Three weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration, another presidential swearing-in quietly occurred 200 miles south, in the historic town of Lexington, Virginia, deep in the Shenandoah Valley. William C. Dudley became the 27th president of Washington and Lee University, one of the oldest and most esteemed liberal arts colleges in the country.
Lexington could not have seemed more distant in its setting and, especially, in its character from Washington, D.C., at the dawning of the Trump era. The old town has an outsized cosmopolitan flavor, with arty boutiques and restaurants catering to the latest culinary fashions. But what distinguishes Lexington, setting it wholly apart from other college towns, is its conspicuous civility. Visitors strolling through town are regularly greeted by strangers with a smile and a hello or encounter young people in uniform, who step aside at the approach of a woman, touch their caps, and say, “Ma’am.”
This ritual comity is spillover from the two colleges situated adjacently in the town of 7,000, Washington and Lee and the Virginia Military Institute. Each is a deeply traditional, deeply Southern institution, with cherished customs and honor codes that are regarded as sacrosanct. VMI is home to the hat-tippers, while W&L students have for generations been steeped in what’s called the “speaking tradition,” the custom of meeting a passerby with eye contact and a friendly greeting.
As he settled into his new job, Dudley, a philosophy professor who’d spent his undergraduate years and teaching career at Williams College in Massachusetts, often remarked upon the singular qualities of the place he’d come to. “What a positive impression you all make on a newcomer,” he told a meeting of the school faculty and staff a few days after his swearing-in. “People here are friendly, helpful, dedicated, and take pride in their university and pride in their town.”
But below Lexington’s surface harmony lay the same deep and bitter divisions that had lately come to afflict the broader national culture. This would be made plain in June when one of the town’s trendy little eateries, the Red Hen, made national headlines by refusing service to White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her party because Sanders, in the view of the restaurant’s proprietress, served in “an inhumane and unethical” administration.
Well before the Red Hen incident, Will Dudley had already had to reckon with the harsh divisions of his new life. He’d not been on the job for eight months when he and the institution newly in his charge were drawn into a controversy that threatened a genuine crisis for the 270-year-old school.
The precipitating event did not directly involve Washington and Lee, but occurred 70 miles away in another historic Virginia college town, Charlottesville. There, on an August weekend in 2017, white supremacists marching against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a city park clashed with counter-protesters. Dozens were injured, and one young woman was killed.
As a horrified nation watched events unfold in Charlottesville, Dudley thought of Lexington, which could easily become the next flashpoint. In the two years since the murder of nine black worshipers at a Charleston, S.C., church by a racist who embraced Confederate symbols, statues of Lee and other Civil War memorials had been toppling across the South. The national discussion about the tension between heritage and contemporary mores, not a notably nuanced debate, figured to eventually land squarely in his new home.
To some, Lexington may seem less a town than a history exhibit. There are 17 properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and W&L and VMI are both considered National Historic Landmark Districts. The flavor of Lexington’s history is decidedly Confederate. Not only are Lee and his most trusted battlefield lieutenant, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson buried there, but their war horses, Lee’s Traveller and Jackson’s Little Sorrel, have their own shrines. (Little Sorrel, stuffed and mounted, is on display at VMI, where Jackson was an instructor at the outbreak of the war.)
When Dudley retires to bed at night, it is in a residence called Lee House, which was built for the general when he served as president from 1865 until his death in 1870. The oath of office he’d taken, with only slight amendment, was the same Lee had sworn. When Dudley welcomes new students at orientation ceremonies and presides over other important events on campus, it is from inside Lee Chapel, an ivy-covered brick structure with a distinctive sloping tower, the design and construction of which Lee had personally overseen. Lee and his family are buried beneath the chapel.
Lee isn’t just one of the university’s namesakes. He can be credited with saving what was then Washington College and putting it on the course toward becoming a great university. His son, George Washington Custis Lee, succeeded his father as president and served for 26 years. So inextricably bound together are Lee and the university that when a statue of him was unveiled in Charlottesville in 1924 (at what was then Lee Park), the president of Washington and Lee, Henry Louis Smith, was asked to preside over the ceremony.
Excising Lee from W&L, as would inevitably be suggested, wouldn’t just be a matter of taking down a statue or renaming a building or two. It would require cutting into the bone and sinew—some would say the heart—of the place.
Before the bloody weekend in Charlottesville had ended, Dudley sent a message to the school community noting that because of W&L’s “complex history” regarding Confederate symbols, the university had “a special obligation to be absolutely clear about what we stand for as an institution.” The following week, he announced that he was appointing a commission on “Institutional History and Community” to examine the university’s past and how its physical campus is presented. The commission would be composed of representatives from faculty and staff, alumni, and current students.
