The Ghost of Bobby Lee

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus

Notes from Atlanta

this lecture a reader was kind enough to send to me. At about the 55:00 mark, Elizabeth Brown Pryor talks about Lee’s relationship to slavery, and more interestingly, how the myth that he was somehow anti-slavery came to be. 

Texas…

Virginia…

The people of Virginia in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under said Constitition were derived from the people of the United States and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression, and the Federal Government having perverted said powers not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slave-holding States.

Mississippi…

South Carolina…

Vice-President of the Confederacy itself…

London” feels like the hood to me. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a contributor to the Atlantic Monthly.

This article was originally available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/04/the-ghost-of-bobby-lee/38813/