Robert E. Lee: Hero or Villain?

For most of the first century following the American Civil War, histories of the war’s legacy – particularly the Reconstruction era – tended to suffer from the myopia of considering only the relationship between white Northerners and white Southerners. As the war neared its end, some in the Union (like Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, though in very different ways) stressed the need for reconciliation between the Union and the defeated Confederates; other “Radical Republicans” wanted a more vigorous demonstration of vengeance towards the rebels and their leaders for their treason. The result of looking at the war and its aftermath solely through this framework is that waves of revisionism swung back and forth between views sympathetic to the Radicals’ desire to remake the South and liberal-sounding histories that condemned them as hard-hearted zealots insistent on prolonging the nation’s divisions, and that painted Reconstruction as a cesspool of corruption. The latter type of history was largely responsible for the bad historical reputation of Ulysses S. Grant’s Radical-friendly presidency. It also colored denunciations of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson (although Johnson, who was wrong about Reconstruction, was right about the specific dispute at issue in the impeachment.) You can still catch a whiff of this latter view in the chapters on that era in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.