The process launched by Dudley in the summer of 2017 lasted for just over a year. The self-examination unearthed deep divisions within the university community and revealed the startling degree to which many faculty members were put off by the school’s traditions and culture. Among the common themes sounded during the process was that Lee Chapel, with its marble statue of a recumbent Lee in bivouac repose, “causes discomfort, and sometimes harm” to members of the community. Some suggested that Lee’s name be removed from the university altogether. There was even an argument that the school’s regard for honor and civility, long considered its core values, was itself a flaw, “an attempt . . . to stifle dissent.” The town was not spared from the faculty critique, which found Lexington wanting in diversity. “The LGBTQI community is hidden,” according to one complaint.
The commission issued its report in May, and the university’s interested parties had the summer to offer comment on the report’s recommendations. Dudley promised that he would make his own recommendations to the board of trustees before classes resumed this fall. As the moment neared, progressives wanting dramatic change at the school hoped that Dudley, an academic from one of the “Little Ivies” up North, would sympathize with their concerns. Conservatives on campus, and many of the school’s devoted alumni, feared that the progressives were right.
The discord at Washington and Lee had been foreshadowed in events two years earlier at another venerable Lexington institution, the R. E. Lee Memorial Church. After a small but vocal minority of the Episcopal church’s congregants, led by a few academics from Washington and Lee, objected to the name of the building, there began a long and painful debate over whether to rename it. By the end, the rector had been dismissed, several members had quit the church, and many of those who remained were left exhausted and dispirited by the dispute.
One of the most persistent voices for change was Howard Pickett, a professor of ethics and poverty studies at W&L, who had been bothered by the church’s name since arriving in Lexington a decade earlier. Most Episcopal churches that are named for people are consecrated in honor of Christian saints. What was the theological reason, Pickett wondered, for naming a church after a Confederate general?
Lee Memorial opened its doors in 1840 as Grace Church. It was the first Episcopal church in the Shenandoah Valley, which was dotted with the hardy Presbyterian tabernacles planted by the Scots-Irish settlers who’d arrived in the valley over the previous century. Grace was just a two decades old when the war emptied its pews of its young men, and the pulpit, too, as the rector became a Confederate artillery officer.
When Lee, a pious Tidewater Episcopalian, arrived in the valley to assume his duties at the college, one of his first acts was to join Grace Church. He was immediately elected to the vestry, the body of parishioners that attends to church business, and over time he served as senior warden and chairman of the church’s finance committee. Money was foremost among the church’s temporal concerns, as was the case with most Southern institutions after the war. When Lee joined, the church had resorted to renting out its Sunday school room and charging fees for its worship pews. Lee toiled mightily over the church’s financial difficulties to the end.
On the last day of his public life, September 28, 1870, Lee followed his almost ritualistic daily routine. He arose, read the morning psalter, then took his customary place in the school chapel for the 7:45 morning service. In the afternoon, after attending to his duties at the college, Lee made his way through a steady rain to Grace Church, where the vestry was, as usual, wrestling with the budget. Among the challenges facing it was a $55 shortfall for the rector’s salary. “I will give that sum,” Lee said, before adjourning the meeting, which had lasted three hours, and heading home for supper.
With his family gathered at the table, Lee stood to say grace, but the words didn’t come. He collapsed back into his chair. Doctors were summoned, and the dining room of what is now called Lee House was transformed into a makeshift hospital room, where, two weeks later, Lee died.
Grace Church immediately added “Memorial” to its name, honoring Lee, and in 1903 renamed itself R. E. Lee Memorial Church. The church prospered and grew for more than a century.
Then, in the summer of 2015, the letter arrived. Parishioner Holly Pickett, an English professor at W&L and Howard Pickett’s wife, wrote to the church’s rector and lay leaders urging a “frank, Christ-centered discussion about the name that our church has borne since 1903.”
The letter was in reaction to the murder of nine parishioners at Charleston’s historic “Mother” Emanuel AME Church by a white supremacist named Dylann Roof, who’d hoped to touch off a race war. At the killer’s bond hearing, the family and friends of the slain confronted Roof and offered forgiveness, as well as prayers for his soul. It was a remarkable display of Christian charity—and to the militantly secular press covering the killing, a nearly incomprehensible one.
