![]() ![]() 2īut Parker’s riposte cleverly positioned Lee’s white supremacy as antithetical to the original values of the United States. In affirming his connection to a logic of blood and soil, Lee was rewriting history in his moment of surrender. While black inequality was a cornerstone of the Confederacy, blood purity was not. By his own definition, Lee-obviously the descendant of immigrants-could not be an authentic American, except by erasing the land’s original inhabitants, one of whom was standing right in front of him. This connection between “blood” and “soil” may be the reason Lee claimed a kind of affinity-however bitter-with Parker. Going back to before the Sons of Liberty at the Boston Tea Party, white Americans have used Indians to articulate their claims of righteous authenticity. Notably, some of the white supremacist groups at the August 2017 “Unite the Right” riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted “blood and soil” as they protested the planned removal of Lee’s statue. What did Lee mean by “American”? He invoked a definition of nationhood that the ancient Greeks and Romans and, later, the Nazis, also claimed: one was an American by virtue of one’s pure “blood” (a claim that one’s ancestors all belonged to the same “race”) and inalienable attachment to soil (or, the territory which white southerners, then and now, claimed they waged war to protect). Parker simply extended his hand and replied, “We are all Americans.” 1 But Parker was not black, he was Tonawanda Seneca, a member of the Iroquois Confederacy from New York realizing his mistake, Lee stepped forward and offered his hand: “I am glad to see one real American here,” he said. At first, the story goes, Lee refused to shake Parker’s hand, mistaking his darker complexion for that of an African American soldier in Union blue. ![]() Grant at Appomattox in 1865, Grant introduced Lee to his personal military secretary, a man named Ely S. ![]()
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