Rod Dreher and Robert E. Lee: The little-known third option

 Dreher offers up a semi-defense of Lee, reflecting on a 1970s-era essay by Wendell Berry: 

As Berry makes clear, the tragedy of Robert E. Lee was that no matter which choice he made, there would have been pain. For Lee to have remained loyal to the Union would not have entailed mere disagreement with his family and his people; it would have required him to make war on them.

This is something I don’t think we fully consider today — that is, what it means to make war (a real shooting war) on your own family. Could you do it today, to remain loyal to the government in Washington? Even though we are far more connected and aware today, thanks to technology, than the Americans of the 1860s were, it is still a hell of a thing to ask people to take up arms against their own friends and family to be loyal to a distant abstraction.

Would you turn your abilities against your own people? Even if those people believed wrong things? Even if they believed wicked things? I could conceive of a circumstance under which I could do that, but it would be extreme. I would like to think that I would have fought against the slave state of the Confederacy, but I think it would have been so very difficult for a Southerner in 1861 to have turned his back on everything and everyone he had ever known to take up arms against them, even if he believed their cause was unjust.

There was a third option, of course: Not to make war at all.

I understand that would have been a difficult choice to make, particularly for Lee, a lifelong military man. I suspect there is no realistic counterfactual that involves him choosing neither to fight against the Union nor to make war on his own family. It's likely he would have been imprisoned or otherwise persecuted -- by one side or the other -- to put his military skills to use. Still, Lee made a choice, and one of the choices on offer was to sit this one out. Instead he lead an army in defense of slavery and for the dissolution of his country. It wasn't a great choice. 


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