Robert E. Lee Character Analysis

Robert E. Lee was the commander of the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. While Lee was considered a skilled tactician at the time, his rebellion against the United States ultimately failed. Yet following the end of the war, Lee—a slaveholder who had committed treason against his country—was not arrested or punished in any way other than losing the right to vote. President Andrew Johnson pardoned him, and he soon became president of a college in Lexington, Virginia. Since the Civil War, monuments to Lee’s memory have been erected throughout the United States, and schools and major institutions have been named in his honor. Isabel Wilkerson calls attention to the gentle—even reverent—treatment that Lee received following the war as emblematic of his privileges as a member of the dominant caste. Only in the 21st century have some begun to question Lee’s legacy and begin taking down statues commemorating him or renaming schools founded in his name. Members of the dominant caste—such as a group of white supremacists who protested a removal of a statue of Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017—have objected heavily and violently to these changes, which Wilkerson argues they perceive as threats to their dominant status.