Book Review: Un-Cancel Robert E. Lee: An Open Letter to the Trustees of Washington and Lee University
Un-Cancel Robert E. Lee: An Open Letter to the Trustees of Washington and Lee University. By Gib Kerr. New York: Bombardier Books, 2024. Softcover, 206 pp. $18.99.
Reviewed by Jonathan W. Peters
Over thirty years ago, Eugene Genovese observed that the media and academy waged “an increasingly successful campaign” to utterly disgrace the Old South, portraying it more or less as “a prologue to the history of Nazi Germany.”[1] This kind of teaching gained traction in the twenty-first century with telling effects, as can be seen in the recent destruction and removal of Southern memorials, and the renaming of streets, buildings, and institutions. Some might consider Washington and Lee University to be a case in point. Within the last few years, W&L leaders discontinued Founders’ Day, deleted images of George Washington and Robert E. Lee from diplomas, removed images and references to Lee from the Lee Chapel, walled off the Recumbent Lee memorial at the back of the chapel during ceremonies, replaced Traveller’s headstone with a plaque without any reference to Lee, and renamed the chapel. Over seventy percent of the faculty also voted to remove Lee’s name from the university.
The administration has received pushback for these and other recommended changes. Following a report of the W&L Commission on Institutional History and Community in 2018, a group of concerned alumni formed The Generals Redoubt, now headquartered at Fancy Hill ten miles south of Lexington. In May 2024, one of its board members, Gib Kerr, published a popular-level book titled Un-Cancel Robert E. Lee: An Open Letter to the Trustees of Washington and Lee University.
Un-Cancel Robert E. Lee directly challenges Ty Seidule’s Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause, published in 2021. Seidule, a fellow memoirist and W&L alumnus, contends that Lee was a traitor to the United States who fought to preserve the everlasting enslavement of African-Americans, and therefore should be canceled. Kerr, on the other hand, argues that Lee disliked slavery and secession, but when Abraham Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand volunteers to subdue the South, Virginia deemed his actions unconstitutional and seceded, obliging Lee as citizen of the state to go with her. As to treason, Kerr says none of the Confederacy’s leaders were tried or convicted. To make his claims, the author heavily relies on Douglass Southall Freeman’s four-volume biography of Lee, but he also makes use of other books by Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Emory M. Thomas, Charles Bracelen Flood, Allen Guelzo, and Thomas J. DiLorenzo. Kerr acknowledges that Lee adhered to the commonly held racial prejudices of his day and imperfectly handled the Custis family slaves when executing his father-in-law’s will.
Kerr maintains that Lee had other qualities, though, worth commemorating:
He saved [Washington College from collapse in the immediate postwar era. As the new president, h]e attracted new students and donors from all over the country. He innovated the curriculum and entrusted the students with the Honor Code. He inspired countless alumni with his example of character and virtue. . . . [He was] a reluctant warrior . . . [and] a leading voice for reconciliation after the war. (182)
Kerr notes that even Dwight D. Eisenhower, “who sent the [101st] Airborne to protect the civil rights of black schoolchildren in Little Rock[,] saw the good in Robert E. Lee and recognized the need for young Americans to ‘strive to emulate his rare qualities’” (72).[2] Therefore, Kerr believes that W&L should restore Lee “to the rightful place of honor,” “without embracing any negative aspects of the Lost Cause,” such as racism (xii, 164, 182).
For now, the board of trustees has resolved to keep Lee in the school’s name and to create a museum to tell the school’s history. Kerr wishes for more and is “highly skeptical about how such a museum will be curated,” (182) while Seidule does not think W&L is doing enough to distance itself from Lee. The board, in time, may wish to consider a more harmonious solution. The school could teach a multi-faceted history of the South while publicly honoring “the noble and heroic features” of the namesakes and the civil rights advocates who sought to correct the former’s flaws. This, as Genovese suggested years ago, could help bring “mutual respect and appreciation for the greatness, as well as the evil, that has gone into the making of the South,”[3] and encourage the W&L community to build upon the good of all.
[1] Eugene Genovese, The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), xi-xii.
[2] See https://www.civilwarprofiles.com/dwight-d-eisenhower-in-defense-of-robert-e-lee/
[3] Genovese, The Southern Tradition, xii.
