“I, Matthew E. Robinson, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, so help me God.
The first time I said these words; I intoned them with little thought, simply repeating them after a bored-looking officer uttered the various phrases. Over the course of my military career, as my experience, responsibility, and scope of influence grew; the weight of these words took on new meaning. Eventually, I took the following oath as an officer, repeating them as promotions occasionally came my way.
“I Matthew E. Robinson, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
I also administered this oath to numerous soldiers as they reenlisted. The first few times I administered the oath, I read the words from a piece of paper provided by the reenlistment NCO. Then one day, a full Colonel looked on as I conducted the reenlistment. He watched me read the words and pulled me aside later and privately admonished me to memorize those words in order to look the soldier in the eye. “They deserve that level of respect for the words and their commitment,” he stipulated. He was correct and I can still recite the oath of enlistment. Oaths matter, even today in our rather feckless society. This is why I must respectfully disagree with those who rank R.E. Lee and other confederate officers as heroes worthy of emulation.
The oath of enlistment is not a new part of the American military experience. The Continental Congress developed the first oath in 1775. Later, after the adoption of the Constitution, the military adopted an oath much the same as our current oath in the late seventeen hundreds. It has remained, relatively unchanged during the ensuing two centuries, serving as a reminder to all uniformed service-members that we serve a high calling, one to live out the ideals framed in our foundational documents. It is a mark of devotion to duty to remain true to those words, even at great personal cost.
As our polarized nation stumbled toward war, a desperate President Lincoln turned to Lee, one of the brightest military minds of his day, offering him command of the Army. And Lee failed the test. He discarded his oath, walking away from his duty, depositing a stain upon his reputation that no fuller on earth can remove. He, and all the other officers that joined him, do not deserve accolades. We should not erect monuments to them, name no schools after them, or lift them up as men to emulate. In fact, we ought to remove those monuments that remain standing. These are men who devoted their professional abilities to support a cause, an economic system, a way of life that rested on the backs of enslaved men, women, and children. Theirs was not a noble or just cause. They, like Benedict Arnold, betrayed their nation and bear the same stigma. Their moral failure outweighs their martial abilities and the passage of time does not somehow expunge their turpitude.
We must not succumb to the “noble-lost-cause” myth of the early twentieth century as part of an ongoing campaign to shroud the confederacy in a cloak of respectability. Whether or not they personally owned slaves does not matter. They chose to support and ignoble cause and share in its shame. It is not rewriting history to insist on a true evaluation of individual and group decisions and the behaviors that flowed from them. To honor men who failed to live up to their sworn duty not only wounds all men and women of color in our nation but also is a slap in the face to all service members who sacrificed, some to the full measure, in order to honor their oath. To continue to elevate these men to icon status is to disregard their moral failure.
Our cultural icons reveal much about us and what we value. Yes, Lee and his generals were great tacticians, but their martial prowess does not outweigh their dishonorable choice. They did not place great value on their word and their honor. They took an oath to support and defend the Constitution and did not live up to it. When we elevate such men to hero status, we demean ourselves and clearly proclaim that we do not consider keeping our word important. Perhaps, now almost one hundred and sixty years later, we so often struggle with prevaricators in the public arena. We casually elevated such men as Lee, Hood, Brag, and others like them to hero status, and in doing that we diminished integrity as a required trait for honorable men. It is high time for us to remove the names of such traitors from the public spaces they now occupy.
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