This past weekend, it was my super amazing girlfriend’s birthday, so to celebrate we went down to Charlottesville, VA. It was lovely! We stayed in a quaint little inn and managed to go to if not all then the vast majority of used bookstores and yarn shops in the town and enjoyed every minute of it. But why Charlottesville? I’ll tell you why. My super amazing girlfriend loves presidential sites, and Charlottesville has no shortage of them.

By “no shortage” I specifically mean three. The three presidents are Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and James Madison, and the sites are their former homes and plantations of Monticello, Highland, and Montpelier. Over the course of a three-day weekend we went to all three and it was absolutely fantastic. The first one we went to was Monticello on a warm but cloudy December day.

When you arrive at Monticello, you pull up to the Visitor’s Center (a good place for visitors admittedly). Our first destination was the very nice little farm table café they got going on because it was lunch time, but after that I think the general thing to do is probably visit the museum they got there. At Mount Vernon, they like to paint a picture of George Washington as a nerdy farming enthusiast, and in that same way at Monticello they like to portray Thomas Jefferson as a passionate hobbyist architect who maybe also did politics. I gotta say, it is a good thing he was apparently half decent at architecture, though it would probably be funnier if he wasn’t – “this building was designed by Thomas Jefferson. It’s shit, but we gotta keep it because, you know, Jefferson.” So in the museum they have all his European influences as he was designing his house at Monticello and displays of how the dome is constructed and all sorts of drafting tools on display.

After poking around the museum we took the bus to the top of the hill for our tour. The tour was really great. Our tour guide was Linda, a short, silver-haired woman wearing a kooky cat pin on a blue pantsuit and round red art deco glasses and who was really passionate about the information she was delivering. It was not busy at Monticello that day (or at any of the sites we would visit) so she had plenty of time to answer all of our questions. I had actually been to Monticello once before a long time ago, and all I really remembered were some nifty gadget doors, Thomas Jefferson’s not-worn-in-yet pair of boots, and his gravestone which didn’t list “president.” All that to say is that I learned a lot!

Of the three plantations we visited that weekend, Monticello I think did by far the best at telling the story of slavery at the plantation. At Mount Vernon slavery is presented as this sort of unsavory fact of life that an otherwise immaculate George Washington couldn’t help but be involved in. At the other two sites the way they address slavery felt sort of tacked on. But at Monticello slavery is centered in the story as an undeniable and central part of plantation life that was fully intertwined with the story of Thomas Jefferson. They make sure to present the enslaved people’s names and give them credit where it is due, such as in the display three pictures ago listing the people who built Monticello. To be fair to Highland and Montpelier, Monticello has the huge advantage of Thomas Jefferson’s meticulous records and so they know the stories of all these people where in other places it has been lost.

And like I said I learned a lot! For example, I learned how interwoven the stories of the Jeffersons and the Hemmings were. I hadn’t learned before that Sally Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, nor had I learned before that Sally had only one African grandparent. After the house tour, we went on the tour about slavery on the plantation, and we learned that Thomas Jefferson “freed” two of his children by Sally Hemmings by just sending them away so they could “pass” for white. One of the most significant facts we learned about Sally Hemings is that she agreed to re-enter slavery after negotiating with Jefferson. He had brought her to France where she was free, because slavery was illegal. She initially refused to return to the United States, and only agreed when Jefferson granted her privileges and pledged to free her children – extraordinary concessions for a 16-year-old girl to extract from one of the more powerful men around.

It wasn’t just Sally Hemings’ story they told. They’ve made sure to try to research every enslaved person’s story the best they could. The things they told were heart-wrenching. I wrote down so I wouldn’t forget how although Joseph Fossett was freed in Jefferson’s will, his wife wasn’t, so that, as Linda told us, he had to watch as his wife was sold away on the auction block placed on the west lawn. I think seared into my brain is Linda’s phrase describing Jefferson’s habit of gifting enslaved persons as part of his daughters’ dowries – “he was very generous with other people’s children.” All this done to people who’s ancestry only differed from Jefferson himself by one Black great-grandparent. The best new perspective I gained I think in my tour of Monticello is from a quote from Andrew Mitchell Davenport, a descendant of Peter Hemings: “Like any fiction worth its weight, race must be read and reread, interpreted, and examined.”

