Reader-submitted, letter by Dee Laird.
I am greatly concerned with your publicized decision to remove the Robert E Lee statue from historic Monument Ave. Now you may wonder why some fellow from western Colorado should be concerned with your actions. The first 55 years of my life were spent in Henrico and Hanover counties in the landscape nursery business, and at one point in my career, my company had a Richmond contract to replant over a hundred large sugar maples down that same historic Monument Ave that is home to the magnificent statues of LEE, STUART, JACKSON, DAVIS, MAURY, and ASHE, all part of Virginia’s long history.
I graduated from St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Hamden-Sydney College, and Virginia Tech. My undergrad major was history with an emphasis on Civil War history, and I’ve walked the ground of every major battle in Virginia, as well as Gettysburg, and Antietam.
Lee graduated at the top of his class at West Point and became a highly decorated member of the US Amy. He proved to be a man of honor and integrity, and was so well respected that, when war became inevitable, Lincoln offered him command of all US forces. But because of his high sense of honor to his state of Virginia, even though he deplored secession and slavery, he resigned his commission to support his state, and one oft he
greatest tactical generals ever produced in this country. Post-Civil War, Lee was revered not only in the South, but the North as well. In 1865 Lee became President of Washington College in Lexington [ later Washington and
Lee] and was named the spiritual founder of The Kappa Alpha Order because he was a moral role model.
There is no question our country has experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly in its long history. But it is still our history, not to be trifled with, but learned from. The Civil War brought emancipation, long overdue. Later segregation was ended, long overdue also. Removing the Lee statue on Monument is, in my opinion, nothing but a historically illiterate political move on your part to attempt to absolve you of your now famous ‘blackface” background, curry favor with other historically illiterates offended by the Lee statue, and to deny the history of Virginia.
In my younger years, I spent sixteen years as a lobbyist in the General Assembly, on behalf of the industry of Virginia agriculture, primarily for the Nursery industry and The Virginia Agribusiness Council. During that period, I had the great honor of working closely with three governors: Mills Godwin for his two separate terms, Linwood Holt0L and John Dalton.
All outstanding governors, who had the highest respect for the highs and lows of Virginia history.
Removing the Lee statue changes not a bit of real history, but with all respect to the office you hold, brands you as a political fool for being manipulated into such action.
This move and your recent actions against the 2nd Amendment to our Constitution are sure to place you high in the ranks of Virginia’s worst governors. Do you also intend to remove JACKSON, STUART, and DAVIS statues? How about the Civil War statues at VMI?
You sir are a disgrace to the Commonwealth of Virginia and your alma mater VWI. Hopefully, the voters of Virginia will be more selective in the next gubernatorial election! In my opinion you are in the same league as our Colorado governor. both of you are sending our two great states down the tubes, while further dividing our country!
Finally, if my comments offend you, the immortal sentiments of Rhett Butler come to mind: ‘Frankly, I don’t give a damn! “
JP says
Completely Agree
Srlene says
Great read!!
FRANK DORSCH JR says
Amen !
Paul Plante says
Pretty soon, Rhett Butler and “Gone With The Wind” will both be gone, as well, because they are racially insensitive, and thus, have to be banned and burned by the RED GUARDS to liberate us from our past.
History in America is going to begin with Barack Obama.
Before that will be nothing.
Arlene says
ABSOLUTELY TRUE!!!
Suzanne Hallberg says
I disagree with everything in this letter
Paul Plante says
Aren’t you glad that you still in a country where you are totally free to do that – to disagree with everything in this letter?
And since you disagree with everything in the letter, which is still your God-given right as an American citizen, you will probably be positively freaked right out by a Politico article entitled “House restores citizenship to Robert E. Lee, July 22, 1975” by Andrew Glass on 07/22/2010, where we learn that Bobby Lee is just as much an American citizen as are you and “Ol’ Blackface” Northam, to wit:
On this day in 1975, the House restored U.S. citizenship to Robert E. Lee, who commanded the Confederate Army during the Civil War and became an enduring icon of the South’s “lost cause.”
end quotes
Note the words “an enduring icon of the South’s ‘lost cause.’”