In Virginia, two Episcopal churches made their own gestures of healing and reconciliation. At St. Paul’s Church in Richmond, where Lee had worshiped during the war, symbols associated with the Confederacy were removed from the church, over the objections of those who believed history was being sacrificed to a political impulse. At Christ Church in Alexandria, where George Washington worshiped and which was the site of Lee’s confirmation, plaques honoring Washington and Lee, installed in 1870, were removed. The rector, Noelle York-Simmons, said she wanted the church to be seen as “radically welcoming.”
At R. E. Lee Memorial in Lexington, Pickett’s letter triggered an agonizing debate that would last for more than two years. Among those advocating for the name change was Doug Cumming, a vestryman at the church and a popular professor of journalism at W&L. (In the interests of the modern taste for disclosure, I will note that I have given talks to his journalism classes.) Cumming knows something about the Southern sense of the past. He was reared in Augusta, Georgia, where many members of his family live on a road named for their forebears, including the first mayor of Augusta and a Confederate general who led one of the brigades of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. As a boy, Cumming had been awestruck by the towering granite-and-marble monument to the Confederate dead on Augusta’s Broad Street, with its life-sized statues of Confederate generals, including Lee, at its base.
But Cumming also harbors ambivalence about the Southern inclination to hold the past too dear. After high school, he’d gone north for his schooling, to Bennington, and stayed there after college, building a career as a newspaperman in Providence. “I graduated from as progressive and Northern a college as it gets,” he says. “I think I was probably trying to turn myself into a New Englander.”
Cumming comes from a long line of Episcopalians and, when he became an instructor at W&L, joined R. E. Lee Memorial. He wasn’t especially bothered by the name. But as talk of it stirred, he sympathized with those who raised theological questions about honoring a Confederate general at a church. He says he was particularly concerned that outsiders would see the devotion to Lee as a kind of idolatry. “It seemed to make perfect sense to us that scripturally, we should be concerned about threatening the potential faith of others, who look at us as a shrine to the Confederacy,” Cumming says.
But some of the 465 parishioners at Lee Memorial saw in their progressive brethren more a call to social justice and political correctness than faith. “They feel like they’re guilty white people because their ancestors, or the ancestors of people in the South, were slave owners,” says Woody Sadler, a retired Marine colonel, who was senior warden in the church as the battle over the name climaxed. “And they just feel that in order to be free of this, they’ve gotta knock down all that is Southern.”
Sadler makes no claim on Southern aristocracy—he is a military brat—but he holds fast to heritage and tradition. He attended VMI and returned to Lexington with his wife (also a Marine colonel) to run the school’s ROTC program in 1992. Sadler has always held Lee in high regard as a military leader—“he and Jackson stand out as among the most brilliant minds in military history”—and since returning to Lexington, he’s come to hold Lee in even greater regard due to his postwar efforts at reconciliation. “We were not glorifying a military leader, though I wouldn’t mind that,” he says. “We were actually remembering a parishioner that meant so much to so many people.”
A few months after Holly Pickett’s letter, the vestry took a vote and decided against changing the church’s name—a decision reflecting a survey showing that two-thirds of parishioners wished to remain congregants of R. E. Lee Memorial.
That should have ended the controversy, but it didn’t. Those wanting change persisted and found sympathy from Mark Bourlakas, the diocesan bishop, who made clear his belief that the church should change its name as an act of racial conciliation. With the bishop’s encouragement, the church formed a “Discovery and Discernment Committee,” to further explore the issue and hired an outside consulting team of “peacebuilding practitioners” to examine the sources of underlying conflict within the church—although to some, including the rector, Tom Crittenden, the divide within the church was pretty clearly political.
The peacebuilding exercise brought to the surface issues in the church not directly related to the topic at hand, including criticism of Crittenden’s leadership style. Following the Anglican tradition of via media, or the middle way, Crittenden had not urged his congregation toward one position or the other in the naming controversy, much to the annoyance of those who thought that he should have taken the lead in the battle to change the church’s name. In the end, the consultants did not arrive at a resolution of the matter. They did, however, leave a tab of $16,000. Cumming’s committee held countless meetings and group sessions and finally, in April, presented its recommendations, which included changing the church’s name. The vestry said it had already voted on the name change and rejected the recommendation. At that point, Cumming says, he was ready to give up the fight and just leave it at that. “And then,” he says, “Charlottesville happened.”
He was in New York with his wife and their daughter, who was about to undergo a serious medical procedure, when news of the violent events in Charlottesville broke. As they read through the news stories and comments on their laptops, Cumming says he felt a sense of personal remorse. “I felt deeply ashamed, almost personally ashamed, that I hadn’t done more,” he says. “That the alt-right, the Unite the Right rally, had come to a town just up the road. And what had happened and what people were saying about it, I just thought, ‘Oh, my God.’ And my attention turned back to the church, and the name R. E. Lee.”
