Why Keep R.E. Lee?

can a confederate soldier still teach me anything?

Charles Sallis began teaching history at Millsaps College when I was a small child. He continued teaching there when I was old enough to enroll, including a very popular course on Southern History. Dr. Sallis was one of the most popular teachers at Millsaps, but my first encounter with him was when I was much younger and he took on the Mississippi Textbook Commission and the entire Mississippi Textbook Adoption Process.

Along with a professor at Tougaloo, he dared co-author a textbook on Mississippi History that included the ugly bits. For this, his book was blacklisted during the textbook adoption process, so he took them to court.

Just last year, I learned that Catherine Gray, one of my classmates, was asked to testify in court that the book “Mississippi History: Conflict and Change” hadn’t warped her mind. Asking a fifteen or sixteen-year-old to testify, I imagine, was a terrifying process. It never happened to me. Catherine won everything there was to win at St. Andrews, my high school. From what I could see, she was the only one of us who ever really piloted her destiny and took herself seriously. I always worried that might make her feel lonely, but that’s my job: worrying about other people.

Among a bucket full of other accolades and positions, Dr. Sallis was the faculty advisor for Chi Omega Sorority, and I was the maintenance supervisor for Chi Omega. In a contest with two of my Kappa Alpha brothers, a Sig, a Pike, and a Chop, I was crowned King of the Chi Omega Maintenance Supervisors, and they gave me a cardboard crown.

If you want to know the way to a sorority girl’s heart, it’s pretty simple. You maintain their lawn, repair their plumbing, and listen to them when they require listening to. It was pretty much the same job I had at Alpha Mu Chapter of Kappa Alpha Order, but one I attended the girls more cheerfully and listened more politely. It’s been forty years, but I still attend the needs of Chi Omega pretty closely.

Dr. Sallis and I often discussed Chi Omega and Kappa Alpha. Unlike most professors, he understood that Kappa Alpha took Robert E. Lee as its spiritual founder, not because of his career during or before the Civil War but because of his far too short career after the war.

Except for his horse and two suits of clothes, Lee lost everything he owned in the war, including Arlington Farm, which he inherited from his father-in-law. Lee received several offers to lend his name to businesses, such as a life insurance company, for which he would receive enough money for him and his wife Mary to have a peaceful, comfortable retirement anywhere they wanted in the world, including South America, where some of his Confederate compatriots went, without having to do any work.

He refused all those offers. The cost of the war on the South, particularly his beloved Virginia, haunted him. The number of boys, Northern and Southern, who died under his command kept him awake at night and would for the rest of his life.

The Trustees of the small Washington College in Arlington, Virginia, offered Lee a position as President. They couldn’t offer him much in the way of a salary, but they could pay his living expenses and provide him with a house and an adjoining stable. Lee wrote to a friend that he would finally be able to sleep under the same roof as Traveler, his beloved horse. Feeling his age, the weight of his life, and the failures that accrued under his guidance, he wrote to a friend of the position at Washington College, “Life is indeed gliding away, and I have nothing good to show for mine that is past. I pray I may be spared to accomplish something for the benefit of mankind and the honour of God.” That was his purpose when he arrived in Lexington with his wife, his horse, a traveling secretary kit, and two suits of clothes.

At the end of the war, in 1865, fewer than fifty students were at Small Washington College. Among them were five boys, all soldiers who served under Lee, who found themselves without prospects in a largely burned-out and destroyed Virginia. They went to college hoping to find a way to rebuild their destroyed lives and homes, and there they found Lee.

Those boys saw something in Lee, not Lee the General, but Lee the president, who, having lost everything, chose to devote what was left of his life to others, including themselves, and that gave them hope. Those boys founded the Kappa Alpha Order, hoping to spread the constructive, redemptive spirit they found in Lee.

Dr. Sallis called me into his office several times to try and convince me so that I could and should convince the members of KA to discontinue the “Old South Ball.” He argued, correctly, that Lee would have been against the idea. Even though Kappa Alpha was a nineteenth-century idea, the Old South Ball was much younger. It began when costumes from the Atlanta premiere of “Gone With The Wind” became available for rent at prices college students could afford. It’s really that simple.