I don’t have a solid transition from that, but neither does America and it probably isn’t something I should transition away from anyways. After you exit the tour you can explore the grounds. They grounds include a fish pond, which of course I was very fond of. They have the usual displays about carriages and the sheer amount of booze that people who are hosting guests every day wind up going through. In the smoke house they had fake hams hanging up, just like the ones at Mount Vernon, so there must be a place out there from which you can buy fake hams to display in your former-presidential-smoke-house. And as you finish with the grounds, you can stroll back down the mountain, on the way passing the grave of the man who caused all this to be built, but thankfully we all know who deserves the credit for building it.

As loyal readers are aware I went to Yale for my graduate degree. That was fun! There were many advantages of going to Yale, but one of them, I am willing to say, was access to the Yale Library. The Yale Library has a very large collection. 15 million items it turns out. With so many items, they have an array of pleasingly obscure items, including at least one book on the lake steamers of the African Great Lakes, which, again, loyal readers are aware is a particular interest of mine. Frankly you never know what you have until it’s gone, and although the Alexandria Library is very nice, I do not think they have 15 million different items, and I can confirm that they have exactly zero books on the lake steamers of the African Great Lakes.

I know I am banging on about the lake steamers here, but I have recently restarted my effort at retyping the Chronicle of the London Missionary Society. I started to feel bad about having stopped pursuing that because I have been reading more books on southern Africa. But since I am reading about Tanganyika, etc, that has me thinking about lake steamers and the like, so that has me remembering there were several books that I wanted to look at while I was in Zambia which I couldn’t because like, I was in Zambia and very far from a library with a collection of any particular note (though Mbala did, in fact, have a library) (I am now realizing that I don’t think I ever wrote about the Tanganyika Victoria Memorial Institute!). Of the two books apparently in the whole world that discuss African Great Lakes steamers, the Yale Library, for all its vast collection, only has one of them (and as of yet will still mail it to me here in Virginia), but for the other I was lost and distraught. Lost and distraught, that is, until the internet reminded me that the Library of Congress has one and I live near the Library of Congress!

The Library of Congress, according to the pamphlet they hand out, has more than 167 million items, which is a lot more than the Alexandria Library and also more than Yale! So I wanted to go and read the book at the Library of Congress. Due to a misunderstanding of the website, I thought that you currently couldn’t do any reading at the Library of Congress, but I wanted to go anyways. My super amazing girlfriend (pictured above) had already been and would be my tour guide. So last Saturday we got on the metro and went to the famously large library.

It is very nice! I didn’t realize what it would be like. First and foremost, the Library of Congress is a place dedicated to excellent ceilings. I won’t subject you to them all, but I do like the below one with “SCIENCE” displayed in tile. I do like both mosaics and SCIENCE. Plus there is like a weird baby involved in the image and I don’t know what that is about, but presumably it is about SCIENCE. I suppose I should specify here that I am talking about the Thomas Jefferson building because the library has a number of other buildings, too.

When we went, the library had two major displays set up. In one wing, they had a whole display on early interactions with the Americas. This was based on the collection of some dude (it was quite the collection, dude) and had an impressive array of artifacts. I really was not expecting to see Mayan pottery when I walked into the museum that day. One of the most impressive items was the earliest map to denote the Americas as America. I took a picture that was just whatever, but you can find it here. The bit I looked at the most was Southern Africa which was cool and impressive and stuff.

I also really enjoyed seeing the Taino ceremonial wooden stool. That object is just so ephemeral and rare and also looks like a turtle, which is cool. Of course on a serious note it reminds us about the important and advanced cultures that existed in these places before Columbus came over and wiped them out.