Once again the vestry took up the issue of the name change, and this time, Sadler says, the other traditionalists knew the change was inevitable. They agreed to a name change, but asked that it be delayed, hoping to postpone wounded feelings, especially among some of the older members of the church. One parishioner had been baptized at R. E. Lee more than a century ago. That argument did not prevail, and in September 2017, the vestry voted to return to the name the church had when Lee attended, Grace Episcopal Church. A plaque honoring three of the church’s historic leaders, including Lee, would be placed out front. A few weeks after the vote, Crittenden left the parish, as did several parishioners.
The liberals had won their long fight, but to Cumming it didn’t quite feel like triumph. “It’s heartbreaking for a church that’s supposed to be the body of Christ to divide on things like this,” he says. “We have been completely focused on healing and reconciliation, which mostly means you just don’t talk about it.”
Sadler says the experience has changed his feeling for the church and for some of his fellow parishioners. “It’s really hard for me, now that this is over, I don’t feel the love in that church,” he says. “I get upset when people hurt other people, especially for no good reason. And that’s exactly what I saw happen at R. E. Lee.”
The unalloyed opprobrium now assigned to Robert E. Lee in the mainstream press could be seen in the reaction to President Trump’s casual mention of the Confederate general at an October rally in Ohio. In the course of telling an anecdote about Lincoln’s frustration in trying to find an equal to Lee, Trump described Lee as “a true great fighter and a great general,” but one who finally met his match in native Ohioan Ulysses S. Grant.
The Washington Post’s report of the event called Trump’s anecdote “an unexpected and provocative monologue on America’s Civil War history” that “threatened to reignite a highly divisive debate over America’s racial history.” The Post also noted, meaningfully, that “Trump appeared buoyant” when mentioning Lee. Those themes were widely sounded in other reports and on social media, making clear that even the slightest approbation of Lee is now controversial on its face.
What’s striking about that reaction is that until relatively recently, Trump’s was the common view of Lee, both in the culture and in historical scholarship. Admiration for him extended beyond his military skill, which is still conceded, to his essential character. Dwight Eisenhower kept a portrait of Lee in the Oval Office and later explained why. “Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God,” Eisenhower wrote. “Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.”
Ike’s lofty estimation of Lee reflected a century’s worth of similar such assessments, beginning with those of his contemporaries of every rank. “He had the quiet bearing of a powerful yet harmonious nature,” wrote James Power Smith, a young aide-de-camp to Stonewall Jackson who went on to serve Lee at Gettysburg. “Essentially a man of character,” said Charles Francis Adams Jr., descendant of two presidents and a Union officer during the war, speaking at Lee’s centennial celebration in Lexington in 1907. A few years earlier, the abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, who had penned the lines of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” published a poem eulogizing Lee as “A gallant foeman in the fight / A brother when the fight was o’er / The hand that led the host with might / The blessed torch of learning bore.”
This idealized view of Lee was nowhere more keenly embraced than at the bedraggled little mountainside college in western Virginia whose presidency Lee assumed five months after Appomattox.
In the fall of 1865, both man and school were near ruin. Lee had lost his fortune and his property in the war, he had an invalid wife to care for, and he knew no occupation but soldiering. He’d had many offers to trade on his name, including $50,000 from an insurance company and the presidency of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway, all of which he had declined. He signed his oath of allegiance to the United States on the same day he took the presidential oath at Washington College—October 2, 1865—but he remained an unpardoned parolee for the rest of his life.
The college offered Lee an annual salary of $1,500, but even that small sum was a reach for an institution so badly straitened by war. A Union raid on Lexington had destroyed VMI and much of the town. Washington College had been plundered, its library and laboratory sacked. A 116-year-old educational establishment had been effectively reduced to a prep school, with an enrollment of 40 boys who were below fighting age and a faculty of 4.
Yet Lee’s years in Lexington can be seen as his most satisfying and are considered by many to be, as Adams noted in 1907, “the most useful to his country of his whole life.” This was partly because Lee’s time in Lexington is associated with his unswerving urging of national reconciliation, the best-known example of which came in his response to the offer of the college presidency: “I think it the duty of every citizen,” Lee wrote to the trustees, “in the present condition of the country, to do all in his power to aid in the restoration of peace and harmony, and in no way to oppose the policy of the State or General Governments directed to that object.”
