by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer

“Being uncomfortable causes no lasting damage. I call it education,” said Brigadier General Ty Seidule at his Sept. 30 lecture on the journey recounted in his book “Robert E. Lee and Me.”

Steeped in the “Lost Cause” myth of the Confederacy during his youth in 1960s Arlington, Va., Seidule’s induction into the military and career as a professor of History at West Point ultimately led him to challenge and reject the Robert-E.-Lee hero he once idolized and to become a champion of renaming Confederate memorials.

Seidule credits the United Daughters of the Confederacy for perpetuating the myth of kind slave masters and the Lost Cause. He grew up with a picture over the mantle depicting the four flags of the Confederacy. “I learned Dixie before the Star-Spangled Banner,” Seidule said. His first chapter book, “Meet Robert E. Lee,” featured endorsement praise from a teacher, “I love these books because they teach us how to teach.” An illustration in his seventh-grade textbook showed slaves dressed in finery exiting a ship that looked like a cruise ship. The book described slavery as “entering into a relationship with social security,” according to Seidule.

Seidule also talked about what he did not know at the time. “Reconstruction was the best chance we had at biracial democracy,” he insisted. But Southern states enraged by the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments rewrote their constitutions to curtail the rights of blacks and ensure only whites could vote, what Seidule called laws “enforced by terror.” Over 5,000 African Americans were lynched, a practice that continued until 1981.

Seidule attended a segregated elementary school, and as a teen, attended all-white Episcopal academies where his father held administrative roles, schools founded to avoid integration. The home of one academy, Monroe, Ga., hosted the last mass lynching in 1946, bringing the total there to nine. His hometown Arlington hosted 11 lynchings. “These things were hidden from me,” Seidule said, but he acknowledged, “The means of enforcing the terror police state were all around me, if I’d cared to look. I didn’t.” He wanted to go back to Virginia, a state he associated with status and power. He enrolled at Washington and Lee University, named after what he believed then to be “two of the greatest men who ever lived.” When the family’s money ran short, he continued his education with an ROTC scholarship, the beginning of a 36-year career in the military.

The day Seidule received his commission, he passed by Lee’s recumbent statue on the altar in Lee Chapel. “We called him St. Pop,” Seidule said. “I raised my right hand surrounded by Confederate flags and took the oath of office.” Seidule spent 20 years at West Point — “To educate, train, and inspire leaders of character for the nation. That was our mission.” All was well and good, until Seidule had “an epiphany.” “The only crime in the constitution is treason, levying war against the United States. I’m living on Lee Road at Lee Gate in the Lee Housing area, next to Lee Child Development Center, just down the road from Lee Barracks.” The question followed, if Robert E. Lee was a traitor, why were so many places at West Point named for him? Seidule began doing research. The answer: President Truman forced the military to integrate, and Lee Barracks was named in the early 1970s when West Point began minority admissions. Other West Point naming followed a similar pattern, occurring as a reaction to integration.

“It pissed me off that I grew up with these lies, and my organization I love, West Point, has all these monuments to racism,” Seidule said. “I started writing about it.”

Seidule cited a long list of military bases named after Confederate generals — Fort Gordon, Fort Bragg, Fort Benning, Fort Pickett, Fort Polk and more — named right after the Civil War during the backlash to reconstruction. Seidule’s hometown, Arlington, Va., has more streets named after Confederate icons than any other city in America, Seidule observed, streets named during1950’s and 1960’s civil rights unrest. Sewanee’s Leonidas Polk Carillon was named in 1958, during the civil rights era.

Arlington is in the process of renaming streets commemorating the Confederacy. Seidule served on a national commission that renamed all the military bases and missile silos in the United States that formerly paid homage to Confederate icons. Many now bear the names of African American military leaders. He suggested the National Park Service should tackle the same challenge. Two local legacies with Confederacy ties reared their heads in the Q&A discussion, the Sewanee Jessie Ball duPont Library and the Nathan Bedford Forrest ROTC building at MTSU. Seidule highlighted the importance of language. “Don’t use Union Army anymore. Say ‘United States Army.’ Union Army makes Confederate and Union sound like they’re the same thing, like they’re equal. They’re not equal,” Seidule stressed. “The United States of America was fighting against an insurrection force [that] fought for an immoral cause.”

“Robert E. Lee had more to do with slavery than any single person in the U.S. army,” Seidule said. Lee ran a plantation, routinely separated families, had escaped slaves whipped and salt water poured on their wounds, sent the escaped slaves he captured during the civil war to the sale block, and slaughtered black prisoners. “Robert E. Lee is not my hero anymore … [the names of monuments should] reflect our values,” Seidule insisted.

Seidule’s current mission: “I’m trying to rescue the stories of the people I think should be the American heroes. In the army there are so many African American heroes that have not been able to have their story told. How do we as humans change our minds? It’s through stories. You can’t just tell the facts. You’ve got to tell it through people.”

Sponsored by the Roberson Project and Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Center, Seidule’s talk was the first in a series featuring speakers confronting generations of misconceptions and misunderstanding that impacted their lives.