On the other side of the library they had on display Thomas Jefferson’s personal library. He had sold it to Congress when their first library burned down, which was potentially a bad move for book longevity because it wouldn’t be the last time the Library of Congress burned down. Fortunately not all his books burned, and so they had a number of the originals. They also had identical copies of some of the books, more modern reprintings of some of his books, and then also some boxes to fill out the ones they couldn’t get. They had the whole thing in a spiral, and this was the first time I have been out and about with my super amazing girlfriend and said something like “we could do the living room like this” and she agreed. So I am looking forward to turning our living room into a spiral, it’s gonna be great.

The final thing to see was the Main Reading Room. Seeing people reading in the Main Reading Room is what eventually led me to discover that you could read in the Main Reading Room on Saturdays, and I hope that is something I can take advantage of soon, because like I said I want to read that book on steamships. Maybe I will read other books there too someday, who knows. A lot of people apparently do genealogy research there. Me though? I just want to look at boats.

Reading this week:

• Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard

Like I mentioned last week, my super amazing girlfriend’s absolute best friend in the whole wide world was visiting last week, so we were out on the town looking at stuff. One of those stuffs was the Washington Monument!

Now, you see, I grew up over near Annapolis, so I had been to DC plenty of times back in the heady days of my youth. I would see commercials on like, Nickelodeon for contests where you could win a trip to DC and I thought that was a bit of a lame prize because we would go there for field trips, you know? (Despite the regularity, sometimes it didn’t go well; I remember one time we got to the Natural History Museum at 0830 only for the teacher to discover only at that moment the Smithsonian Museums don’t open until 10) However, despite the regularity of my visits to DC, one thing I had never done (among many things, actually) was go up to the top of the Washington Monument.

This is not for lack of trying! It’s just mostly due to lack of trying. Back in the ole’ days, you had to line up for tickets. They were first come first serve, which meant you had to be one of the first however many people in the line, which meant you had to get there early. I did try to do this once. It took forever for me to find parking that day, but I got in line, and the line started moving, and when I was finally three people away from the window they had run out of tickets. This was very sad for me, clearly. But mostly I had just never tried.

But since my super amazing girlfriend’s best friend was in town, they did try, and lo and behold, they got four tickets! Super neat! We showed up at our appointed time, went through security, quickly admired a statue of George Washington, got in the elevator, and head to the top!

The first and stupidest thing I learned is that the windows look at lot bigger up close than they do from the bottom. I thought they were very tiny. They are small, but not tiny. See? Stupid. There are actually two floors at the top, the 500′ level and the 490′ level. The 500′ level has the windows and you can look out and admire the city. I put those pictures at the bottom. It is a pretty excellent way to see DC all at once (well in four chunks, one for each direction) and you can spend as much time up there as you want. I was like “I can spot my workplace from here!” and “I can spot my house from here!” and “wow the White House has more trees on its grounds than I thought!” You know, deep things like that. It was pretty neat.

After you are done with the 500′ foot level, you descend some stairs to the 490′ level and there is a very tiny museum thingy. There’s not a whole lot there, but the single most interesting thing for me was the above model, which shows how the monument’s very top is constructed. I hadn’t ever thought about it, but the monument is entirely stone (they claim to be the tallest freestanding stone structure in the world, which is neat!) and I was impressed how they did the masonry to put the top together, as demonstrated in the model above. It is also from the 490′ level that you catch the elevator down. Taking the stairs was not an option, though in the elevator on both the way up and down they have a presentation, and on the way down they pause twice to let you look at some of the carved stones on the inside. So that was cool! Having taken the elevator down, we were discharged (you have to go elsewhere for the gift shop), having gained a whole new perspective on this city I’ve been visiting for my whole life.

Reading this week:

• House of Glass by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

The other week my super amazing girlfriend’s absolute best friend in the whole wide world was visiting us, and so we went to Planet Word! Planet Word was certainly an interesting take on a museum, and it was interesting to see a different way of presenting information to people.

First, despite the name, Planet Word is not a whole planet, but in fact only comprises part of a school building. You turn the corner into a courtyard where you discover a tree-looking thing. Hanging from the tree are a bunch of speakers. They are motion-activated, so as you stand under the speakers you hear different recordings and tracks and I suppose that really gets you into the mood.