From the school’s perspective, there was little doubt that Washington College owed its survival to Lee. He had refused to use his name for his own gain, but he eagerly worked his connections to benefit the institution. His first touch was Cyrus McCormick, the inventor and businessman, who began his benefaction with a $10,000 donation in Lee’s first year as president and followed with gifts through the years that eventually totaled more than $350,000. While taking the waters at White Sulphur Springs in 1869, Lee met the industrialist and financier George Peabody, America’s first great philanthropist, who had a particular interest in promoting education in the prostrate South. Peabody died later that year, leaving a sizable inheritance to the college in his will.
Lee also proved an able, even visionary, educator. Before the war, Washington College had been essentially a classical academy. Lee expanded the curriculum in applied sciences, added programs in journalism and business (the first in the country), and affiliated the college with a local law school, effectively transforming Washington College into a modern university. By the time of Lee’s death in 1870, the school was on sound financial footing and had an enrollment of 400 students, making it one of the largest colleges in the South. In its first meeting after his death, the board of trustees voted to rename the school Washington and Lee.
But Lee’s most meaningful contribution to the college was the imprint he placed upon its character. “We have but one rule,” Lee told the young men in his charge. “That every student must be a gentleman.” That dictum and its corollary—that a gentleman doesn’t lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do—encapsulated what became the college’s honor code. Lee placed its enforcement in the hands of the students, where it remains today. A violation of the duty of honor is determined entirely by a student committee and carries only one possible punishment: expulsion.
“What’s different about Washington and Lee is the honor code really works,” says the broadcast journalist Roger Mudd, a member of the class of 1950. “You could leave your bicycle anywhere, and it would still be there in the morning.” More remarkably, students are allowed to take exams in their own residences, unsupervised as long as they affix their pledge (“On my honor, I have neither given nor received any unacknowledged aid on this exam”) to the work. “The professors loved it because they could pass out their final exams and then leave,” Mudd says. “They didn’t have to monitor what was going on in the classroom as the students wrote their finals. And it made life better and easier for everybody.”
The honor culture has a bonding effect on students, between themselves and with the school. Mudd says that it shaped his life, and after his broadcasting career, he returned to Lexington to teach a politics course. In 2010, he made a $4 million donation to the university for what became the Mudd Center for Ethics.
By the time Mudd arrived in Lexington, Washington and Lee had come to be a highly regarded Southern men’s college, deeply traditional (at least one professor insisted upon a jacket and tie for boys entering his classroom long after the school’s dress code was relaxed in the 1960s) and with a conservative approach to education. This began to change when the school developed the ambition to be ranked among the nation’s elite colleges.
The most jarring change came in 1985, when W&L became coeducational. The Ivies had been coed since the 1970s (except for Columbia, which only admitted women in 1983), and the board was convinced that W&L could not survive, much less join the ranks of the elite, as a men’s school. Other changes inevitably followed, including the introduction of a gender-studies program with such non-traditional courses as “Gender Role Development” and “Queering Colonialism.” As W&L began to compete with upper-tier schools in hiring, its faculty and administrative staff became ever more susceptible to the trends and attitudes sweeping through academia, including an approach to history that would cast the school into its current identity crisis.
Scholarship had long been focused on the past as a fixed thing, knowable by the actions and words of historical figures who were to be considered within the context of their own time. The method that supplanted traditionalism sees history as a fluid thing, highly subjective and interpretive, with the people of the past being fair game for present-day judgment. This approach, historical presentism, is inherently inclined toward revisionism, and there is perhaps no figure in American history whose profile was more susceptible to revision than Robert E. Lee.
The seminal moment was the publication of Thomas Connelly’s The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society in 1977. The conventional view of Lee regarded him as an exemplar of personal honor, a peerless soldier who’d agonized over his decision to fight for the Confederacy and then sought reconciliation at war’s end. The fact that he was himself a slaveholder was generally contextualized. Lee was considered as a man of his time and place whose view of the South’s “peculiar institution” was, if anything, relatively moderate. His father, Revolutionary War hero Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, had soldiered alongside George Washington (another slaveholding Tidewater aristocrat), who, after all, was himself the commander of a rebellious army fighting to establish what was, at its birth, a slaveholding nation.
Connelly argued that the noble, heroic Lee was a fiction, consciously contrived by a clique of postwar Virginians to deflect blame for Southern defeat from their native son. Far from the “harmonious nature” observed by James Power Smith at Gettysburg, Lee’s psyche, Connelly posited, was deeply disturbed, rendering him a morose, depressive, even suicidal figure given to violent outbursts of temper.
