Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause Free Audiobook Download by Ty Seidule

Ty Seidule vividly tells the story of his life as a southerner and how Robert E. Lee's chief legacy is to dishonor the southern generation who accomplished so much in a society that was largely controlled by northerners.

Robert E. Lee and Me tells the story of how, in the wake of the Civil War, a generation of "New Southerners" tried to break away from the legacy of slavery in order to create a new beginning for their region. Ty Seidule tells his own story of becoming involved with this movement, including fighting for civil rights as a member of SNCC and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC and SNCC are respectively initials for the organizations).

Ty Seidule was born in Mississippi during the Civil War. He was a young boy and family members were avid Confederate supporters. As a child, his family talked about General Robert E. Lee's "Lost Cause" as if it were a fact of life. But as Ty grew up with his own family, they became more and more racist and began to blame African Americans for everything that went wrong in their lives. When he was 18 years old, Ty's father died unexpectedly of a heart attack and he had to take over care for his disabled father who never quite understood what caused it.

"I was born in Texas and have lived most of my life in the South. I had no idea that Robert E. Lee was such a controversial figure when I began reading about him as an undergraduate at Emory University, where I grew up and went to school."

When he left the Army, Ty Seidule wrote that the history of the Confederacy was misremembered. In this memoir, he offers a personal account of why the South's defeat became such an intense national wound, and how it is still felt today.

Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause by Ty Seidule is a moving account of one man's journey to understand the Civil War, what he could have done differently during that time, and how his life has been affected by this reckoning.