American History Hit - Confederacy: Myth of the Lost Cause

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

How do you justify a war you lost, and that destroyed countless homes, businesses, towns and families? This was a question facing the southern states after the Civil War.Their answer? The myth of the Lost Cause.In this final episode of our series on the Confederacy, Don catches up with Ty Seidule to find out where this myth came from, and what it really is.Ty is a Brigadier General (Ret.) of the US Army, Professor Emeritus of history at West Point and author of 'Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause'.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Monument Avenue, Richmond, Virginia, 2020. An eight-foot bronze statue of Jefferson Davis

stands poised on a granite block, his right hand outstretched, as if commanding the glorious forces of his past. Behind him, 13 columns rise, a tribute to the 11 states that seceded from the Union and the two others who sent troops to the cause. Down the way, further along on Monument, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee,

cast their bronze gazes over a city that has been transformed around them. Within a year, all these Confederate statues will fall, graffitied, torn down, utterly destroyed, relegated to museums or some other ignominious fate. But why were they there in the first place? What exactly were these monuments intended to memorialize? Why honor any figure who is plotted to overthrow a nation beloved by its people? and then waged a bloody war to do so.

How were these men immortalized, while their unworthy cause crumbled to dust? Hello and welcome to American history. I'm Don Wildman. In 1865, under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln, forces of the United States of America won the Civil War. Richmond fell to Union forces on April 2nd. Robert Lee surrendered his army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox on April 9th. In June, the final Confederate stronghold fell to Union troops, and in August 1866, 16 months after Lee's surrender, President Andrew Johnson declared a formal end to the conflict. Now, the saying goes that history is written by the victors, but in the case of the Civil War in the South, this isn't entirely true. For this episode in our Confederacy series, I am joined by Ty Sidguli.

Together, we will discuss the Lost Cause myth. What is it? How is it still? significant today and how Ty himself stopped believing in it. Hello, Ty. How you doing? Great, Don. Thanks for having me. It is a big subject, the lost cause myth. And I suggest many, many Americans do not have a clue how deeply affecting it is in our culture, even today. Are we in agreement on that? Violent agreement. Yeah, the lost cause myth is like Kudzu. If you've ever grown, it lived in the American South. It has deep roots that go like eight or nine feet. It's an import that isn't really supposed to be there. And even if you cut it down every day, it's going to grow right back. How interesting. For me, you know, I'm of a certain age that around fifth grade,

I remember. The seed was planted in the early 70s in my head about states rights and the war between the states versus any other kind of view of this. Maybe it was where I was raised. I have no idea how it happened, but definitely got planted in me. And for years and years, I kind of went on the fence. I don't know what kind of war this really was. Only later on has this become straightened out. We're really addressing that kind of in-betweenness about what the Civil War was by definition. Let's start with Robert E. Lee, because he's such an obvious figure to do that with, and really a lot of lost cause myth hangs its hat on this figure, doesn't he? The lost cause in a way is a religion. It's a civic religion. It's a belief system. And every religion needs a Christ-like figure

at its top. And Lee is the only person in the Confederacy that had any success whatsoever. It only lasted for four years. And if you could see me now, I've got a big L on my forehead. The Confederacies were huge losers. But Lee won in 62 and 63 before he was crushed by the United States Army General Ulysses S. Grant. So he becomes this mythic figure. And also because he dies at the right time. He dies in 1870s, alive only for five years after the war. So he becomes this mythic sense. And then are Virginians who control the idea of who controls the knowledge, the history of the war is done by Virginians like Jubal Early and the Southern Historical Association. So they prop him up and make Virginia the most important part.

And if Virginia is the most important part, then Lee is the most important part of the Virginia and the war is there. So yeah, Lee is the most important part. It has everything to do with Virginia, you know, seizing back the storyline because they were the ones with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and they saw themselves as the founding state. Now they want this back again, having stepped way far afield from that role. He is an idealization of this Southern gentleman, right? I mean, here's a general who is just every picture you ever see of the guy, handsome, elegant, well-dressed. You know,

everything about him was created as a sort of depiction of this idealized Southern gentleman. Yeah, but let's talk about the real Lee, if we could. So here's a guy who, graduates from West Point in in 1829 and is said by everybody to have been the only person to have graduated there without demerits, which is not true. There were four other people in his class that did it. Goes into the army and his mother dies soon thereafter. And when his mother dies, he gets enslaved people from his mother. And he continues to benefit from those enslaved people all the way until really then he marries the descendant of George Washington's adopted son. and when he does that, more enslaved people come into his world.

