THE NATION'S PULSE: History Under Fire

...Douglas Southall Freeman’s Pulitzer-winning four-volume biography, which was published in 1936, remains the definitive account...

...Krick, who retired in 2002 after three decades as chief historian at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park, was invited to deliver the featured address to the Lee Bicentennial Symposium, an event convened in Arlington to defend the reputation of the Virginian born in 1807...

...This generation of historians reinvented Christopher Columbus as a genocidal brute, revived a discredited partisan libel in order to portray Thomas Jefferson as Sally Hemings’s paramour, and so altered public opinion of the Pilgrims as to make Thanksgiving an occasion for protests at Plymouth Rock...

...Robert Stacy McCainis an assistant national editor for the Washington Times and co-author, with Lynn Vincent, of Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party (Nelson Current...

...A DMIRATION FOR LEE, however, was by no means confined to the Confederates under his command...

...But Lee lost this inheritance during the Civil War, in the course of which federal officials made the plantation a burying ground for Union soldiers, thus consecrating the hallowed ground now famous as Arlington National Cemetery...

...An award-winning author of 16 books about the Civil War, Krick heaped scorn on the revisionists who argue, among other things, that it was not until the postwar era that nostalgic mythmakers created the idea that Lee was beloved and admired by his soldiers...

...One Confederate officer described Lee as “an ideal Christian knight,” and Wolseley admiringly described “the impressive dignity of his old-fashioned style of address...

...He was the ablest general, and to me, seemed the greatest man I ever conversed with,” recalled Garnet Wolseley, the commander of the British army, four decades after visiting Lee’s camp as a military observer in 1862...

...It is hardly surprising, then, that they would embrace Nolan’s revisionist view of Lee...

...of imposing bearing, noble countenance, with expression of deep sadness overmastered with deeper strength...

...It was there, in 1831, that Lt...

...It is history that teaches us to hope...

...Inside a ballroom of the Key Bridge Marriott hotel that Saturday, however, more than 200 people gathered for a symposium dedicated to the highway’s namesake...

...If Lee’s good reputation was once so widely acknowledged, what provoked the recent revisionist assault and why has it gained such headway as to require a symposium to defend him...

...By the 1990s, however, a new generation of academic historians had risen to prominence, deeply enthralled with “social history” and imbued with a ’60s spirit of iconoclasm toward everything oldfashioned and patriotic in the American belief system...

...To most Washingtonians, this is just another road in another suburb...

...It is doubtful that any of the drivers rushing past a 12-story hotel on a Saturday in late April gave any thought to the historical significance of the names “Lee” and “Arlington...

...Any researcher approaching the subject will easily discover praise for Lee from those who knew him, whether before, during or after the war...

...thus anyone likely to be deemed heroic by your grandfather is almost certain to be a villain to liberals...

...The Rebel by Robert Stacy McCain L EE HIGHWAY IN ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA, is a busy thoroughfare...

...Nolan, an octogenarian whose first Civil War book was a 1961 account of the Union army’s famed Iron Brigade, returned to the subject three decades later with Lee Considered, in which he dismissed the venerated image of Lee as a “parable” that served to rewrite the war’s history as “Victorian melodrama...

...Modern liberalism depends upon a peculiar sense of progress that renders the past—its ideals, its holidays, its heroes—not merely obsolete but morally inferior to the present...

...Led by Indiana lawyer-author Alan T. Nolan and assisted by academics like University of Virginia professor Gary W. Gallagher, a band of revisionist historians has sought to discredit as “Lost Cause myth” the traditional image of Lee as a tragic hero who demonstrated his noble character in defense of a doomed cause...

...Yet because of the continuing market for “new” Civil War books, publishers have continued to issue “a wretched flood of Lee biographies,” as Krick told the Arlington symposium, although such works generally contain “no new evidence...

...Yet there is abundant evidence from direct sources, Krick said, that “during the war, the men adored Lee...