The Marble Man opened the gates of Lee revisionism, through which a host of other historians streamed. Gone was the Lee who merely tolerated slavery, which he’d described in a letter to his wife “as a moral and political evil,” replaced by Lee the wicked master who was personally cruel to his servants. To Lee’s supposed flaws of character was added a new, critical view of his military ability, which saw a reckless strategist whose hubris doomed countless thousands of Americans to unnecessary death and who brought on a crushing defeat that an abler commander might have avoided.
The fact that so many people, from Julia Ward Howe to Dwight Eisenhower, had for so long regarded Lee as a paragon was ascribed to the pernicious power of what the revisionists call the “Lost Cause” narrative. This was a deliberate effort in both the North and the South, the argument holds, to romanticize the Confederate cause in the hope of facilitating sectional reconciliation—described by the Atlantic in October as “a shared commitment to white supremacy.”
This is the prevailing view in academia and in much of the media, a conviction that is reinforced when Confederate symbols are embraced by a Dylann Roof or torch-bearing white nationalists in Charlottesville. And it is why, when statues start toppling and monuments are defaced, appeals to heritage and history are largely unavailing.
It was against this background that Will Dudley assumed the office once held by Robert E. Lee, heading a university that had ostentatiously revered Lee for a century and a half and taking up residence in the house where Lee had breathed his last.
The process of bringing Dudley to Lexington had taken nearly 18 months, involving a nationwide search and a lengthy transition, and the W&L board of trustees was certain that it had found its man. Dudley had served as provost at Williams College, one of the most prestigious liberal arts schools in the country, a credential that fitted W&L’s ambitions perfectly. He was also a native Virginian, born in Charlottesville and reared in Arlington. His family had been in the Old Dominion for 300 years.
Even so, Dudley was in some ways a fish out of water in his new job. While Williams and W&L are peer institutions, each situated in a picturesque small town up against the Appalachians, in key ways the two schools could not be more different. Williams is quite secure in its heritage, while W&L is wrestling with its own. And even apart from the honor code and speaking tradition, numerous other aspects of campus culture in Lexington would not be recognizable in Williamstown. For one, social life at W&L is dominated by Greek social organizations, 21 of them, whereas at Williams fraternities have been banned since 1962. The school handbook warns that any attempt to organize a fraternity could result in expulsion from the college. And at Williams, Dudley had certainly never confronted a controversy of the sort he encountered in March with the arrival of a letter from a Lexington local named Don Samdahl.
The retired head librarian of VMI, Samdahl wrote to complain that a book authored by his wife Margaret, a longtime employee of W&L, had been banned by the school in violation of its policies ensuring freedom of expression. The work in question, “My Colt”: The Story of Traveller, was a 32-page, illustrated children’s book focused on the famous bond between Lee and his horse, who is buried just a few feet away from the general’s own grave in Lexington. It does not romanticize the Confederacy, which is scarcely mentioned in a tale told from the horse’s perspective; if anything, Traveller comes off as a bit of a pacifist for a war horse (“I have to say I did not miss the bullets, bombs, or confusion of the war”).
But at least one member of the W&L faculty, politics professor Robin Le Blanc, was apparently of the view that Traveller should have been portrayed as having served in the unjust cause of preserving slavery and perpetuating white supremacy. She registered a complaint about the book, and within a few days, a book signing at W&L was canceled and My Colt was removed from display at both the Lee Chapel shop and the university store. (Le Blanc did not respond to a request for comment.)
Dudley responded to Samdahl’s letter by assuring him that My Colt had not been banned by W&L, merely suspended from sale while the matter was investigated. Three weeks later, the book returned to the shelves of the school’s stores.
Samdahl remained convinced that W&L had fallen under the sway of a group of academic Jacobins. “Unless you denigrate and attack Lee and all Confederates and Southerners, you are an evil person,” he says. “There is only one permissible view—that Southerners and Lee and Jackson and Washington, all these men who had slaves, are evil people, and if you ever say a kind word about them, or even a neutral word, then you are an enemy.”
Some W&L traditionalists worried that Dudley was more Massachusetts than Virginia. “My fear is that Dudley has been brought in to push this politically correct metamorphosis of the school,” said Jeffrey Southmayd, ’73, an attorney who is very active in the school alumni network. “I’ve been told by people who’ve met with him and sat with him that he’s really not attuned to W&L and the traditions, and nor, I fear, does he respect them.”
That fear seemed to have been realized when Dudley’s commission on institutional history and community released its report in May. It made 31 recommendations, several of which suggested that the revisionist view of Lee would prevail at the university named for him.