And then when his father-in-law dies, he controls and goes to Arlington and controls and runs that plantation for two and a half years more time in charge of enslaved people until he finally chooses treason, which is what I say. He took an oath right three weeks before he left for the Confederacy to support and defend the United States of America and then chooses the Confederacy. So this is a guy who, and we can talk more about what he did during the war, but right leading up to the war, believe fully in slavery. And that's the most important thing to remember. This war is to protect and expand the institution of slavery. You were working at West Point for decades. Is this the common feeling about Lee there? It wasn't when I got there because I was living on Lee Road by Lee Gate and Lee Housing Area by Lee Child Development Center. They gave a Lee Prize in Mathematics. There's a Lee Barracks there. And that's what really started me on my journey was why. I went to Washington and Lee University. I understood that. Why was it there? And so I went and researched why were so many things named after Lee at West Point, the United States Military Academy. And that really set me on my journey. Okay, so the myth of the lost cause really begins very soon after the end of the Civil War. 1866, the name of a guy named Edward A. Pollard is important in this. Newspaper director from Richmond, Virginia. We can really stake ourselves to this guy as the beginning of a real force of propaganda. I mean, this was a created myth very deliberately, right? Yes, but I would go back a little bit earlier to General Order's nine when Lee surrenders. Remember, he surrenders because Grant has.

completely destroyed his army. And when he surrenders, he gives us general order that says, we lost our honors intact because we lost to overwhelming force. Well, it was a better army for a better cause. Remember that all the enslaved were now leaving the South to fight with the United States of America. I don't like to say the Union Army. It's United States of America. They wore the same blue uniform that I wore. And so that's really when it starts. But how do you deal with a catastrophe? They went to war to protect and expand slavery. And then after the war, particularly with the 13th Amendment ending slavery, the 14th Amendment guaranteeing equal rights to all Americans, the 50th Amendment giving the vote to all men, including black men. This says they sowed the wind, they reap the whirlwind. How do you deal with this new set of equality, which is what Reconstruction brought?

You create a massive lie, and that's what the loss cause is. Interesting. This is a very deliberate made thing. It doesn't sort of bubble up from a seven mentality or nostalgia, all of these things become later the characterizations of this. This is a decision among leaders in the South to say, we need to take control of this storytelling. And that becomes a 20-year process that then becomes, you know, lives with us even today. With a purpose, and I think this is the important thing. Why are they doing this? The reason they're doing this is to create a new society that returns to white supremacy and ensures that the African-Americans in the South.

have no political power, and they do it through violence and then eventually law. Yeah, a redefinition of why we were fighting this war. So it takes the focus off of that which people find abhorrent or have found abhorrent and on to something that's a lot more palatable. The phrase, the war between the states, the war of northern aggression, all of these things that are sort of bubbling around in our historical, you know, consciousness, all come from this redefinition, from this effort. Ty, let us talk about, Edward. Paulard, this newspaper man, what did he write and how did it get distributed? Yeah, he, I mean, he wrote up, he was, you know, often there's this old saying that whoever writes first wins,

and he wrote first, and he wrote this idea of the lost cause. And it really, it begins a process of creating this myth. And I think it's the most important thing is to talk about what is this lost cause. But yeah, Pollard writes about the lost cause and then is piled on by other people that come back from the United States. So Pollard is the first one. He's a newspaper, writes this book on the lost cause, and it's followed shortly thereafter by many others. I do want to know, though, from this conversation, and let's just get to it right away, what is the initial cause? I mean, is there a conference? Do they all sit around somewhere and bubble this up in the back room? How does this even get born? Yeah, I mean, it's a bunch of people

trying to make sense of this catastrophe, and how do you make sense of something that you chose to do and turns out so absolutely horrible. And they pretty much simultaneously, it starts in Virginia and then goes out from there. And it starts with men doing this. And then it becomes sort of spread by women's group, ladies memorial association, and then the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It's an organic thing that starts. And there is one guy, this guy Jubilee, who was a, he was a Virginian who started out as a unionist.