Following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, it was illegal to wear Confederate uniforms for a time. Having lost everything, Lee had his old uniform and one black, broadcloth suit. Mary Lee sewed scraps of cloth over the brass CSA buttons of Lee’s uniform and removed the insignia so he might dress warmly without being arrested.

I argued with Dr. Sallis that the boys of KA could wear confederate crap, shoot cannons and drink far too much beer any day they wanted to, and often did, but should we threaten to take away the Old South Ball, the ladies on campus would hold a rebellion.

It wasn’t lost on me that the Old South Ball was just another drunken, hazy memory for us men, but for the women, it was a chance to wear a princess costume and be among us during the few days in the year when we at least pretended to uphold the “les dames” part of our motto. The make-believe princess part of the party for them was as much fun for us as it was for them, although you’d be hard-pressed to find a KA who admitted that.

We rented the Confederate and “Southern gentlemen” costumes from a place in Atlanta. Surely, they weren’t the same costumes from “Gone With the Wind,” but they smelled like it. They were horribly constructed, historically inaccurate, and threadbare. The women, however, could produce the most elaborate dresses, seemingly out of thin air. My date one year required lace elbow gloves and a lace parasol to accessorize her costume. I visited four department stores looking for them before a clerk took pity on me and suggested I try a bridal shop.

Dr. Sallis believed the party was disrespectful to the boys who died in the Civil War. He even showed me Lee’s Standing Order Number Nine, where he bade farewell to his troops as we discussed the issue. Grant had graciously allowed the boys in Lee’s army to return home with their weapons (many of which were their own and not the property of the Confederate States of America) and whatever mounted animal they had at their disposal in the army. That’s not much to rebuild an entire country burnt out by Sherman, but Lee was forever grateful for Grant’s generosity to his men. Grant spoke on Lee’s behalf, seeking a pardon from President Lincoln, but an assassin’s bullet prevented it.

Not long after I graduated, the Alpha Mu Chapter of Kappa Alpha the Order discontinued the Old South Ball. By 2010, the National Office of Kappa Alpha banned the party entirely and banned the phrase “Old South” from being associated with any chapter functions. Dr. Sallis, who had been right all along, got his wish.

There’s a theory, one I ascribe to, that the Trojan War never happened. The Greek people, as they grew from separate warring tribes to an empire, felt the need for a cultural myth to bind themselves together as a people, so they took different actual events in their history, mixed them together with some healthy imagination, and created the Myth of the Trojan War. Just like Agamemnon bound the Greek Tribes together, the myth bound the different Greek Islands together.

The gold mask you see, often called The Mask of Agamemnon, is real. German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered it and attributed it to Agamemnon, but the carbon dating of the artifact makes it much older than the supposed Trojan War. It was the mask of a king and chieftain, but not Agamemnon.

One of the founders of Kappa Alpha, Samuel Zenas Ammen, said of Lee: “We likened him to Agamemnon, and we were his Achaioi, battling on the windy plains of Troy. Spiritually, then, he thoroughly dominated us.” He was grappling with fitting the very real figure of Lee into his need for a mythological founder in a world destroyed by war. Ammen was a brilliant man and a brilliant writer. He created KA out of nothing, with the hopes of creating a brotherhood that might rebuild Virginia.

People need myths to bind them together and define their culture. In America, there are many myths. When I was young, we were taught that the story of George Washington and the Cherry Tree was real. There are other myths. Thanksgiving is largely a myth. In the South, we have the myth of the lost cause. With its roots in the nineteenth century, it didn’t flourish until the twentieth. It elevated the regionalism the South always had to specifically mythic levels.

Around the South, hastily constructed bronze statues began appearing, paying homage to the Myth of the Lost Cause, its leaders, and martyrs, including Lee. Southern people began equating their culture with the Confederate War, even though it only lasted four years and nearly destroyed us. We were more than the Confederate States of America, but it was becoming us. It took eighty years and the work of many people like Charles Sallis to reverse that trend, but we’ve made great strides and continue to.