Jonathan W. Peters serves as an administrative assistant at Reformation Bible Church and Harford Christian School in Darlington, Maryland. He was interviewed in Pennsylvania Cabel Network’s Battlefield Pennsylvania: The Battle of White Marsh (2019), and he transcribed and edited Our Comfort in Dying: Civil War Sermons by R. L. Dabney, Stonewall Jackson’s Chief-of Staff (Sola Fide Publications, 2021).
Finally a book and idea I can get behind. Lee should never have been cancelled in the first place, and Seidule is a loon.
“obliging Lee as citizen of the state to go with her.”
Go ahead and tell that to Lee’s mentor Winfield Scott, his close friend George Thomas, and every other white southerner who stayed loyal to the old flag for one reason or another. Lee broke his oath, failed in his quest to lead a rebellion for Confederate independence, and died with no restored citizenship as his punishment.
Any work positively citing Thomas DiLorenzo tells me plenty. I probably won’t agree with much of what Kerr has written and don’t plan on giving it my time to find out. But I do think W&L went too far in an attempt to over-correct. That’s just my opinion as someone with no correction to the school. Yet the W&L faculty as well as plenty of alumni like Seidule were pleased with the changes; if they had a 70% approval vote for carrying out their agenda then majority rule prevailed.
I disagree with some of Seidule’s assessments in his short book I let my guard down to read. However, an attempt to restore reconciliationist public veneration to Lee’s name is the other side of the tug of war I want no part of.
Lee waged war against the Unites States, and was a traitor. As to his father-in-law’s slaves…Lee did not fulfill the Father-in-law’s request to have the slaves freed in 5 years. Lee petitioned the courts to extend the time in servitude.
So glad this book was written, and its premise has my full support.
Institutional, arbitrary suppression of facts and images based upon opinions of the institution runs contrary to the essence of free, intellectual inquiry and discussion of conflicting opinions.
Freedom of expression and debate lay at the heart of an academic environment’s cherished atmosphere.
Arbitrary suppression of historical facts and images because they do not resonate with current interpretations of issues, is censoring at its best.
An academic environment must allow for the full spectrum of interpretations without preselecting those opinions worthy of discussion. They all must be there for student analysis.
The ancient Egyptians defaced and destroyed images of past leaders in an attempt to suppress their ideas and beliefs.
This may be sufficient for an illiterate population with no other method of accessing information, but not for current students.
The moral courage of the W&L Board of Visitors would better be vindicated by retaining of images and expressions of its past accompanied by an explanation of all that is good concerning those images and expressions, and their rational for retention.
There is much to be learned from Robert E. Lee’s actions before, during, and after the Civil War. Let students be exposed to all aspects of the discussion and let them decide what the interpretation should be.
I will just start by agreeing with the premises laid out by Roy above Lee decided to betray his oaths to join the confederacy while men like Scott, Thomas, Anderon and (I’ll add a Navy name to show it wasn’t just West Point grads) David Farragut chose to stay true to those oaths. I could also add that for someone who “disliked slavery” it is odd that he chose to go against the wishes of his father in-law when it came to freeing those he held in servitude. So, I tend to agree with the folks at W&L and Seidule in the assessment of parts of Lee’s character. That being said “cancelling” him or other parts of history doesn’t do justice to the history of our nation and the context of how we got to where we are today. So, should Lee be cancelled? No, not at all. Venerate him? That is also a no from me.
I’m a bit mystified why this book was even thought worthy of a review by Emerging Civil War. It certainly doesn’t appear to add anything to the scholarship and only rehashes tired arguments that have been debunked by any number of trained historians in the last thirty years.
The opening line of this review suggests the scholarly, evidence-based debunking of the Lost Cause was some kind of propaganda campaign. Might just as well say “that damn liberal media and those socialist/Marxist/commie college professors” and make it even easier to be dismissive of the intellectual rigor and scholarship. I think W&L went too far in its efforts to sweep Lee under the rug, but the apologist’s tone of the review’s opening undercuts (for me, anyway) the validity of arguments the reviewer or Mr. Kerr might have for inviting the university to revisit the issue.
Well said – it’s difficult to appreciate any of the book or review’s positive contributions when the reviewer makes his bias so immediately evident.
Is this a fair question for me to ask? The article said that “70% of the faculty voted to drop Lee’s name”. Which begs my question: why were they working there to begin with if they felt their employer’s name and legacy were so disgraceful?
And I’ll add this question: did those faculty members have any problems or hesitations about accepting their paychecks that had “Washington and Lee” printed on them?