And then once he, as someone later said, once he unsheat the sword for the Confederacy, never put it back again. And he left the country to go to Canada after the war saying that he would rather skin a Yankee woman and kill a Yankee child rather than go back to, than get back together with the Union. And he's the one that really, really sets this in motion and makes Lee the great hero. And at the same time, part of this also is to make sure you denigrate African Americans as unworthy as people that can't have citizens. So it's this multifaceted myth, lie, ideology, religion that grows organically until it becomes a set of precepts of like the true word. Two very general precepts of it are the glorification of the Confederate forces, that they were better than they turned out to be, more strategically led. It was just the resources and supplies of the northern states were overwhelming, but that the southerners were actually, better at fighting this war. The other side of it, of course, is the redefinition of slavery,

sort of a nostalgic representation of what all that was about. Let's talk about that. How do they go about creating that myth? Exactly. I mean, the first and most important is the war was not fought over slavery. And if you can say the war wasn't fought over slavery, then you could fight honorably. How could you be honorable if you fight for something as a moral abomination of slavery? Let's remember, slavery featured legal rape. It featured separating a husband from white, mother from child. It featured the lash. Slavery is the most evil moral abomination you can imagine. And they're now saying, no, we not only do we not fight for it, but even the slavery was,

that we did have, masters were kind and slaves were happy. So in fact, the books I had as a kid, my textbooks in Virginia and the fourth and seventh grade said that slavery was a good institution, sort of social security. And so that's the second one. The third one is that the Confederate Army was amazing and they fought to the very last. Well, no, by the end of the war, they were scattered, the Confederate Army. Lee had very few people left at the end because everybody else was running away. And remember, they weren't just defeated by a little bit. They were catastrophically defeat. Lee is the biggest loser in American history. And remember that Lee killed more U.S. Army soldiers than any other enemy in our history. And I think these are the other ways. And part of that

is this lost cause is that post-war reconstruction, that period from 1865 to 1877, was actually a failure because black people weren't ready for the vote. No, there were 2,000 black men that served in high office. And at the top of this myth is Robert Lee, the greatest general and the greatest man who ever lived. Remember, be the loser. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. It is essential that this sort of paternalistic view of slavery get baked into this thing. It really is what sets the table for all of what becomes Jim Crow and segregation down the road, this continued white supremacy, even to this day, arguably, that really begins with this redefinition of slavery and within the lost cause myth. It's amazing how much

foresight really seems to have laid out. I don't think it really was, but it seems like it has because it had such a lasting effect. Yeah, because not only once you've got the basic precepts, then you have organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy that create textbooks. They burn books in the South to ensure that only this is created. They create the children of the Confederacy. The children of the Confederacy is a group that still extend today that gives scholarships for memorizing the Confederate Catechism, which is the war wasn't fought over slavery, that slaves were happy in their condition, Lee's is great as human. So that's still there today, and you memorize this Confederate Catechism. And so,

So, yeah, this is, and I think the, as the monuments are huge, but it's really in teaching the children, which is what I got as a kid, you know, my first chapter book was Meet Robert E. Lee. And I read Gone with the Wind, which is the greatest loss cause propaganda of all time. So it's so many different areas reinforcing each other, not just in the South, but across the country. Yeah, it seems so unbelievable to somebody much younger than us, but I do recall being taken to the re-release of Gone with the Wind in 1967 or 68. And my northern parents took me to this screening because we were going to see the great movie.

And it is a perfect expression of how absolutely endemic this myth became. So in 2014, they asked Americans, what is the best book ever published? The Bible's number one, gone with the wind number two, beats out Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. And it is really the essence of the lost cause myth. And that book, which I read in the sixth grade, and it's a rollicking good story. And I went back and read it. And all these myths of the lost cause are in there endemically. And so it has reinforced that all throughout American history. Exactly. So let's talk about the monuments. This, this, it really is a phase of time that happens later on when suddenly we begin to see these big, gigantic monuments going up, especially in Richmond, but pretty much everywhere across the south, put up by the daughter. of Confederacy. How did that happen and what were those decisions? Right. Well, remember that, so the first thing to know is that these are all reinforcing. So in the 1890 to 1900, 1904, every southern state reddoes its constitution. And they're all Jim Crow constitutions.