Did you know that the South lost the Civil War?
Were you aware that they didn’t win?
Were you ever made aware of the fact that when one looks on a statue of Bobby Lee, he is not being honored, he is being remembered as “an enduring icon of the South’s ‘lost cause,’” a war he lost, which is supposed to be an enduring message to the people of America to remember there once was a Civil War in this country, so we would not be stupid enough to want to repeat it?
And obviously, the Democrats, who caused the Civil War that dragged in Bobby Lee on the losing side, are still that stupid today, as they try to provoke another one, which takes us back to that Politico article, to wit:
The 407-10 vote came after a campaign spearheaded by Sen. Harry F. Byrd Jr. (D-Va.).
end quotes
So, Suzanne, are you condemning Senator Byrd of Virginia, a Democrat, for spearheading a campaign to restore to Bobby Lee his U.S. citizenship, and the house for doing so?
You can, you know, as this is still the old America, where people like yourself still have some freedom of choice left to you.
Getting back to Politico:
Though President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation of amnesty and pardon to the Southern rebels in 1865, it required Lee to apply separately.
On Oct. 2, 1865, the same day that Lee was inaugurated as president of Washington College in Lexington, Va., he signed the required amnesty oath and filed an application through Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.
Nonetheless, neither was Lee pardoned, nor was his citizenship restored.
After receiving it, Secretary of State William Seward gave Lee’s application to a friend as a souvenir.
Meanwhile, State Department officials, apparently with Seward’s approval, pigeonholed the oath.
In 1970, an archivist, examining State Department records at the National Archives, found Lee’s lost oath.
That discovery helped set in motion a five-year congressional effort to restore citizenship to the general, who had died stateless in 1870.
President Gerald Ford signed the congressional resolution on July 24, 1975, correcting what he said was a 110-year oversight.
The signing ceremony took place at Arlington House in Virginia, the former Lee family home.
Several Lee descendants, including Robert E. Lee V, his great-great-grandson, attended.
“As a soldier, Gen. Lee left his mark on military strategy,” Ford said.
“As a man, he stood as the symbol of valor and of duty.”
“As an educator, he appealed to reason and learning to achieve understanding and to build a stronger nation.”
“The course he chose after the war became a symbol to all those who had marched with him in the bitter years towards Appomattox.”
end quotes
And it is for those reasons, and especially that Bobby Lee appealed to reason and learning to achieve understanding and to build a stronger nation, that the anarchists who want to return us to a state of benighted ignorance in this country want to tear down the statue of Bobby Lee.
So, are you on the sides of the anarchists and gross ignorance then?
Is that why you disagree with everything in this letter?
Stuart Bell says
Then, you are part of the problem…
Arlene says
Just another radical Communist!!
MJM says
Ralph Northam is a disgrace ad I have no idea how anyone could disagree with that. Robert E. Lee did graduate 1st in his class at West Point and I don’t know how anyone could disagree with that. Ignoring , destroying, or hiding from our history, good or bad, will lead us down the road of being doomed to repeat it, and anyone who has ever studied history knows that. Ralph Northam is cow-towing to the misguided BLM movement and he will makes this a weaker commonwealth and country for it. All lives matter was the message of MLK and any positive thinking civil rights believer. Anyone who promotes any race or color over another due to color or race is not a civil rights minded individual at all. They become the bigot they claim to protest with any stance other than equality. This BLM movement is not the civil rights movement of the 60’s and needs to be called out by all as just another form of angry bigotry. It’s leaders misguide seeking power, not justice. Anyone who supports arson, rioting, or takeover of private property is a thief and a felon. Not a civil rights activist. And our misguided and corrupt press supports the issue and story to create more controversy and sell more advertising.
tokenny says
Robert Lee lead troops against the United States of America – care to comment on that?
Paul Plante says
I would.
Point I, Bobby Lee is dead.
Point II, the Civil War is over.