Instead of discreet displays like at uh, a traditional museum, Planet Word is comprised of a series of rooms that explore a wide range of different aspects and uses of language. At the top is a picture of a room about jokes and wordplay. In one bit of the room you pose with pictures of different idioms and then other people have to guess what the idiom is all about. What’s in the picture is a station where you and your partner tell jokes to each other. The screens give you different jokes to tell and it is a game where you score a point if you make the other person laugh. As you can see, the jokes are of the utmost quality so it is a very competitive game. What made me laugh every single time is not how funny the jokes were, but I started laughing because every time my super amazing girlfriend told a joke she would be very proud of herself and laugh at it herself, and it was extremely cute, because she is super amazing.

For me though I think the part I had the most fun in was a section on advertising. There were some displays around the edges of the room, but the center of the room was comprised of a spiraling set of screens that taught you about different aspects of advertising copywriting, like wordplay and double entendre. Once you reached the center of the spiral, and had thus achieved master of the advertising artform, it invited you to make an ad of your own around a couple different potential themes.

I immediately tried to see what bad words it would let you put on an ad copy. I didn’t try way too hard, because I was afraid of getting us kicked out or revealing too much of the world to the little kids running around, but still I found it extremely entertaining. Right above you can see the masterpiece I finally contributed the world of Planet Word. Once your ad goes up it slowly moves along the spiral for all your museum compatriots to see. For you, my loyal readers who might want to go to Planet Word someday, it does have a word filter, but for some words it is more aggressive than others. It wouldn’t let me type “Poop,” for example, but it would let you put in very simple variations, like “Poopv.” It also of course blocked words like “Fuck,” and wasn’t tricked by the same simple variation like “Fuckv.” Art arises from limitations, and since I had also learned something about subtlety or something (I think) from the spiraly course on copywriting, I decided that a simple “BUTT” would suffice to convey my message to the world.

One of the other big sections of Planet Word was a stylized library. This library had a small selection of books, but the neat part was that if you took a book and put it on the table, as my super amazing girlfriend is aptly demonstrating above, it started projecting on it and became all interactive and stuff and that was pretty neat. They even had my childhood favorite book, The Way Things Work, and so that was very nice to see again. Around the room too they had these displays where if you said a quote, it displayed a model scene from that book. They had scenes from The Little Prince and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, among others.

They had a number of different rooms besides those, but I won’t spoil all of them. You know I don’t know if I learned anything in particular from this museum, but it is nice to go to a place that tries a new way of being a museum and a new way of presenting information. It was fun and interactive and a nice way to spend an hour or two. I only wish I had written down some more of the jokes from the game so I could deploy them again later. At parties or something, you know?

I noticed this place when I went out to lunch with a former boss on the day that we saw Doug Emhoff. It is GW University’s Textile Museum! I am a fan of textiles, my super amazing girlfriend is a super amazing fan of textiles, so when we discovered there was a whole museum dedicated to textiles, we had to go! Unfortunately, it isn’t open on weekends. But fortunately due to my many long years of naval service, this great country of ours gave us a day off to celebrate the day that was 14 days before the first World War ended. So we went to the textile museum!

The textile museum was really good! I knew it was going to be good when we walked in and the guard explained to us that they “have a lot of textiles.” He then immediately recommended that we descend into the basement to let our textile journey begin. Down in the basement is I think their special exhibits space, and they had going a display where contemporary textile artists were taking inspiration from some older textiles to design new clothes and the like. It was pretty neat! Even neater though was the section in the basement they had that showed you how various textiles were made. They had a good chunk of hands-on things in this part of the museum. I liked the exhibit in the photo above, where you could touch both the raw materials that textiles were made of and then the finished fibers on the bottom. Pretty neat to see how various bits of trees, animals, or cocoons get turned into the comfy shirts we all know and love.

They also had a cabinet full of various textile samples, as is being demonstrated by my super amazing girlfriend in the photo above. That was neat to be able to put hands on all the stuff! So all in all a very cool part of the museum that at first glance I thought was going to be mostly for kids.