They're to exclude black people. Remember that at this period, Mississippi and South Carolina are still majority African American. So once they, using violence and terror, especially through a Ku Klux Klan and other groups like that, they've now excluded the black people from the vote. To celebrate that, to celebrate the Redeemer movement that whites are back in the saddle are back in control, they put these monuments up starting in 1890, really through 1920. That's the same period where lynching reaches its height. So you have the constitutional control, you have violent control, and you have these monuments going up to celebrate that, often paid for by the most important propagandists and one of the most politically astute groups in American history, the United

Daughters of the Confederacy. They did all this without the vote. So between 1890 and 1920, thousands of these monuments go up throughout the South, including the huge ones like they are in Richmond in New Orleans, but also small ones in every, you know, most southern counties in front of the courthouse. It's important, John, to remember that they're going in public places so that black people will have to go by them and to go into the courthouse, because the only way a black person can go into the courthouse is as a custodian or a defendant. So if you think about what this is, you have this in altogether, you have these new constitutions, you have voting laws that prevent black people from voting. You have a lynching, 5,000 black men, women, and children lynched to support

that. Then you have the monuments which celebrate it and make it a civic pride. And all of these go together to create what is a racial police state, an apartheid state. And that's what I was born to in Virginia, that's what I was born into, is a racial police state that did not allow equality. And it's, but this loss-cause myth is the ideological foundation of that racial police state. Sure. 1914, the erection of a monument honoring the Confederacy where at Arlington Cemetery, which also happens to be, many forget, Robert Lee's former plantation. Yeah. So that monument, which is, I think the cruelest in the country, had an enslaved, overweight woman, a mammy figure with a tear in her eye, taking the baby from her, quote-unquote,

her enslaver, who is in Confederate uniform. And it's meant to show the kind master, the good slave. And there's another enslaved servant around on the other side. And this monument is sort of an FU to the United States of America, saying that we, the white, south, the right, will always be right, and you, the United States of America, is always going to be wrong. But I am awfully happy to report that monument's not there anymore. Right. It's a hundred years later almost that that's, well, it is a hundred years later that this takedown period begins. Right. And remember that why that monument comes up, when you have this racial police state, it's controlled by one party, the Democratic Party. So for anyone in Washington

to get anything through Congress, you have to go through the Democratic segregationist party, which it was at that time. And so you have to appease them. William McKinley appease them to get Guam, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, from the Spanish-American War. had to appease them. Franklin Roosevelt would have to appease them again in Social Security, which is why black people are excluded from Social Security, and that is to appease the white southern segregationists who control all the committees in Congress. So it's a really, really politically powerful movement that this lost cause forms the ideology for. We just did a story about Harry Truman's desegregation of the military on our president's series.

And it made me wonder, the name Hubert Humphrey came up and all of those guys in the 40s who were facing down all these civil rights problems from the north. How much were they aware at the time of the lost cause being this myth? Or has that come out later on? Yeah, that's a great question. I think that there's still this idea that Lee is a great guy. And it's also a way that you can give the white Southerners something. And you can give them that and still go after other things.

Oh, yeah, Lee's still a good guy. Oh, yeah, the Confederacy is still a good guy. But the United States of the Confederacy and this myth is so powerful by the 40s that most people are agreeing with it. Remember, Franklin Roosevelt dedicates the Lee Monument in Dallas in 1936. So it's still powerful. And most of the Army bases that are in the South in World War I and World War II are named for Confederates in 1940, 42. And as long as there are no voting rights for black people, this continues. But I mentioned it because of what you say, because of the willingness to face down.

the fact, the cynical fact that the Dixiecrats, the Southern Democrats, were such a fundamental part of the Democratic Party, the power base of the party, that to challenge the lost cause myth, challenged them. And sure enough, eventually, with other political moves of desegregation and so forth, Strom Thurman and those Dixiecrats walk on the Democratic Party. That shift, I always wondered how much was that motivated by the realization and the clarity of this whole thing, this whole mythology, being part of American culture. Yeah, I mean, it's so powerful, but again, the underlying power of it is to create a society where white people control the political, social, cultural power.