Laurin Stennis understood this need for cultural myths and the symbols that encompass them, and she worked to incorporate this idea into her effort to remove the Confederate battle standard from the Mississippi State Flag. Dixicrats, now all Republicans, saw her work as a betrayal of her grandfather and buried it, but she was right.

Her grandfather, the late Senator John Stennis, always scared the peanuts out of me. He was polite but generally treated me as a zombie bit of reanimated flesh from my uncle’s dead body. Not so much now, but this happened often when I was younger. It’s been a while since I’ve had to introduce myself as “Boyd Campbell, but not THAT Boyd Campbell.” It still happens, though. The Pikes at Millsaps called me Mr. Cooke for a while because that’s my nephew’s name. I never corrected them.

I always liked Laurin. She seemed remarkably bright and far braver at speaking her mind than I was. I doubt if she liked me very much. She was a feminist, and I was a grumpy bastard. I’m pretty sure she saw me as a symbol of the oppressive white South she was trying to change. There was a time in my life when I let people believe that because if I ever started fighting that perception, I would have to continue fighting it for the rest of my life. Ultimately, I chose to do just that.

Last week, two members of the Kappa Alpha Chapter at Ole Miss were accused of racist behavior during the counter-protest to a free Palestine protest in Oxford. The investigation continues, but the university and Kappa Alpha Order were not able to prove that these boys did anything wrong other than dressing like idiots.

During a town hall meeting, members of the Ole Miss NAACP loudly beat upon the issue of Kappa Alpha and its affiliation with Robert E. Lee. I expected that. It’s legitimately part of our history. Pretending it didn’t happen would be a lie. A few years ago, when two of our members put photographs of themselves shooting the Emmitt Till historic marker, they did more to ruin the reputation of Kappa Alpha than a decade of graduating solid citizens could mend.

There are several reasons to disparage Robert E. Lee. He inherited slaves from his father-in-law. He fought to extend the practice of slavery despite Lincoln’s efforts to end it. For Lee himself, nothing was more painful than abandoning his oath to defend the Constitution of the United States because he believed his beloved Virginia was in danger, but he did it.

I’m never offended when members of the NAACP disparage Lee and the Kappa Alpha Order. Their perspective is every bit as valid as my own. There have been an awful lot of men who looked exactly like me who did their best to disparage the NAACP, even going so far as to shoot and kill other men just because they were active in the NAACP.

Although it’s better, we are generations away from mending the rift between white men and black men in Mississippi. I make every effort to listen to their perspective and hope they will listen to mine, but as they are the long-aggrieved party, I can’t really demand it. Two perspectives can exist, and both can still be very real. It’s vital for every member of Kappa Alpha to understand and listen intently to the perspective of people who descended from Southern Slaves. That is our shared history.

Men who looked like me and two fellow members of the Kappa Alpha Order did everything they could to stop Laurin Stennis's attempt to change the Mississippi Flag. I had gone into complete artistic, social, and political retirement when this was going on. I felt so strongly about the issue that I nearly ended my self-imposed exile years early. In retrospect, I probably needed a fight like that to revitalize the life I was letting go of.

Frustrated by her lack of success, Laurin ended her campaign to change the flag with the old flag still flying over state buildings. A few years later, the NCAA said they would sanction no championship events in states that used the Confederate Battle Standard as part of their state insignia. Within months, the very same men who found ways to defeat Stennis’s efforts found ways to change the flag.

I wrote Laurin a really long letter, thanking her for her service to Mississippi and acknowledging that, at least to me, this was her victory, not theirs. I stand by that. At first, I couldn’t find her address to send the letter; when I found it, I decided I was not yet ready to contact the outside world again. The battle was over. She had won. I was satisfied the right side won. Nobody needed me to be a part of it.

I wish I had sent the letter now. I’ve tried to search my files for it. I have saved nearly everything I have written since 1980 as a computer file, but sorting it and finding what I want became much more of a challenge than I would have believed.

There are giant gulfs of understanding between the white experience of the South and the black experience of the South, and Lee stands as a barrier between the two. Lee never worked to mend or shorten the gap between white Virginians and Black Virginians. He might not have believed it possible. Once you acknowledge that you and your culture enslaved people who didn’t deserve it, asking for their forgiveness can be quite difficult. Lee never found himself up to the challenge. That doesn’t mean he couldn’t lead other men to seek that forgiveness.

