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

Seidule is in a unique position to explore this topic, being both a Virginian born and bred, and a career military man who taught history at West Point. As a child growing up, he was in awe of the hero Robert E. Lee; but as a mature man and military history professor at West Point, he began to question what he was taught growing up. Looking around the campus at the Point, he saw memorials to Lee everywhere. He decided to research why West Point displayed a huge portrait of Lee *in his Confederate uniform*, and also bronze plaques, supposedly commemorating US military history, which include the KKK. Seidule decided to research how and why Confederate officers, particularly those educated at West Point on the taxpayers' dime and undoubtedly considered traitors during and for some decades after the war, somehow had become heroes memorialized with statues, and streets, and buildings named after them. A very good question, I thought; the cemetery at West Point contains the graves of many military heroes...but not a single man who served in the CSA because they weren't allowed burial there. And there's a very good reason for that...they were traitors, period. I don't mean to say they weren't brave or good officers, but you can say the same about Rommel and other Germans in WWII; they were still enemy soldiers. The Confederates fought against the US Army, and thought of themselves as a foreign country; they killed hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. In 1861, Congress passed two laws concerning cadets at West Point; one which decreed that all cadets swear an oath never to fight for any other country *or state* against the US, and the other stating that such conduct was treason and could be punishable by death. This excellent book delves into all that and more. My only criticism is that there are no footnotes citing sources.