And when that is threatened in any way, there's a reaction and it has always been a reaction when that comes. And that it was violence first, and then it was law, and then it's been culture. Every time there's a threat to that underlying power structure, boy, it is, there's hell to pay. And we see that over and over again in American history. A big symbol of all this, of course, not just the monuments, but the flag, the Confederate flag, never goes away to this day. Still a huge part and huge controversy in America. One of those symbols that has become sort of, we're anured to its real meaning so often.

It's just kind of become a thing that you see on race cars and so forth. But it goes through several iterations. There's a first, second, and third iteration. walk me through the creation of this flag and what it means to this lost cause. Right. I mean, when I was a kid, my dad had the four flags of the Confederacy over our mantle. I grew up with these lies myself. And the four flags are the first one, which is sort of the stars and bars, which looks like it's a red, white, red, and it looks sort of like the stars and stripes.

And in fact, that's why they changed it, is that on the battlefield, they said it looks too much like the hated Yankees. and they changed it to the stainless banner. And the stainless banner is all white within the one corner is what we think of today as a Confederate flag. And it turns out, Don, that white on the battlefield, a white flag on the battlefield, not the best idea because that's the flag of surrender. And it also gets really brown and yucky really quickly. And then it moves to the bloodstained banner, which the white one is called the stainless

banner. Then they put it right at the end of the war, at the very end of it, a red stripe, which becomes the bloodstained banner. But the one that we know of today is really Lee's Army of Northern Virginia flag. And it's chosen as the symbol of the Confederacy in the 1890s. So that's when it really becomes powerful when the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the sons of Confederate veterans choose that one. And this is when they also come up with the Southern Cross of Honor that goes on Confederate gravestones, which today, the VA, the Veterans Administration, you can still get a Confederate headstone from the VA that has this Southern Cross of Honor. But the flag that we

used today, never the flag of the Confederacy. But it has become a powerful symbol. But remember, it means the same thing today as it did then, which was white supremacy, that white people should control black people through slavery or through segregation, through Jim Crow. It has never had a good meaning in this country. And yet it's one of the most emblematic seals of America now next to the stars and stripes. But it is a symbol of treason and slavery. It has never been officially adopted by anybody. No. This has never been a government-sanctioned flag. No, it never has. And we should remember what it is and to love your country is to hate those people who killed U.S. Army soldiers who try to destroy the country. Remember, they were insurrectionists

who wouldn't accept the results of a Democratic election and chose armed rebellion for the evil purpose of continuing human bondage. These are not people that we should honor. The myth spreads a lot because of Western expansion, doesn't it? I mean, many of those Southerners, especially the young ones, headed out west. And this carries forth this storytelling into these new lands. Yeah. And it's not just out into West. It's actually into Brazil, where there's still a Confederate community in Brazil. They go to Mexico, they go to Canada, and they continue, and then they go out west. And that's always part of what the Confederate brand was, was expansion. One of the reasons they go to war is they want those Western States to be slave. Because remember, if you have enslaved people, you want to continue to sell them.

The price of enslaved persons is an all-time high in 1860. You need more places to be able to sell those. Also, they're more enslaved people. In 1840, there's two and a half million enslaved people. By 1860, there's four million. So you need that Western expansion. And with that Western expansion, it continues. So in fact, to this day, there are more than a dozen outposts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy just in California. Wow. That's amazing. And it makes sense, too, because as you're creating these new lands and these new governments, these, you know, counties are setting up and all that kind of leadership, you can bake in these ideas very early in the process, as opposed to sort of taking on established, you know, systems and structures back east.

