When I was in about third grade, I read the same three books over and over. One was a biography of Babe Ruth. One was a biography Jim Thorpe. And one was biography of Robert E. Lee. These books were not nuanced pictures of these men. They were designed to reach eight year old kids and they portrayed their subjects as heroes. 

The Ruth and Thorpe books focused on two boys overcoming obstacles. Ruth moved from an orphanage in Baltimore to become one of the greatest baseball players of all time. Thorpe was forced to leave home at an early age to go the Carlisle School for Indians before becoming one of the greatest all-round athletes in American history. They were worthy sports heroes.

The Lee biography, though, described a different kind of hero, more a tragic one. On the cover, Lee sat upon his horse, Traveler, while rank-and-file Confederates looked on reverently. The scene, I always assumed, was Lee’s final address to his troops at Appomattox. 

The book described him as a man with deeply held beliefs about honor and duty. He grew up around the people who founded America. His father was a distinguished Revolutionary War general and his wife was a descendant of Martha Washington. He was a great soldier, the author explained, who only reluctantly took a command with the Confederacy out of loyalty to the Commonwealth of Virginia. He opposed slavery and freed his slaves before he went to war. He was a brilliant general who served nobly and honorably, earning the undying admiration of his troops. He ended the war and worked toward the successful reconciliation of the country. He was a man to be admired. 

Why did a school library have such a flattering biography of a man who betrayed his country in an effort to preserve the institution of slavery? According to an Atlantic article, Lee not only supported slavery, he denied freedom to the slaves he inherited even though they had been granted it in his father-in-law’s will. He treated them abysmally, dividing families and punishing runaways with severe beatings. 

Today, on a website called “Kiddle,” an encyclopedia for kids, the entry for Lee says:

Lee inherited a number of slaves with Arlington House. However, the slaves knew their freedom had been granted them in the will and refused to work. Lee wanted to grant them their freedom but needed them to help him run Arlington House properly. He was kind and refused to use torture. Lee, like Thomas Jefferson had mixed feelings about slavery. Lee called slavery an “evil” to both blacks and whites, but saw the benefits of owning slaves. Lee thought slavery had to be ended gradually or the economy (a way of buying, selling, or trading things of value in order to manage how you live) of the South would collapse. However, Lee did agree with other Southerners in thinking that blacks were inferior. He believed God would work out the problem in His own time.

In reality, Lee fought releasing his slaves in court. He didn’t free them, as we were taught in school, because of any noble sense of justice. He freed them after he lost his lawsuit to contradict his father-in-law’s will and because his home in Arlington had been occupied by federal troops. 

These biographies serve to whitewash the history of the South, making heroes of traitors. They are core to the creation of the myth of the Lost Cause. They portray reluctant rebels who struggled with the decision to support succession and slavery. Instead of casting their doubt as virtuous, we should be highlighting that they clearly knew better and chose fight to keep people enslaved at the cost of the lives of 600,000 Americans anyway. That’s more than just moral failings. That’s criminal. 

The flaw in these stories, and in our history, is the lack of accountability. Nobody really paid the price for defending slavery and we turned traitors into heroes. We teach our children that the leaders of a rebellion against our government to preserve an evil institution were tragic, conflicted figures. For over a hundred years, we’ve been teaching our children the wrong lessons. 

If our third graders are going to be reading biographies of men like Robert E. Lee, they should learn that the consequences of their moral failings led to death and destruction. We should learn that not holding them accountable led to lynchings and Jim Crow. That is really the legacy of Lee, not his noble demeanor or conflicted opinions of slavery. He had a choice and made the wrong one with devastating consequences. In the story of America, Lee is one of the villains, not one of the heroes.  

On the bright side, Happy Juneteenth.