Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

Seidule’s hometown of Alexandria, Virginia is a suburb of Washington, DC that is home to many thousands of federal employees who have no affinity for ‘the South.’ Seidule, however, was born and raised there to parents with Southern roots. He experienced Alexandria as not merely an extension of the national capital but as a bastion of Southern culture and pride. When he was young, Seidule believed that his roots in Alexandria made him a “Southern gentleman.” While he was right that Alexandria does in fact have a special Southern history, there was an ugly side to that history that he did not appreciate until much later.

Seidule’s father taught at the prestigious Episcopal High School in Alexandria, which catered to wealthy families with the promise of helping their sons become Southern, Christian gentlemen. Part of this education involved revering the legacy of the Confederacy, especially Robert E. Lee, who was born in Alexandria. A Confederate veteran, or a descendant of one, served as the school’s headmaster for the better part of a century, and a campus memorial commemorates only Confederate alumni. The school taught young Virginians that their state was the most important in the nation, and that Virginians are by extension a higher class than other Americans. Yet, as Seidule investigates the history of his hometown, he finds that it has a far more complicated relationship with Virginia and the South. When discussions were underway to designate the area for a new federal capital, George Washington asked that Alexandria be included, as the capital would bear his name and Alexandria was the closest city to his home in Mount Vernon. With Alexandria, Washington, DC would constitute 10 square miles across Maryland and Virginia. Yet, in 1846, the people of Alexandria voted to leave the capital and rejoin Virginia, shrinking the size of the capital by a third. By that time, Alexandria had become central to the slave trade. As anti-slavery voices became more prominent in the US Congress, Alexandrians sought to protect their business interests. When Washington ultimately banned the slave trade in 1850, enslavers in the capital simply moved their business to Alexandria, further enriching the city. Alexandria served as a hub between the mid-Atlantic “slave states” and the Deep South, and thus became the point where many enslaved people were separated from their families.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, a minor skirmish in Alexandria led to the first death of a US Army officer, Elmer Ellsworth, along with the death of his killer. Both men became early martyrs for their respective sides, and even though Alexandria spent the majority of the war firmly in US hands, the city itself commemorated the dead Confederate James Jackson, as a plaque bearing his name was on display until 2017. During the war, Alexandria was a refuge for fugitives from slavery, many of whom died of disease. The cemetery for these self-emancipated and formerly enslaved people was long ignored and left to decay, and only recently have there been efforts to honor these deceased Alexandrians. Lack of widespread knowledge regarding this chapter of the city’s history is indicative of a broader effort to obscure the contributions of Black Americans. Whereas public life and education commemorated Lee and other Confederate generals, Seidule learned the story of Samuel Tucker, a largely self-taught lawyer who led efforts to desegregate Alexandria in the 1930s. While unsuccessful, he helped to generate publicity and introduced tactics of nonviolent resistance which the civil rights movement would later use to great effect. Following an honorable term of service in the Second World War, Tucker eventually led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)’s effort to desegregate Virginia, and after the Supreme Court struck down segregation in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, he filed the suits to demand state compliance.

Seidule knew little about Tucker’s efforts because Alexandria responded to the civil rights movement by intensifying its veneration of the Confederacy. All states running north to south were given names of Confederates at the very same time that a local court case challenging segregation was percolating into federal courts. The local United Daughters of the Confederacy unfurled a portrait of Lee in 1964, the same year as the Civil Rights Act. As a schoolboy in the 1970s, Seidule recalls a history textbook which downplayed the horrors of slavery and instead describes the relationship between enslaver and enslaved person as familial. The production of such textbooks resulted directly from federal efforts to push desegregation and secure the rights of Black Americans. For decades after the Brown decision, Alexandria politicians fought to evade or impede desegregation efforts, which proved easier to maintain in residential neighborhoods than schools. Federal pressure eventually compelled Alexandria to bus kids from racially homogenous neighborhoods to more diverse schools, inflaming already high racial tensions. As a result, Seidule left the integrated school he had attended for one year and entered a mostly white private school, as many white children did at the time.

Seidule now recognizes that the Virginian ideal of his youth was a body of ideas justifying a police state for Black Americans. It is both a suburb of DC and a Virginian city, and is making unsteady progress toward reckoning with its racist legacy. Many street and school names still honor Confederates, but in an encouraging sign, there is also a school named for Samuel Tucker.