only way to move forward with present-day challenges.”
Changing names and removing memorials, apart from a few practical challenges, is relatively easy. Monuments can be moved into museums, and names on street signs can be changed. (The four-ton statue of Lee napping in battle dress with sword at hand is too much to move, but Lee Chapel was renamed University Chapel. It did not become a classroom space and “museum,” as recommended by W&L’s Commission on Institutional History and Community in 2018.)
But to get rid of the world’s largest Confederate monument at Stone Mountain? That’s hard to imagine. How much dynamite would it take, and what about the optics? “Erasing history” would come to mind unbidden.
The massive granite carving is also supported by law. “According to the laws of the State of Georgia,” says the website, “Stone Mountain Park is a Confederate memorial, and the carving of Davis, Lee, and Jackson cannot be altered, removed, or obscured in any way.” You can look this up in GA Code § 50-3-1 and GA Code § 12-3-192.1. But laws do not need to be “taken for granite,” forgive the pun. Laws, like names, can be changed.
The “Monument” website is loaded with a timeline, historic images and an artesian well of deeper information and citations. The multimedia approach is meant to reach multitudes who might never get to an exhibit or seminar on this history.
On Jan. 17, the documentary was launched with a showing at the Atlanta History Center and a panel moderated by Rose Scott of Atlanta National Public Radio affiliate WABE-FM. Audio of that hour-long “Closer Look” program is online. Center president F. Sheffield Hale urged the audience to spread it around: “You can forward it to friends and say, ‘Please watch it. It’s not boring.’”
What he thought was boring was the limited reach of old off-line forms he had been using since 2016 to tell the story of Stone Mountain — a white paper, a timeline and a PowerPoint he took around the state on the “rubber chicken” circuit. Then COVID-19 hit and the Center decided to invest heavily in digital storytelling. In November 2020, the Center hired media whiz Kristian Weatherspoon as vice president of digital storytelling, who produced the documentary. She is young, Black and “a proud Mississippian.”
“We look at it as an opportunity to reach new audiences and, to be honest, to stay relevant,” Weatherspoon said from the panel stage. “What is our role in the 21st century as a museum?”
When I taught journalism at Washington and Lee, I was comforted by my idea that I could separate the myth of Robert E. Lee from the reality. I took a little pride in my graduate school training in historiography, that I knew when “public” or popular histories such as Confederate memorials and bad high school textbooks were different from the “real” history that historians argue over. More than that, I thought I could somehow, if only vaguely, glimpse the real Robert E. Lee because I was walking in the very paths he trod on that campus, teaching journalism where Lee was said to have created the first journalism education, serving on the very church vestry where he served, and having coffee in his house, in the very room where he died after a dinner-table stroke.
On Valentine’s Day, 2018, I walked the short walk from an Ash Wednesday service at the recently renamed Grace Episcopal to the Lee House (since renamed “The President’s House”). University President Will Dudley had invited me and a few other faculty members for a chat about the Lee problem. A rather feisty history professor, David Bello, attacked Dudley for not seeing that Lee was the equivalent of Adolph Hitler. The professor said W&L should take a lesson from post-war Germany’s admission of guilt, after the Nuremburg Trials. Dudley, a forbearing scholar of German philosophy, finally pushed back, saying, “Let me finish my thought,” and “I spent a few years in Germany, too.”
I stayed silent with my china coffee cup in hand, as did the other three professors in the room (one with a black-ash cross on his forehead from the nearby Catholic church). I protected my secret sense that Lee was just a man of the Old South, as flawed and vain as my ancestor, Confederate Maj. Joseph B. Cumming, but stoic and romantic enough to buckle down in Lexington as a ruined man with a job to do. Of course, slavery, expanded and forever, was the South’s reason for secession and fighting — the evil Primum Mobile of the rebellion that was under Lee’s shrewd command. But I could amuse myself with ideas of secondary causes, such as how uneducated Southern men simply needed a good brawl, no matter the cause, or Mark Twain’s observation that the bad writing of Sir Walter Scott was the cause of the Civil War.
Comparing Lee to any of us today is a mismatch, because he was given a uniquely fateful choice at one shining moment in history, and he did the wrong thing. Wrong, wrong, wrong. He had a choice.
But coming home to Atlanta for a second time, this time for good, I was losing my ability to separate the myth from the man. The sight of Stone Mountain was like a hallucination working on my psyche. The documentary “Monument” put it together.
I began to see what my faculty colleagues saw in not just the popular myth of Lee, but the man. The comparison with Hitler may have been overblown, but it contained a truth. A colleague in my journalism department, Toni Locy, had written in The Nation that her first visit to Lee Chapel sickened her with its “overpowering musty odor,” reeking “of the cruelty of slavery, of elitism and racism.” Whenever I was in Lee Chapel, it felt serene to me, and beautiful. But I’m beginning to feel what Toni felt — and “smelt.”
Robert E. Lee was a loser, a slaver, and a man who had the greatest moral choice perhaps of any person in American history — and he chose wrong. Comparing him to any of us today is a mismatch, because he was given a uniquely fateful choice at one shining moment in history, and he did the wrong thing. Wrong, wrong, wrong. He had a choice.