The commission did not recommend changing the name of the school “at this time,” but its key proposals would dramatically diminish Lee’s presence in the school’s culture and on the physical campus. The commission urged that Lee Chapel, which had long been the site of important school functions, be converted into a museum, with official school events being held elsewhere.
The report recommended that references to Lee in school materials drop the title “General,” instead referring to him only as “President Lee.” Portraits of Lee showing him in military uniform should be taken down, replaced by pictures of Lee in civilian attire or portraits of other individuals “who represent the university’s complete history.” The commission also called for a standing “naming committee” to conduct a review of the school’s buildings, programs, and departments. This was an apparent response to a faculty complaint that “the campus tells the story of white, male patriarchs.”
Perhaps the most striking of the recommendations was that the school’s cherished honor code be distanced from Lee in order “to ensure [its] credibility.” The orientation of new students into the honor system, which traditionally includes signing a copy of the code, should be removed from Lee Chapel, the commission suggested, and references to Lee given “a more proportionate place.”
Traditionalists in the W&L community were appalled by the report, and they let Dudley know it. Among the most outspoken of them was a rising senior, Hayden Daniel, a history major from Mississippi attending W&L on an academic scholarship. “Washington and Lee’s history, its identity, its essence will be lost,” Daniel told me this summer. “Without it, we become just like everybody else. We become another self-flagellating northeastern liberal arts college that no one’s ever going to want to go to because we’re in the middle of nowhere. It’s our history and our traditions that bring people here.”
He was particularly aggrieved by the proposed changes to the honor book ritual. “It is a very visceral experience. It’s the first time your honor is tested at Washington & Lee,” he said. “Everyone in your incoming class is with you, and you make the pledge, and then you sign the White Book, which is the honor code book, and you can look up and see Lee in his recumbent pose as you’re signing the White Book. . . . And then you look behind you and you see all those pews where everyone comes and gathers, and you think of all the previous W&L classes that have signed the White Book. You’re connected to the history of the honor system itself. You’re there with the man who personified it, and you’re there in spirit with all the people who came before and signed it, too. So you’re inducted into this sort of fraternity of honor there when you sign that book.”
Daniel published a stinging critique of the report in the campus conservative newsmagazine, the W&L Spectator, helping to rouse sympathetic alumni to the fight—not that much help was required. “It’s an uprising, believe me,” said Jeffrey Southmayd, who was one of several hundred W&L alumni who attached their names to a point-by-point review of the commission’s report. The alumni expressed support for several of the commission’s recommendations, such as new efforts to increase diversity and finding ways to more fully tell the story of the school’s history. But, the alumni warned, “We are opposed to any recommendation which tends to diminish, tear down, obscure, or eliminate our history, values, and traditions.” Among those unwelcome proposals, the alums made clear, were the diminishment of Lee Chapel and the proposal to strip the title “General” from Lee, “which, frankly, we consider almost silly.”
The alumni pointedly expressed their belief that implementation of some of the recommendations would “result in a significant decline in support, both financial and otherwise, for the university.” “These tend to be alumni who graduated in the ’60s, who are doing their estate planning, and who have been very loyal alumni,” Southmayd said. “What I hear is ‘I’ve given my last dollar to W&L, I’m going to have to redo my will because I’m not going to make the bequest I was going to make.’ There’s a lot of that sentiment brewing.”
As students, faculty, and staff arrived in Lexington for the fall term, Dudley sent a message, nearly 4,000 words long, to the school community, in which he revealed his decisions on the commission’s report. Recipients did not have to read far before arriving at the most telling passage. “We will neither distance ourselves from our history,” Dudley wrote, “nor oversimplify it.”
He said that the school’s namesakes and other important figures in its history needed to be remembered for who they were and what they did, whether or not their actions and decisions would gain contemporary approval. “The point is not to sit in judgment, but to understand them in all of their human complexity and with an appreciation of the contexts in which they lived,” Dudley wrote. “The interminable messiness of historical inquiry is an educational virtue that advances our mission by honing the ability of our students to think freely and critically.”
Regarding Lee Chapel, Dudley decided, “We can and will continue to use Lee Chapel, as our community has done for a century and a half, in the service of the life of the university.” The honor code orientation ritual would continue to be held in the chapel—or not; it would be entirely the decision of the students, as Lee himself would have had it, Dudley said. But both the chapel and Lee House would retain their names.
