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

Psychological studies have demonstrated that people who hold objectively incorrect ideas are not likely to change their minds just because someone presents them with the facts (for a summary, see The New Yorker’s piece “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds” by Elizabeth Kolbert in February 2017). There are a few reasons for this. One is that people are reluctant to admit that they are susceptible to false beliefs, and so they will defend their ideas rather than admit error. Even more fundamental, however, people’s beliefs are not simply the product of rational inquiry, weighting the evidence to arrive at the proper conclusion. Regardless of someone’s intelligence or education level, what they believe is largely a function of who they are, their place in the world and relationships with others. A belief that is false empirically can be true in the sense of informing someone with an aspect of their identity. To challenge that belief is tantamount to challenging a part of themselves. The psychological costs of reorienting one’s worldview are often higher than coming up with new defenses for one’s erroneous beliefs.

There is an enormous amount of evidence for the contention that slavery played a primary role in driving the secession of 11 Southern states in 1860 and 1861. The precipitating event was the election of Abraham Lincoln, who had become a national figure for criticizing the expansion of slavery into the western territories, and for his famous declaration that “a house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free…I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided” (“House Divided Speech.” AbrahamLincolnOnline.org). The interests of enslavers in the South interpreted his election as a declaration of war, and the records of the various secession conventions indicate that the preservation of slavery was the chief topic under discussion. When the seceding states formed the Confederate States of America, their constitution charges its congress with the protection of slavery in the states and any territories they might acquire in the future. The causes of war are often difficult to confirm with total certainty, and slavery was not the only issue at stake, but the US Civil War presents one of the clearest examples of a predominant cause which the people at the time explicitly recognized as such.

Ty Seidule is the ideal messenger for conveying this essential fact about US history. The military remains one of the most respected professions in the country, and so in his PragerU video, his uniform connotes trust and authority. He was a military history professor at West Point, and he co-authored West Point’s official history of the Civil War. Seidule received praise as well as criticism, but by his own estimation, his crisp and clear presentation of the facts does not appear to have changed anyone’s mind. Those who have grown up taking pride in the South and the Confederacy do not wish to think of themselves as racists, and do not wish to relearn the ideas of history to which they have become accustomed. As a result, the book supplements the facts with an attempt to unpack his own identity, which for so long was caught up with worship of Lee and the Confederacy, in order to show that such a rethinking is both possible and urgently necessary to overcome the nation’s legacy of racism.