Ty Seidule, a Washington and Lee graduate who became a brigadier general and historian at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, makes this point in his book “Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning With the Myth of the Lost Cause.” He says that Lee was the only one of Virginia’s eight Army colonels at the outbreak of hostilities who joined the “insurrection” (a word with added meaning since January 6, 2021). Lee’s aristocratic family was anti-secessionist, and when war broke out, many Lees sided with the United States, not the Confederacy. Lincoln offered Lee command of the U.S. Army. He had a choice, and he made the wrong one.
In Richmond after the War, Lee told a U.S. Army general that it was Providence that revealed which of them was right; because his side lost, God had spoken, settling the matter in blood. Lincoln said this better in his Second Inaugural Address. But for Lee, I see now, his 1865 rationale was just bad-faith face-saving. It was his choice to make in 1861.
In an online Q&A, Seidule (pronounced SED-uley) won me over. I’m sorry I missed him when he gave talks at W&L in 2017 and 2018. He was speaking about how, as a historian, he came to realize the depth of the myth of Robert E. Lee in himself. Seidule had grown up in Alexandria, Virginia, Lee’s home, attended Episcopal High, and aspired to be a Virginia gentleman. He was a true believer in the myth, putting Lee a couple of notches above his Episcopal faith in Jesus Christ.
“History is dangerous because it goes after our myths and our identities,” Seidule said in his Q&A with W&L’s Department of History. If you grew up in the 1950s culture of his South, he said, the worship of Robert E. Lee seeped into your DNA. Seidule’s professional discipline as a historian began to go after his own myths and identity. It was as if the facts and evidence were digging under the kudzu down about eight feet into the soil.
It takes a profound reimagining, he said, which is the difficulty that W&L is going through with the former Lee Chapel.
“Maybe there’s an exorcism that could be done to get the Lost Cause myth out of there,” Seidule said.
I was blind, but now I see. He’s right. The myth of Lee is too tangled in the kudzu tendrils of the “Lost Cause” to extricate an admirable man named Robert E. Lee. In the reverence his Confederate soldiers had for him, his Christian piety and his famous “noble” bearing, he began replacing Jesus for white Southerners as the savior of a mythic, moral, honorable South. The former Lee Chapel became, almost as soon as he died, this religion’s revered shrine. A century later, Stone Mountain was to be its grandiose Mount Zion.
Now, I seek a reality apart from the one I enjoyed at Washington and Lee. Stone Mountain Park, 20 minutes away, is a beautiful recreation area of lakes and trails for families of every ethnicity, biking, jogging and relaxing under the shadow of a breathtaking geological wonder. The suburbs around it, once a haven for white flight, have sprouted with expensive homes of Black professionals like Sam Fulwood III, who wrote Waking From the Dream: My Life in the Black Middle Class. Fulwood is now dean of the American University School of Communication, but he lived in a Black enclave called Brook Glen, about 12 miles south of Stone Mountain, when he was an editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He once told me that when his Black neighbors saw a Realtor showing homes to a white family, one said, in all seriousness, “There goes the neighborhood.”
I drive to Gilly Brew Pub in Stone Mountain village to meet a man who was one of the Lost Boys of South Sudan, now a Centers for Disease Control worker assigned to the Center for Global Health, supporting some countries in Africa. Gilly Brew Pub is a minority-owned coffee and tea house in an old two-story building. Closer to Robert E. Lee Boulevard and the state park is St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church, where this man, Abraham Deng Ater, helps with a Sunday afternoon worship service for the South Sudanese diaspora community, using his translation of the service into Dinka, their language. Their native land is having its own civil war, which has lasted for decades and killed and displaced millions.
Georgia law currently forbids banning the Lost Cause myth within the boundaries of the state park. But if faith, religious or otherwise, has any reality or morality, it will bloody well find its way out of such historical myths.
About the author
Doug Cumming is an associate professor emeritus of journalism at Washington & Lee University with 26 years experience at metro newspapers and magazines. After getting at Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in mass communications, he has taught multimedia reporting and feature writing at Loyola University in New Orleans and at W&L in Virginia. Earlier, he worked at the newspapers in Raleigh, North Carolina, Providence, Rhode Island, and Atlanta, Georgia; was editor of the Sunday Magazine in Providence; and helped launch Southpoint monthly magazine in Atlanta. He won a George Polk Award and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. He also plays a mean saxophone. He now lives in Decatur, Georgia.
- Doug Cumminghttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/doug-cumming/
- Doug Cumminghttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/doug-cumming/
- Doug Cumminghttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/doug-cumming/
- Doug Cumminghttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/doug-cumming/
This is an outstanding piece and I’m grateful to Salvation South for publishing it. I especially appreciate its highlighting of the work of General Ty Seidule who, as the article shares, hails from Alexandria, Virginia- my hometown, and where I still live. In his book, “Robert E. Lee and Me,” he recalls how the Alexandria City Council, in response to civil rights gains, mandated that all new streets in the city, running north to south, be named after a Confederate figure. One street so-named is the main street I live just off of, and on which I drive and walk every day. I had no idea about the origin of the street’s name until I read Seidule’s book. I was going to write my city council representative to propose a name change, but somebody beat me to it. All of the Confederate-named streets will be changed, I hear: a testimony to the efforts of people like Seidule and Doug Cumming to address the legacy of the Lost Cause. Thanks again.
I appreciate you helping me wrestle with this piece of our story.