William Mack Lee and the Lost Cause

Having spent the first few decades of my life studying machines and computers, in the nineteen eighties I decided it would be more fun to study people by pursuing degrees in history and anthropology.  I was embarrassingly old before I discovered something that should be painfully obvious to anyone who has paid attention in a high school history class:  that throughout history, there have been no guilty people.

Well, there have been a lot of truly evil people over time, but each of these villains has been perfectly innocent in his own mind.  No matter what people have done, they convince themselves that they are always justified in their actions by forces out of their control.  This reasoning, of course, is nonsense, but people have an inherent need to find ways to justify their actions, no matter how utterly wrong they may be to the rest of us.  People who cannot find a way to do so, probably go mad.

This same inherent need to justify actions evidently applies to large groups of people in a collective need to explain actions that otherwise appear reprehensible.  So it is with Southerners still trying to explain away slavery and the Civil War.  Almost immediately after the war, Southerners wholeheartedly accepted the negationist theory of the Lost Cause—an absurd belief that the actions of the South were somehow honorable and that slavery was not the root cause of the war.  

While the North and the South differed on several issues, all the arguments except slavery could have been resolved by negotiation and compromise.  Put simply, if there had been no slavery, there would have been no war.  Any attempt to justify the war or the actions of the southern leaders is denial of the simple fact that the Southern states fought primarily to retain the institution of slavery because their economy depended on it.

After more than a century and a half (and after more than half million people died fighting a senseless war), you would think that this issue would have been settled for good, but since the recent removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee from Richmond, the whole rancid issue has bubbled to the top of the septic tank again, and with it, the ludicrous tale of William Mack Lee.

William Mack Lee was a former slave who, in the first part of the 20th century, began passing himself off as the former cook and body servant of General Lee throughout the Civil War.  In the South, people donated small amounts of change to pose for pictures with William Mack Lee and listen to his stories about how he cooked for General Lee through the war.  You could even buy a copy of his pamphlet, “History of the Life of Rev. Wm. Mack Lee, Body Servant of General Robert E. Lee Through the Civil War: Cook from 1861 to 1865”.  Having read that long title, you can read the other half of the pamphlet for free here.

According to William Mack Lee, the ‘Marse Robert’ was the epitome of Southern gentlemen: a kind master who freed his slaves more than a decade before the Civil War, and who was such a wonderful master that none of his slaves left, preferring to stay on the plantation.  William Mack Lee says he remained on the general’s plantation for eighteen years after the war.

The problem of course is that William Mack Lee was a fraud and liar.  I can’t really bring myself to blame him, however, considering that he was an elderly former slave without a pension or means to support himself, was forced to eke out a living by telling people what they desperately wanted to believe.  I’m just surprised this didn’t get him elected to Congress.

Among the numerous errors in the pamphlet is William Mack Lee’s claim that he was Robert E. Lee’s slave who accompanied the general during the war.  There still exists an accurate inventory of the general’s slaves and William Mack Lee isn’t listed.  Nor did the man cook for the general, as Robert E. Lee wrote about the two slaves that accompanied him during the war:  Meredith was his cook and Perry was his valet.  And while he claims the general left him almost $400 in his will, if you read it—and it’s available online—no such provision can be found.  Nor is it possible for the former slave to have remained on the plantation for eighteen years after the war.  The general never set foot on his old plantation after the war, which by then had been converted into Arlington National Cemetery.  In any case, the general died five years after the war.

For anyone remotely familiar with the events of the Civil War, one tale from the pamphlet is obvious nonsense.  According to the author, "I was with him at the first battle of Bull Run, second battle of Bull Run, first battle of Manassas, second battle of Manassas..."  The Battle of the Manassas and the Battle of Bull Run are the same battle, as the North tended to name battles after rivers and streams, while the South usually named battles for nearby towns, communities, or railroad junctions.  Not only would no Southerner ever refer to that battle as Bull Run, but General Lee was not even present at the first battle.

By far the most ludicrous story in the pamphlet is William Mack Lee’s account of Stonewall Jackson’s putting on the uniform of a Union officer so that he could sneak through Union lines and spy on the enemy’s army.  I will admit that General Jackson was a weird duck—he used to watch battles while sitting in the saddle, sucking on a lemon, with one hand raised in the air (supposedly to “balance” him).  While I would love for the story of General Jackson’s being a spy to be real, it’s impossible.

That the wild tales of William Mack Lee continue to be believed by gullible people is proof that far too many Southerners are desperate to believe that Robert E. Lee was someone worthy of respect.  General Lee was a brilliant battlefield tactician, but he wasn’t a very admirable man.  Lee certainly did not free his slaves a decade before the war—the laws of Virginia required freed slaves to leave the state within 12 months.  There is also ample evidence in the general’s own writings that he treated his slaves harshly.  In one case, after two of his slaves who had run away were recaptured, Lee ordered that they be stripped to the waist and given 50 lashes each.  Still not content with their punishment, Lee ordered their backs washed with brine water.

In 1857, Lee inherited more slaves, but the inheritance came with the stipulation that Lee free the slaves within five years.  Lee went unsuccessfully to court twice to postpone the required manumission of the slaves, only freeing them two days before the deadline.  When Lee took his army north of the Potomac River into Union territory, he allowed his officers to capture free Blacks and take them back south to be sold for profit.  Lee’s writings and letters leave absolutely no doubt whatsoever that he wholeheartedly supported slavery.

After the war, General Lee could have, had he wished to, spoken out against the violence in the south against freed slaves, but he chose not to do so.  In addition, while he never became a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as the president of Washington College, he allowed a chapter of the KKK to operate on campus—something that would have been impossible without his permission.

While I’m at it, I might as well talk about the realities of the claimed amazing abilities of the general.  Robert E. Lee was a master tactician, capable of sizing up the terrain of a battlefield and positioning his forces better than any other general in the war.  However, as a strategist, Lee was poor—even disastrous.  It was his choice to fight a long, conventional war against the more populated and industrialized North—a decision that was just short of downright stupid.  Making matters worse, after Gettysburg, there was no good reason for Lee to continue a war that he could clearly never win.  Certainly, after Lincoln won reelection in 1864, there was no possible way for the South to win the war.  By continuing a futile war, Lee sacrificed tens of thousands of lives long after it was time to seek an armistice.  

I’m a multi-generational Southerner, and I understand the desire to find good in our heritage, but the South needs to find better heroes.  There is no particular reason why the people of the 21st Century need to continue to honor controversial heroes of the past, especially if it was a past like that invented by William Mack Lee—one that never actually existed.