With the basement exhausted, we got in the elevator to skip over the ground floor and go up to the second floor, where the majority of the textile collection begins in earnest. It is quite the range of textiles from all over the world and from a huge wide range of time periods. If you wanna look at some textiles, do you have the right place for sure.

The two above textile examples are both from the Kuba people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and both from the mid or early 20th century. On the left is a Tcaka, which as the parenthetical on the plaque noted is a ceremonial dance skirt. On the right is a “royal belt or girdle.” Hard to tell from my tiny picture but it features shells from both the Atlantic and Indian oceans, meant to display the breadth of the chief’s control. So that is pretty neat, and a good example of how the museum certainly doesn’t take a narrow view of what a textile is.

Speaking of which I was pretty stunned to get up close to the piece right in the photo above, which at first I thought was contemporary art but turns out to be a 500 year old Incan khipu! I didn’t think I was going to see one of those up close anytime soon, and here they have it right on the wall. It is well documented on this blog that I like old stuff, and this museum had a lot of old stuff, with textiles thousands of years old. Besides the khipu, they had a notable collection on display of Incan and Inca-era textiles, and it was just stunning how fine those textiles were. If you want to see some old fabric from just about everywhere, this is the place to go.

Side by side with the ancient textiles they also had a huge range of contemporary textiles and textile art. It really let you see how this cultural technology spans the whole era of human civilization. I took an absolutely terrible picture of it, but my favorite art piece in the place I think was “Attitude” by Lia Cook, which you can see on the museum website here and her website here. It is a lot cooler to see in person because due to both the way she creates the image on the fabric, and the texture of the fabric itself, it has a very cool 3D effect that is fantastic to see when you can navigate your head around the piece.

One piece I did get an okay photo of is the below one, which is “Waterscape VI” by Shihoko Fukumoto, and is apparently “indigo dyed, hand woven linen and paper plain weave.” Like the Lia Cook piece, due to the texture of the textiles I think you really gotta see all these pieces in person to get the sense of how they are constructed, especially in the below example to get a sense of lighly the “waterfall” threads are woven in there to give a sense of how water flows in real life. It’s really great!

After getting our fill of textiles, we swung by the museum shop where you can buy, uh, textiles. And also some books on textiles. It is a very nice little shop! We didn’t get anything, but only because we have enough throw pillow covers for now I think. It is not a huge museum but it does have a fantastic collection of textiles defined very broadly, and the range of objects and the way they display them all together really makes you think about much of a throughline this technology has been to people everywhere. Check it out if you can!

Speaking of assassinations, the other week my super amazing girlfriend and her super amazing mother and I went to Ford’s Theater. It was a fairly interesting place!

My super amazing girlfriend had gotten us timed tickets for 11:30, so after a leisurely morning we showed up, picked up our audio guide, and entered the theater. Unbeknownst to us (probably just me?) the place has a whole museum in the basement. I thought it was just going to be the theater. But you enter through the ticket line and then head down some stairs and there is a whole floor of exhibits about Lincoln’s presidency. I thought it did a pretty good job of detailing stuff, not that I know a whole lot more than the average bear about Lincoln’s presidency. There were a fair number of amusing anecdotes and the biggest takeaway for me is that I want to pick up a biography of Grant at some point.

The museum had a number of interesting things. The photo at the top is a statue of Lincoln they had, and I guess I didn’t get the memos about leaving pennies. I think this is so Lincoln can gaze upon his severed head? Not sure. At the very start of the museum, which starts (chronologically) with Lincoln entering DC for his inauguration, they had a set of brass knuckles, a knife, and some goggles that were offered to him for his protection:

He turned them down but he should have accepted them. Everybody already agrees Lincoln is a badass with an axe, so why not brass knuckles too? Real missed opportunity there. On a more solemn note, they also of course have the pistol that Booth used to kill Lincoln:

Ford’s Theater is still (or actually once again) a working theater, and apparently there was a play that day, so the museum was closing early. This hustled us through the rest of the museum and upstairs to the theater itself, where a very upbeat National Park ranger was answering the same questions I am sure they get 1000 times a day. You can go over and see the box where Booth shot Lincoln, which has the furniture from that night. You can also look up at the box from below, to get the same perspective everyone else had:

And uh, yeah. Then we went to the gift shop, which did have a lapel pin. This is a very short post and I am sorry, I don’t have a lot to say about Lincoln because man a lot has been said about him. Ford’s Theater is a very good museum and lets you see the spot where an act was carried out which killed a very mortal man but which had such a monumental effect on American history it starts to make you reconsider the Great Man theory. Then you can wander over to see the Chinese restaurant where they conspired to enact such a despicable deed.

Reading this week:

• Before the Birth of the Moon by V.Y. Mudimbe

Recently my super amazing girlfriend and I, along with that mysterious other friend I mentioned last week, went to the International Spy Museum. My initial impression was that it was fine, but the more I think about it, man that is a weird place.

This was my first time going, but I remember when it first opened and all the hype. Lines around the block and all that. When we went there were not lines around the block, but that was mostly due to timed tickets what with this era of COVID and all. The museum is split into two major parts over two floors, and when you go in they put you in an elevator to take you to the top so you can work your way down. Out of the elevator you mill about in this waiting room area and get a badge that lets you log onto computers and take part in a mission. You’re supposed to memorize a code name and some facts about your cover identity and stuff. You are shown a short video outlining like, the world of spying and then you are ejected out into the museum.

The first floor is all about the tools of the trade and tradecraft. There is a bit of history of famous spies throughout history, and then a number of displays full of spy gadgets. Most of the museum is from a single collection, and it is indeed an impressive collection of spy stuff. A lot of the stuff on display is from the mid-20th century, but the museum stays pretty current. They cover things like the 2016 DNC hack and other cyberattacks, and they also have a fairly large chunk of information on female spies which I think is supposed to be #empowering.

But man look the weird part is, who is this museum for? My initial impression is that it was kinda geared towards kids. They have that spy mission thing I mentioned which I think I would have found astonishingly cool when I was 12 (it was still alright, we all tried to do all of it). The artifacts are all behind glass of course, but on some of the displays they have like, tactile versions you can touch, which includes this one:

So um, yeah kids, know you can really know how big the thing you put up your butt is. Very family-friendly. Maybe this is becoming too much of a theme on this blog, but one thing I don’t really recall the museum doing is trying to grapple at all with the moral aspects of this whole spy game. By definition pretty much everything the museum is detailing is extra-legal, and they don’t super try to ask questions about whether it is all worth it, or who the targets of this spying is and why. My super amazing girlfriend and I watched a group of kids huddled around a very neat display detailing how they assessed Osama bin Laden was in his compound. And people fret kids might learn about slavery.

As you descend from the tradecraft floor, you come to what I think was termed the “kinetic action” floor, aka all about killing people. The above photo is of a underwater canoe thingy so SCUBA-equipped assassins can get places. I was thoroughly impressed by the range of artifacts they had the museum, including even the actual ice axe used to kill Trotsky. Which… wow? These people are bidding on different ebay auctions than I am. I sort of tried to imagine bringing a kid around this place, you know, show them some cool history and murder weapons and really introduce them to the murky world of international extrajudicial assassination. Normal, good parent stuff.

Anyways after all that you descend another set of stairs and then you wind up in the gift shop. They have a really good selection of books, actually, but I was very disappointed to discover that they didn’t have any lapel pins. I really wanted a souvenir of my morally hazardous adventure.

Reading this week:

• Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by Jason K. Stearns

I am at least a week late in posting this and several weeks late in writing it, but during October my super amazing girlfriend and I, along with another friend of ours, visited Arlington National Cemetery. I think of Arlington Cemetery as an old haunt of mine because my grandpa is buried there along with an uncle and aunt of mine. On top of that, I went sailing with Ted Kennedy one time, and since he is buried there too I have plenty of reasons to visit.