...Such revisionist claims, Robert K. Krick says, are “counter-factual blathering...

...One can imagine that professional historians weary of this stale stuff would find it hard to resist a “new perspective” on such an overdone subject, and this was what Nolan provided when Lee Considered was published in 1991...

...During the evening banquet speech, Krick vented his frustration with the postmodernist attacks on Lee—although he reminded the predominantly Southern audience that he is a California native with no ancestral ties that compel him to a defense of the Confederate chieftain...

...JUNE 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 55...

...Winfield Scott, whom Lee served as a young aide during the Mexican War...

...The event is sponsored by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, to whom Lee is a special name and Arlington is a special place...

...Crocker III noted that Lee’s Christianity “makes modern America uncomfortable,” and that Lee’s selfless devotion to duty was at odds with the contemporary culture of “self-esteem...

...Both observations are undoubtedly true, but cannot account for the vehemence and success of the revisionists...

...More than a quarter century had passed since the orgy of official commemoration of the Civil War centennial in the early ’60s, an occasion that produced lots of dully even-handed tributes to “the boys in blue and gray” and corny reiterations of the “brother against brother” theme...

...54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 The notion of Lee as “a heroic soldier who led an outnumbered army against a powerful enemy,” Gallagher wrote in a book that he and Nolan co-edited in 2000, is part of a myth “propagated in the years following the Civil War...

...Lee inherited Arlington in 1857 upon the death of his father-in-law (who happened to be George Washington’s adopted son...

...Union Gen...

...Timing also helped promote this iconoclasm, since Nolan’s Lee Considered was published the same year that Ken Burns’s PBS documentary on the Civil War generated a surge of interest in the subject...

...Who then is more deserving of liberal demonization than Lee, a man recognized even in the 1860s as exemplifying the most ancient ideals...

...Army married his wife, Mary Custis, whose family owned Arlington plantation, from which the nearby town got its name...

...More than 140 years after Appomattox, it seems that everything important that can be written about the Civil War has already been written, and this is certainly true of Lee...

...The consistency of such praise from so many different sources is remarkable...

...That history is unknown to most who travel Lee Highway through Arlington, and perhaps for the best, considering what a battering the Confederate commander’s reputation has suffered in recent years...

...At his death in 1870, Lee was honored even by Northerners—the New York Herald said Lee had won “the respect and admiration of the world...

...In an article that appeared earlier this year in The American Spectator’s daily online edition, historian H.W...

...In ensuing decades, Lee’s character and accomplishments were praised by such eminences as Theodore Roosevelt (“the very greatest of all the great captains”), Winston Churchill (“one of the noblest Americans who ever lived”), and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who declared Lee “noble as a leader and as a man” and expressed the hope that “American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities...

...Joshua Chamberlain, describing how ROBERT STACY M CCAIN he first saw the Confederate leader during the surrender at Appomattox, recounted his “awe and admiration” of Lee, “a commanding form...

...Robert E. Lee of the U.S...

...To the progressive liberal, the past is by definition chock full of sexism, racism, and sundry other oppressions...

...Slightly more than a mile from the hotel is the Greek Revival mansion known as Arlington House...

...Lee is the greatest military genius in America,” said Gen...

...As might be expected, the book was favorably reviewed in the liberal press, with the New York Times calling it “persuasive,” while the Washington Post credited Nolan with providing “solid documentation” for his claims...

...A great measure of the revisionist impulse might be ascribed to sheer boredom...

...I T IS DIFFICULT TO RESIST THE CONCLUSION that recent assaults on Lee’s reputation have less to do with 19th-century history than with contemporary politics, given that Lee’s fiercest critics are liberals, both inside and outside the academy...

...Those defending Lee’s reputation are currently fighting a losing battle against the revisionist insurgency, but a losing battle is not always hopeless, as Lee himself said: “[W]e often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged...

...Nolan, for instance, has given thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates since 1996, including $1,100 in contributions to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, according to Federal Election Commission records...