What I Bought at the PTA Used Book Fair
The Richardson ISD Council of PTAs had its annual used book fair last weekend. If you've
never been, you don't know what you're missing. There are thousands of books,
of all genres, for sale at steep discount prices, a treasure hunt where you
never know what you'll find. The book that caught my eye, the book I just had
to buy, was the one with the big Confederate flag on the cover. I just had to
take this one off the shelf...for review, let's say.
It cost only $1 ($1.08
with sales tax, a pet peeve of mine, but that's for another day). I just knew
it would contain a lot more than a dollar's worth of entertainment. So I gave
the PTA $2, told them to keep the change, and felt conflicted about the whole
transaction. I reconciled my feelings by telling myself I was doing good by
taking this particular book out of circulation. Does that motivation make me a
book banner? I was twisting myself into a pretzel trying to make myself feel
good about simply buying a used book. But the title of the book was "Gallant
Christian Soldier: Robert E. Lee." Lee is a subject that has conflicted the
country since the country's Great Conflict itself.
In the end, I just had to see how the book's author, Lee Roddy, was going
to spin his biography of this slave holder and traitor to the United States
of America. The title was a spoiler: "Gallant"? "Christian"? Really? I didn't
have to wait long for more along the same line. It turns out Roddy sees no
conflict in Lee's life story at all. In his foreward, in the very first
paragraph, there's this:
As a former newspaper editor and writer of countless short historical
biographies, I searched diligently for a flaw in Lee's character. I
found none [emphasis added]. I cannot say that of any other person
I researched. I kept asking myself, "Why? What was his secret?" That
led to this book.
No character flaws? Not even the fact that Lee owned slaves? That he
inherited hundreds of slaves upon the death of his father-in-law, who
specified in his will that they be freed within five years, but Lee twice went
to court to extend that deadline? That Lee separated families to pay off
debts, hiring some slaves to plantations (i.e., slave labor camps) farther
South? That Lee was credibly
accused of personally ordering and overseeing the administration of 50 lashes
on two of his slaves who escaped and were recaptured? That when his
slaveholding life was threatened by abolition, he became a traitor to the
United States of America and took up arms against it? None of that personal
history is considered to be character flaws by Lee Roddy.
How does Roddy handle these historic facts? He either doesn't report them
at all or, when he does, he dismisses them as slanders. For example, when Lee
was accused of having escaped slaves lashed, Roddy simply denies the
possibility. "Lee and those who knew him were aware that he was not capable of
doing such a thing. Still, he didn't defend himself."
Perhaps the biggest revision of history Roddy accepts as fact regards the
causes of the Civil War.
Since Lincoln had been elected in the previous autumn, the issue of states'
rights versus the Union had raged across the land. The main issue was not
slavery [emphasis added], but whether a federaton of states which had
banded together in the Revolution could be forced to stay together at the
command of a central government
Roddy should read the actual declarations of secession of the various
states (e.g., Texas).
They leave no doubt that the main issue is slavery. Even Roddy quotes Lee himself
in a letter to his wife, blaming "efforts of certain people of the North, to
interfere with the domestic institutions of the South" (i.e., slavery) for what
will lead to a "Civil and Servile War." Denial of a purported right to secede
wasn't why the South seceded. It was why the North fought the South after the
South seceded. That is, a desire to preserve the Union was the North's motivation
for the war. The South's motivation was to preserve slavery.
Roddy supplies cherry-picked quotes from Lee's papers to make it sound
like Lee was virtually an abolitionist in spirit. He quotes from a letter to
his wife where Lee called slavery "a moral and political evil" but Roddy
conveniently omits to give us the full quote:
...I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy.
Besides the careful selection of quotes from Lee's papers to turn
Roddy's biography into hagiography, we get entirely made-up stories about
Lee's life. The tone is set in the book's very first paragraph:
The cry of a newborn baby drifted faintly from the plantation house
known as Stratford Hall. A young slave outside the great house rubbed
hands against the cold. She cocked her head slightly, straining to
hear. The sharp January wind made hearing impossible.
A slave with her hair tied up in red cloth opened the door a crack.
"It's a boy!"
The young slave threw up her arms in joy. "A boy! Ol' Marse Lee
got hisself another son!"
Roddy invents an idyllic master-slave relationship on the Lee plantation,
where the slaves speak in dialect and are all happy as can be for the birth
of a new master. Roddy continues the fiction right down to his penultimate
paragraph.
Without doubt, he was one of the most remarkable men this nation ever
produced. He set an example for all people of all ages to follow. And
he set the example so high no one an easily reach it.
The one thing "Gallant Christian Soldier: Robert E. Lee" did for me was
show me where antipathy towards CRT and BLM is coming from. For generations,
books like Roddy's have been used to give white Christian nationalists a
version of history they are comfortable with. Today's efforts to remove that
whitewash is leading to a backlash against corrective efforts.
Grade: F-
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