Lee did instill in the boys he taught at Washington College a deep sense of rebuilding their home and rebuilding it in peace this time. That sense of “we have lost everything, and now we must rebuild our lives“ created the Kappa Alpha Order. Lee’s insistence on piety, excellence and gentility gave us the tools to mend the rift we made between white and black Southerners and Northern and Southern Americans, even though many of us chose not to avail ourselves of them.

Several times a week, someone will ask me, “Boyd, why do you return to Jackson? It’s ruined. There is no rebuilding Jackson, Mississippi, Boyd. You should come live with us in Madison.” I met an Indian woman I like very much who also writes.

“Would you like to go to dinner?” I asked.

“I would love to, but I never go to Jackson.” She replied.

This woman is the first generation of her family to live in this country, and she’s already developed a prejudice against my home.

It’s not lost on me that the struggle to prevent racial equality and fairness played as much of a part in the destruction of Jackson in the twenty-first century as it did in the destruction of Virginia in the nineteenth. Walking away from what we ruined isn’t the answer in either case.

So, why do I go back to Jackson? There are lovely places in Rankin and Madison Counties. I’ve lived there before. Jackson is deeply depressed. Crime is out of control. Many of the things I loved as a child and a young man are either gone or nearly gone. Why go back to Jackson?

In my mind, it’s what Lee would do. It’s what Lee did do. He could have been wealthy living in the South American Sun, but he chose to preside over a small, nearly dead college in Lexington. I could live in the sun on the reservoir again; it was fun the first time, or I could go home and fight for Jackson—my beloved home.

Several art pieces in my home are of Robert E. Lee. All depict his surrender at Appomattox or his time at Washington College. Lee’s legacy begins at Appomattox for members of Kappa Alpha.

My favorite is the last photograph ever taken of Lee in his uniform. After Appomattox, he wrote his farewell letter to his men. He was entering the doorway of a building where he would spend the night before deciding what to do with himself since he had no home. A photographer shouted, “General Lee! May I take your photograph?”

In those days, there were no “click-click” photographs. An exposure could take several seconds. Standing in the doorway, holding his ecru campaign hat, Lee’s face shows the weight of his life and decisions. His eyes and his mouth were immensely sad but not yet broken. His soulful brown eyes turned steely and fixed. In a matter of days, his wife would cover the brass buttons on his uniform so he would have a warm coat to wear without violating the law against Confederate insignia. He could have escaped, but he chose to rebuild.

Forgiveness is not something a man like Lee, or a man like me, has the right to ask for. Unlike Lear, we are absolutely not more sinned against than sinning. (Neither was Lear, but that’s another matter.) I can’t just put down the past. It is a part of me. Lee’s legacy, both the good and the bad, is a part of me.

Most of my ancestors were dirt farmers, both in Mississippi and Scotland, but some owned slaves. I can’t hide from that. People like Laurin Stennis believe we can build new foundational myths for the South and let the myth of the lost cause die like a vampire exposed to sunlight. I agree with that.

The way to deal with the life and impact of a man like Robert E. Lee is not to mythologize it, as was done for so long, but to see him for what he was. A slave owner? Absolutely. A Racist? Yes. A traitor to his country and his sworn oaths? Yes. But he also gave the last years of his life to teaching boys to rebuild. Rebuild a new legacy for the South. There were too many men in America who made the mistake of owning slaves, including former slaves. We can’t assume there is nothing more we can learn from any of them.

We fail Lee’s and Stennis’s visions for a new South all the time. That doesn’t mean I’m giving up. I am due some licks and some punishment for what happened in the South. I do not shy away from that. There is a life beyond that, though, and that’s where I focus my sights.

In Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Quentin Compson, in his last days in New England, before taking his own life was asked why he hated the South. He said: “I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!” Hate is a strong word, but I understand how Quentin felt. I won’t put weights in my pockets and jump off a bridge. Unlike Quentin, I intend to rebuild.