So out west, these are young sort of malleable lands where young people can come in. I mean, some million people left the south and headed out west. So you begin to create these towns and counties and states eventually that have these feelings and these myths baked into them. And the names are there too. You know, the names are out west as well. So there have been several good books about this recently that talk about how that continues. And I think we're now, we just never looked at this carefully for a century, for more.

than a century. And now that we are, the thing about it is once we do that, and historians uncover this, it takes years, it takes decades before it infiltrates into everyone's consciousness. And now that it has, then that upsets people who grew up with this myth. And that myth, then, then there is a reaction against that, what they grew up with. But it's out west. And it's not just out west, I think. We should think about how it manifests itself in the north as well. It actually becomes a part of the myth there where Lee is, the Bronx used to have this Hall of Fame and Lee is in that Hall of Fame there as well. And in fact, one of the ones that I always look at is, I don't know if you've ever been to Grant's Tomb on the Upper West Side

of Manhattan. Yes, it's great. So it was put in there in the 1890s, well after Grant died. But if you go in there, the first thing you see is this enormous, it's wonderful. If you've ever been there, it's great. And if you go in there and there's a huge mosaic as soon as you walk in, of Lee and Grant shaking hands. So Lee is in a place of honor in Grant's tomb put there in 1965 during the Civil War Centennial. And that's where we get this idea that blue and gray are equal. There's Confederate and Union. There's Johnny Reb and Billy Yank.

There's blue and gray. And that's why I always like to say, it's the United States of America against a rebelling insurrectionist force. But by that Civil War Centennial in the 1960s, it's competing the civil rights movement is competing against this Civil War Lost Cause myth. And you see that in Grant's tomb where they're equal. I can tell you that there's no Grant in Lee's Tomb in Lexington, Virginia. So you see that this equality of the two sides, but they are not equal. Sure. You wonder what he would have thought of that at the end of his life. Although Grant was all

about reconciliation, I suppose. And that is the theme that's really important to discuss. I mean, that plays a big role in this, the general desire and genuine desire of northerners to reconcile with the South and get on with this. There's a lot of room for forgiveness and a lot of sacrifice of the truth. Yeah. So remember that that's what Grant does initially by giving such lenient terms. And Grant remembers, as others do, the bloodshed that came after the English Civil War when Napoleon went into Spain and Portugal. So they remember that they're going to be kind. But white Southerners take advantage of this to a huge degree and don't accept that. And so Reconstruction is violent use to reassert white political power and stop black participation,

which there was during the Reconstruction era. And I think one of the best, if I could give one example of that, is James Longstreet. So James Longstreet, one of probably the finest general in gray during the Civil War. And after the war becomes a Republican, good friend of Grant, fights with black soldiers in the militia in New Orleans to stop a coup attempt by white supremacists. And he is then banished from memory in the Confederacy. There were no statues of James Longstreet anywhere in the South until, I think there's one in 1980, and then there's one put up in Gettysburg in the 1990s. He's banished because he participates as a Republican to work for biracial democracy.

And so that just, it's kind of, it tells the tale when you don't. don't allow the greatest soldier in gray any statues because he's fighting for biracial democracy. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. How effective has the change been at West Point in terms of this? Let's look at that as a case study of what's really happening across the nation. Yeah. So I think from the 1870s to 1930s, the Confederates were seen as traitors. They violated the oath. That's Article 3. They violated the Constitution. Article 3, Section 3 is

there's only one crime, which is treason, which is levying war against the United States. And so they were seen as traitors. So the first time that any Confederate commemoration comes is the 1930s when Black cadets come back for the first time. Then the 1950s, when the Army is forced to integrate more Confederate commemoration, 1970, early 70s, when minority admissions starts. So Confederate commemoration at West Point is a reaction to integration. So it's there throughout that period of time. And then in 2020, Congress passes a law, which creates a commission that I served as a vice chair called the naming commission to get rid of everything that commemorates Confederates Confederates in Department of Defense. And that is passed by a supermajority in the House of

Representatives and in Congress. Trump vetoes it and it's the only veto that Congress overrides. and that creates a S naming commission that I was on, and it gets rid of everything. So at West Point right now, there is nothing that commemorates the Confederates the Confederates and nothing in the Department of Defense that commemorates the Confederate. So I think that you can, you know, there's an old saying that you can count on the Americans to do the right thing after they've exhausted all other options. And that's a Churchill quote, I think. And so there is now nothing at West Point that does that.

It gives me great pride to think that who we commemorate now at West Point reflects our values. You were vice chair of that government naming commission within the Department of Defense. Well, it was actually a congressional commission with three Republicans, one Democrat, and four retired flag or general or admirals. And that was what we found 1,111 things that commemorated the Confederates in the Department of Defense. And now they're all gone, including that Confederate monument that's at Arlington. That was one of the things removed. And we did it not because this commission said it, but because the United States Congress said it was the right thing to do. And that is, you know, again, slowly chipping away at this lost cause mythology, which we can do as Americans if we recognize the history and look at the history, which is, Don, which is what you're doing is look at the background of this, understand why it's wrong.

