When you stop and think about it, the General Beauregard Lee thing is wild.
Far from just any old rodent, General Beauregard Lee is Georgia’s beloved Groundhog Day woodchuck weatherman — a Southern version of Pennsylvania’s Punxsutawney Phil. According to recordkeepers, he’s more accurate than his northeastern colleague and although he’s not quite as famous, he’s treated with a particular sort of Southern reverence, with the literal trappings of a bygone lifestyle.
Every year on February 2, after cautiously stepping out from the small doors of his custom antebellum mansion, General Beauregard Lee predicts the weather. This year, we’re due for an early spring, which the prognostication skills of a climate-sensitive groundhog may not have been necessary to detect, but traditions are traditions.
But there are layers of additional Southern traditions in this ritual. General Beauregard Lee is the namesake of not just one but two Confederate leaders.
The most famous name “The General” carries is his surname, which honors Robert E. Lee, who led the Confederate army and ultimately surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the Civil War.
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
The other is a man named P.G.T. Beauregard. Sure, his preferred name could double today as a moniker for an antebellum trap music recording artist, but in fact Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard was also a Confederate general.
To this day, Beauregard and Lee are considered Confederate heroes. Yet in recent years, particularly after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, but also following a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, protestors and organized groups pushed, successfully in several cases, to have monuments of both men removed from public areas in cities like New Orleans and Charlottesville and Richmond, Virginia.
Credit: Josh Brasted
Credit: Josh Brasted
While those acts from state and local governments were seen by some as victories, it would appear that General Beauregard Lee, the groundhog, is evidence — on some level — that cultural normalization of Confederate heroes continues.
The rehabilitation of Lee and Beauregard has been widely reported. But putting their names on a presumably innocent groundhog promoted as a harmless public figure (since when are weathermen racist?) seems problematic in a different way.
Dr. Maurice Hobson, a Georgia State professor who specializes in civil rights and Southern history, says Confederate monuments should be preserved rather than destroyed.
“They should be removed and put into museums,” he says, suggesting that it’s important for society to understand these figures’ importance to the culture that continues today. Hobson believes in order to understand the truth and move toward reconciliation, evidence of the past should be retained, no matter how unsavory. Destroying records of the Confederacy could even backfire, Hobson believes, clouding the narrative of the war and its cause. “I teach history, and I can tell you, they are trying to erase history,” Hobson says.
Credit: TYSON HORNE /TYSON.HORNE@AJC.COM
Credit: TYSON HORNE /TYSON.HORNE@AJC.COM
Hobson, who developed a years-long friendship with the late Congressman John Lewis, says the Civil Rights Movement leader would occasionally ask a favor related to the preservation of his own role in America’s complicated racial history, and why keeping such evidence was important.
“One of the things Congressman Lewis used to always say to me was, ‘Don’t you let them take Edmund Pettus off that bridge and put my name on it.’ And I knew what he was saying… You don’t want to take the name off the Edmund Pettus Bridge because you want to hold white supremacists accountable. When you erase their names off of stuff, they forget what they did. Let them fly that flag so we can remember who they are. They were treasonous.”
Hobson says Beauregard was somewhat different from his Confederate peers, such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, another Confederate Army general who was also the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Hobson says Forrest, as well as Confederate leader Jefferson Davis, were often at odds with Beauregard, who he considers a complicated figure. A West Point graduate, Beauregard was an expert in engineering and artillery, building fortifications in his home state of Louisiana and elsewhere, prior to the Civil War. He also served in the Mexican-American War, and briefly led West Point as superintendent until Louisiana seceded from the Union. “Before the Confederacy broke away, he was considered a real patriot.”
Credit: Matthew Hinton
Credit: Matthew Hinton
Still, Hobson doesn’t absolve Beauregard. “He was sired on one of the largest sugar plantations in all of Louisiana. Make no if, ands or buts about it; he’s a good-ol’ boy that benefitted from everything we know about the Old South.”
The whimsical manner in which Beauregard and Lee are lionized, or perhaps groundhogerized, by General Beauregard Lee, could be seen as harmless. But there’s in fact a passive-aggressive push, at least for this writer, that seems almost like trolling or gaslighting. It turns fun and silly rituals like groundhogs predicting the weather into something sinister, and maybe psychologically cruel.
But there’s something else just as cruel. General Beauregard Lee, the groundhog, probably has no idea how racist we have him looking out here. And to be clear, General Beauregard Lee can’t communicate in English. He’s a groundhog.
Credit: Steve Deal
Credit: Steve Deal
Again, consider it all: Every year, about this time, on the second day of Black History Month, we wake this fuzzy, otherwise business-minding neighbor of ours – sometimes with trumpets – until he comes out of the tiny black front door of the antebellum plantation in which he lives.
We wait to see his reaction as network cameras and livestreaming cellphones broadcast his every move. But are we really paying attention to what this all means?
According to Pennsylvania Dutch lore, groundhogs can interpret seasonal weather patterns simply by going outside on a specific date and looking over their shoulder. If they see their own shadows and retreat back into their homes, or antebellum plantations, it means things will continue to be cold for an extended set of weeks.
Could it be that General Beauregard Lee simply sees the shade he’s throwing, and maybe it’s not a good feeling? Maybe this isn’t what he wants the world to see. We all know the vibes.
Let’s not lose focus; this thing is way bigger than General Beauregard Lee. And what we’re not gonna do is feel worse for General Beauregard Lee than we do for people who somehow gained freedom but are still fighting for it at the same time.
And until General Beauregard Lee gets a new name, hopefully ending the generational curse of continuing a Confederate legacy against his will, that early spring might never truly come.
This story was updated to correct the site of the 2017 white nationalist rally that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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