For those not in the know, Arlington Cemetery is located on the site of Robert E. Lee’s estate. It’s more accurately the estate of his wife, Mary Anna Custis Lee, but it became a cemetery when Union Soldiers buried their war dead in her garden as a sort of revenge against Confederate General Lee. The house was built by Mary’s father, George Washington Parke Custis, and I gotta say that man certainly understood the importance of location, location, location. The picture above of course doesn’t do it justice, but his front porch is almost certainly the absolute best place to look over Washington, DC, in its grandeur and depravity.

In all my visits to the cemetery, this was the first time that I actually toured the house. It’s fine. I mean it’s a very nice house, but it isn’t my first plantation house. We somehow wound up between guides, but from what I overheard from the group ahead of us the tour guides were very good at centering the story of enslaved persons in the house and highlighting their identity and personhood. I also hadn’t realized before that next door, but down a little path and through a garden, is a whole (but very tiny) museum on Robert E. Lee.

The point of this blog post is my huge disappointment with how they presented Robert E. Lee at Arlington National Cemetery. They swung for nuance but whiffed by trying to teach the controversy. I have some sympathy here, because it is hard to have a museum about a guy and not try to make him sound okay. But they can and should do better.

The central moral dilemma in the story of Robert E. Lee is his decision to resign his commission in the U.S. Army to go fight for the south. He had to decide, and the museum details this at length, whether to remain loyal to his country or to his state. This was undeniably a real moral dilemma for our man Lee, as evidenced by his letters on it. Since this museum is in the context of Arlington Cemetery, they highlight the personal cost of the decision, which was that (among other things) his family would have to abandon the estate as the Union could obviously not leave it in Confederate hands. Nevertheless, he decided his loyalty to the state of Virginia was more important than his loyalty to the United States.

As I tried to lay out in my post on Mt. Vernon, it is important to understand the decisions people made in the context that they made them. For this reason it is necessary to highlight that during this time period, loyalty to one’s state had much more salience than it does today. Hence, the difficulty of Lee’s decision. This is the story the museum tells and the story people who want to use Lee’s legacy for their own benefit want you to know. But as we know today, and as was in fact clear to the men of Lee’s time, the choice to remain loyal to Virginia or to remain loyal to the United States were not moral equivalents.

Lee’s decision to betray his country and join the Confederacy was a choice to lead men into battle and to their deaths, and risk his own life, in order to uphold the institution of slavery. The Confederacy tried to will into being by use of force a country founded on the principle that people are not created equal, that it is the natural order of things that certain people can be bought and sold because the color of their skin means they have no value as people. The moral decision that Lee made was not whether to remain loyal to his state or to his country, and by presenting it that way the museum makes it seem plausible instead of obscene. The moral decision that Robert E. Lee made, after much thought and consideration, was that some people had no inherent right to life or freedom. By presenting it any other way, the museum does at least some work in continuing to deny the personhood of Black people.

That is the central wrong the museum does, but there are other offenses. As we should all be aware by this point, there has been more than a century of work to repair Lee’s reputation. The museum makes hay of Lee’s apparent efforts towards reconciliation. Should Lee get credit for trying to bring the country together when it was his purported military prowess that did the most to tear it apart? Should you trust a glowing quote about Lee from 1925, during the tail end of the (first) height of the Lost Cause narrative? [1] Inside the house, they have a sign detailing that President Ford pardoned Lee in 1975. Without commentary, they quote President Ford as saying “General Lee’s character has been an example to succeeding generations, making the restoration of his citizenship an event in which every American can take pride.”

What are we taking pride in here? The character of a man who thought there were principles more important than the concept that every person is created equal and has the right to life and liberty? Fuck right off.

[1] Actually, from what I can tell Louis Cramton was a pretty great guy. However, the context of that quote is that they were trying to fend off a museum that more fully glorified both Lee and the Confederacy, and the compromise they made was to only glorify Lee a little. Tell you what guys, this is how they always get you: they get you to admit someone had some nice moments, and use that to gloss over the fact he fought to maintain the right to enslave other human beings.