Like many of my generation, I learned that Robert E. Lee was special. Yes, we were taught that Lee fought for the Confederacy, which wanted to preserve slavery. But that uncomfortable fact was downplayed in favor of a narrative that instead highlighted both Lee’s military prowess and his strength of character, particularly his efforts to bring the country back together after the war was over.

Because Lee died on October 12, 1870, he is the focus of today’s #stampoftheday. A 30-cent stamp depicting Lee that was issued in 1955, this stamp is a particularly noteworthy example of what I was taught because, amazingly, it was part of the “Liberty Series” of stamps issued between 1954 and 1961. According to the ever-helpful (and always cheerful) Mystic Stamps website the series, which consisted of 27 different stamps depicting 23 notable people and places, “honors the guardians of freedom…who led the fight for independence, shaped the new government, and guided it through war and peace as well as through our westward expansion.”

So let’s be clear: including Lee on the list means that in 1955, the year after the Supreme Court (supposedly) banned segregated schools, meant that according to the United States government, Confederate General Robert E. Lee was a member of a pantheon included:

• 7 former presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and (for some strange reason), Benjamin Harrison
• 6 of the Republic’s early leaders: Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry, John Jay, John Marshall, and Paul Revere
• 1 other general: John Pershing, who led American forces in World War I
• 8 notable places: the Alamo, the Bunker Hill Monument, The Hermitage (Andrew Jackson’s home), Independence Hall, Monticello, Mount Vernon, the Palace of the Governors in New Mexico, and (of course) the Statue of Liberty
• 1 woman – Susan B. Anthony, and
• 0 Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, or Native Americans.

And this wasn’t even Lee’s first appearance on a U.S. stamp. In 1937 – three years before the first Black person (Booker T. Washington) was honored on a stamp – Lee and fellow Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, were portrayed on a 3-cent stamp that was part of a series of 10-stamps honoring Army and Navy Leaders. That stamp supposedly was issued to mollify southerners angry that a previous stamp in the series honored Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman (known for Sherman’s March through Georgia). Lee was also pictured on a 1947 stamp honoring the 200th anniversary of Washington & Lee University. In addition, Lee was pictured on a 1970 stamp marking the completion of the giant Stone Mountain statue that portrays Lee (and others), a 1995 stamp that was part of a Civil War series that portrayed 16 people and 4 battles, and a 2015 stamp honoring the 100th anniversary of his surrender at Appomattox.

The stamps were part of a larger public narrative. In “Caste,” Isabel Wilkerson notes that at the time of the infamous Charlottesville rally in 2017, there were 230 memorials to Lee in the country, including hotels, parks, schools, roads, and even a Robert E. Lee Creek in Boise National Forest, 2,000 miles from the Confederacy. Moreover, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson both spoke highly of Lee. And Lee’s portrait was one of four portrayals of “great Americans” that hung in the Oval Office when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. When asked why he was honoring someone who had devoted “his best efforts to the destruction of the United States government,” Eisenhower replied that Lee was, “in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. . . . selfless almost to a fault . . . noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history. From deep conviction I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee’s caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul. Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities . . . we, in our own time of danger in a divided world, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained.”

Writing about such glorifications of Lee in “Caste,” (including his portrayal on several stamps), Isabel Wilkerson notes that “usually it is the victors of war who erect monuments and commemorations to themselves. Here, an outsider might not be able to tell which side had prevailed over the other.”

In recent years, Wilkerson and many others have questioned the mythology that has grown up around Lee, noting that he not only owned slaves, but also broke up their families and punished runaways extremely harshly. Moreover, they note that while he expressed a distaste for slavery, he defended it as a necessary evil because, as he once wrote, “the blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially, and physical. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things.”

In addition, recent critics note as a general, Lee allowed his troops to kidnap free blacks in Pennsylvania and murder black soldiers who were trying to surrender. And while he urged Southerners to put down their arms after the war, he opposed suffrage for former slaves and reportedly turned a blind eye when students at Washington College (later Washington & Lee) lynched blacks and reportedly abducted and raped others. (While many also question whether Lee really was a brilliant general, I’ll leave that discussion to others.)

As is often the case, the current critics are resurrecting arguments made by Frederick Douglass. When Lee died in 1870, Douglass complained that he could scarcely find a northern newspaper “that is not filled with nauseating flatteries of the late Robert E. Lee,” whose military accomplishments in the name of a “bad cause” seemed somehow to entitle him “to the highest place in heaven.” And Wilkerson notes that eight years later, the ongoing glorification of Lee, specifically, and the Southern cause generally, led Douglass to remind people that “there was a right side and a wrong side in the late war, which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget…it is not part of our duty to confound right with wrong, or loyalty with treason.”

Be well, stay safe, do not confound right with wrong, fight for justice and work for peace.