And then when we do that, we can do the right thing. How contentious were those hearings? Oh, man. So we would go, in the summer of 21, we went to each one of the bases that was going to change their name, all in the deep south, and, well, from Virginia down. And the first thing they would say is, Ty, why are we doing this? And I said, oh, that's easy. We're doing it because Congress told us to. The second thing is you're changing history. And I would say, no, no. Listen, every year at West Point, we're going to study the Battle of Gettysburg. Every year picket's going to charge, and every year Lee's going to lose. That is not going to. change. But what is changing is who we commemorate. And we, we chose those base names in World War I and World War II when the South was a racial police state. And they're also terrible people. People like Henry Benning, which is the biggest base in Georgia, was named after someone who never served in the U.S. Army, but killed U.S. Army soldiers. And was a leading fire eater. Somebody tried to break apart the United States as early as possible to create a slave republic and then was important in the formative

part of the Jim Crow era. And now it's named after Hal and Julie Moore. If you've ever seen the movie, the Mel Gibson movie about this great hero from Vietnam and his wife, who was also a great hero. So who we commemorate reflects our values. I keep saying that. But Confederates chose treason to preserve slavery. And they're not worthy of commemoration for the great country of the United States of America. Do you think I could ever go back? Do you think we'd ever turn that clock back again? Yes. We'd be done it. So in Shenandoah County, in the northern tip of Virginia, they, in 1961, there's another period where we name a lot of things after Confederates. And that's when after the 1954 Brown versus the Board of Education that integrates schools, Virginia starts massive resistance

to stop that. And a number of schools throughout Virginia are named that. I went to elementary school, bused to a school called Robert E. Lee Elementary School, a segregated all-black school until they integrated it, named in 1961. Well, that same thing happened to Stonewall Jackson High School in Shenandoah County, Virginia, named in 1961. It was changed in 2021 to something else, Valley View or Central Valley, something like that. And then in 2024, it was changed back to Stonewall Jackson. Wow. So there have been things that done. And then just recently, the Secretary of Defense Hegeseth changed Fort Bragg, we changed to Fort Liberty, and he changed it back to Bragg. But interestingly, not Braxton Bragg, the terrible Confederate General, who was a loser and a hated man. His own troops tried to frag and tried to kill him. And it's been changed to Bragg, but named after Roland Bragg a World War II hero. So there have been some that have gone back, but I think most Americans realize that the Confederates no longer reflect the values of this country. But your life has been kind of microcosmic of this, hasn't it?

It has sort of symbolized this entire journey within yourself as a military man. Well, I grew up thinking that on a scale of 1 to 10, Lee was an 11. And even though I was a good Episcopalian, went to church every Sunday, I would have said Jesus was about five, maybe six. So Lee was the height. And I chose to go to Washington and Lee University because I wanted to be a Southern gentleman. That was power. That was status in my culture. And I went in the Army, which is what Lee did. But there in the Army, there was a couple things different. One, it's the most diverse organization in the country. And then two, I became a historian and learned about this lost cause, learned about these

things named after Lee at West Point. And it ticked me off. I got so mad at myself for believing these lies. And then when I did the research about it, I said, I realized that the only way to tell people about it was not to be a no-at-all historian, but to tell the story through my own life. And if I researched the areas that I grew up in and realized that they were filled with these lost-caused myths, the monuments, also lynching. So every place I lived in in the South had these horrific unresolved lynchings, including the last lynching in American history was where I went to high school in Monroe, Georgia. And yet I never heard anything about it growing up. Once we know the stories of these things, we can't be unchanged.

Yeah, it's all rooted in this mythology. Brigadier General, U.S. Army retired Ty Sigily, is the author of Robert E. Lee and Me, a promise delivered, 10 American heroes, and the battle to rename our nation's military bases. I was formerly head of the Department of History at West Point, Professor Emeritus West Point, professor now at Hamilton College. I'm so grateful for you to be on the show. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit.

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