R&I~Smit
The idea we all grew up with: that Columbus discovered North America in 1492? Fuhgeddaboudit! Scientists reported this week that a new type of dating technique proves that Vikings occupied a settlement at the northern tip of Newfoundland in 1021 AD – exactly a millennium ago and 471 years before the voyage of Columbus!
But that’s not the only long-held belief to be shattered lately. So’s the myth of the Civil War as a noble, but “lost cause.” It’s a myth I grew up surrounded by in border state Delaware, but which is mercifully buried once and for all in a powerful new book: “Robert E. Lee and Me,” by Ty Seidule.
Nobody has better credentials to expose the lies about the Civil War and Gen. Robert E. Lee. Seidule’s a retired U.S. Army brigadier general, who spent 40 years, from 1980 to 2020, in Army uniform and ended his career as a top professor of history at West Point. Not only that, he’s a true son of the South: raised in Alexandria, Virginia, and Monroe, Louisiana; educated at Washington and Lee University; and served at bases named for Confederate generals.
As Seidule admits up front, as a Southerner and soldier, his entire life led him “to worship slave-owning traitors” and honor the “righteous” cause Southern states fought for in the “Battle Between the States.” But his research as a historian taught him that what had become the prevailing opinion of the Civil War was all bunk.
Seidule identifies five planks still held and preached today by Civil War apologists as part of their “Lost Cause” argument: that the Civil War was not about slavery; that Southern states were fighting for a noble cause; that Confederate soldiers were simply the Southern equivalent of Union troops; that the South only lost because the North had bigger guns and more money; and that Robert E. Lee was a true American and the greatest American general ever. He then proceeds to expose every one of them as a big lie.
MTG303
Article URL : https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/bill-press-burying-myth-of-lost-cause-once-and-for-all/ar-AAPNnkb?ocid=msedgntp