Dudley announced his intention to appoint a director of institutional history, reporting to the president, who will oversee Lee Chapel, the school’s art and history collections, and the design and operation of a new museum devoted to the school’s history. “We have to move forward together,” Dudley announced, though he noted the difficulty of doing so in an era when the school’s core values are being called into question and “ ‘civility’ has become a loaded word.”
The traditionalists had won. But some worried that, as with the former R. E. Lee Memorial Church, the victory would not be final. “I think Dudley’s hope is things will die down, we’ll have this director of institutional history, and he can do some of these things that the commission wanted to do,” says alumni activist Jeffrey Southmayd.
Indeed, a month after Dudley sent his message out, some of the changes proposed by the commission were adopted by the school’s board of trustees. Chief among them was fulfillment of the commission’s most urgent recommendation, the renaming of Robinson Hall, whose namesake, “Jockey” John Robinson, had been an important early benefactor, leaving his entire estate—which included several dozen slaves—to the school. Robinson Hall will now be called Chavis Hall, after John Chavis, who became the first African American with a college education when he graduated from Washington Academy, as the school was then called, in 1799.
Lee-Jackson House, in which the two Confederate generals had each briefly lived, will be renamed to honor Pamela Hemenway Simpson, an art historian who spent her entire career at W&L and was instrumental in its transition to coeducation in the 1980s. The board also decreed that when university functions are held inside Lee Chapel, the doors will be closed on the statue of the recumbent Lee, hiding him from view. And the portraits of Washington and Lee in military uniform inside the chapel will be replaced with pictures of the two men in civilian attire. That objective came closer to fruition on November 13 when W&L agreed to loan to Mount Vernon the painting of Washington that had long hung in the chapel—the 1772 Charles Willson Peale depiction of Washington as a colonel in the Virginia Regiment, the only portrait of him predating the revolution—for two years. In exchange, one of Gilbert Stuart’s replicas of his famous “Athenaeum” portrait of Washington (the countenance famous from the $1 bill) will be hung in Lee Chapel.
In the W&L Spectator, Hayden Daniel editorialized against the chapel changes, saying that those uncomfortable with Lee’s presence on campus would not be mollified with gestures. “Giving in to demands formulated based on how a certain group feels leads to radical change after radical change until we will not be able to recognize ourselves anymore,” he wrote. “We will end up erasing the history, both good and bad, that makes Washington and Lee such a unique place in favor of becoming a safe-space ridden clone of Davidson or Wellesley that attempts to coddle its students rather than expose them to the harsh realities of history and reconcile the complexity of the figures who made that history.”
Dudley acknowledges that there are faculty members who don’t believe that he went nearly far enough—some have reportedly threatened to leave the school. “I do live in the real world, and I know that those folks are there,” he says. But he is determined to hold the line. He believes the goals of inclusion and diversity can be achieved “without the kinds of symbolic changes that some of them think are necessary.”
When he initiated the agonizing self-examination exercise, he’d said he hoped that W&L would “set a national example for how this work should be done,” and the school may have done just that. In the end, with the board’s backing, Dudley has arrived at an elegant, even wise, resolution to W&L’s identity crisis, one suiting an institution of higher learning. Washington and Lee will undertake to resolve the tension between history and contemporary mores by adding to history, not subtracting from it—or, worse, erasing it.
And there is, in the end, a most practical motivation to succeed. “I’m pretty sure this university will always be called Washington and Lee,” says Doug Cumming, who successfully advocated for the renaming of R. E. Lee Memorial Church but has no such ambition for the school. “What else would you call it? We’re building a reputation. You know, it’s a brand.” Cumming endorses Dudley’s decision on the commission’s report, too, and the subsequent actions of the board of trustees. “I think it’s a good first step, to get some of these names on the buildings, at not much of a loss to the shades of the two generals,” Cumming says. “Our mascot remains the Generals.”
But even so careful an approach to the past holds peril, as was made evident in late October when a group calling itself the Loyal Knights of the Ku Klux Klan distributed leaflets around campus, claiming biblical authority for racial segregation and warning, “K-K-Keep the name the same.” Dudley condemned the group and the leaflets in another letter to the community, saying (as he had after Charlottesville), “The views espoused by the KKK and other hate groups are abhorrent and antithetical to the values of Washington and Lee.”
The one-time Williams philosophy professor is teaching a course this semester examining W&L’s core ideals—“honor, integrity, civility, citizenship, and thinking freely, critically, and humanely,” as he lists them—from the perspective of Aristotelian ethics. Cumming has a bit of advice for his university’s president: “I don’t know if he’s also drawing on Stoicism, but that’s always been a strand of the Southern way of getting through polarization like we see now.”