Point III, Bobby Lee fought for the Commonwealth of Virginia, as a citizen not of the United States of America, but as a citizen of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Point IV, he kicked the ass of the Union but good.
Point V, to heal the wounds of the Civil War, which you want to keep tearing open, tokenny, the Congress of the United States of America restored U.S. citizenship to Bobby Lee.
Ergo, or ipso facto, tokenny, Bobby Lee is as American a citizen as you and me.
So what is your point?
The Civil War is over, tokenny.
The South lost!
The slaves have been set free.
So you can go back down in your basement again, not having to fear Bobby Lee.
He’s dead!
tokenny says
Do we honor Benedict Arnold ? How is what Lee did any different than what Arnold did? Arnold betrayed his country, Lee fought against his country
Nancy Mullins says
Take your white guilt somewhere else. 95.4% of guilty white’s ancestors could not afford to buy any slaves.
Paul Plante says
Seriously, tokenny, you don’t know the difference?
And yes, actually, we the FREE AMERICAN PEOPLE do honor Benedict Arnold with the Boot Monument, an American Revolutionary War memorial located in Saratoga National Historical Park, New York which commemorates Major General Benedict Arnold’s service at the Battles of Saratoga in the Continental Army.
But for Benedict Arnold that day rallying the troops at Breymann’s Redoubt, our history quite probably would be quite different, with us having to call yourself, “Your Lordship.”
Erected 1887 By
JOHN WATTS de PEYSTER
Brev: Maj: Gen: S.N.Y.
2nd V. Pres’t Saratoga Mon’t Ass’t’n:
In memory of
the “most brilliant soldier” of the
Continental Army
who was desperately wounded
on this spot the sally port of
BURGOYNES GREAT WESTERN REDOUBT
7th October, 1777
winning for his countrymen
the decisive battle of the
American Revolution
and for himself the rank of
Major General.
end quotes
We Americans are funny people, are we not, that we can admire what Benedict Arnold did for American freedom at Saratoga, while holding him out with great disappointment as a traitor to the American cause, not the United States of America.
As to Bobby Lee, tokenny, no offence intended, but you are not a warrior, and so fail to see Bob Lee through the eyes of a warrior, who sees him quite differently than you do.
And if you had ever bothered to learn real American history prior to the ascension of Hussein Obama to the U.S. presidency, you would know that in the time of Bob Lee, prior to the Civil War, people were citizens of their state and took oaths to their state, such as in the Commonwealth, and this is 7th grade stuff, so shame on you for not knowing it, and to refresh your memory (you might have been sick that day) after the fifth and last Virginia Revolutionary Convention voted in May 1776 to instruct the Virginia members of the Continental Congress to introduce a resolution to declare the colonies independent, it adopted a new constitution in June.
Don’t you remember any of this, tokenny?
Were you one of those like Hussein Obama spent your school days snorting coke while trying to figure out who you were, and because you were special, you got passed along with the kids who actually had learned something by studying and paying attention, even though in reality, you didn’t know a ******* thing other than how to “get over?”
Getting back to the history of the Commonwealth as a Virginian like Bob Lee would have known it, the body also called for all officers of the new state government to take an oath of allegiance to Virginia.
Are you following that, tokenny – that part about an oath of allegiance to Virginia?
That is because Virginia was their nation, their independent country if you bother to read the Declaration of Independence, to wit:
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.
end quotes
Whether or not you are aware of that, tokenny, or believe what it says, and many in America don’t, Bob Lee would have been aware of it, which is why he fought for Virginia as head of the Army of Northern Virginia against what he rightfully, I would say, considered to be armed foreign invaders.
Getting back to the history you missed, tokenny, prior to 1776, all men holding public office took an oath of allegiance to the king.
At the May 1777 meeting of the General Assembly, the legislature passed an act declaring that “Whereas allegiance and protection are reciprocal, and those who will not bear the former are not entitled to the benefits of the latter . . . all free born male inhabitants of this state, above the age of sixteen years, except imported servants during the time of their service, shall, on or before the tenth day of October next, take and subscribe the following oath or affirmation before some one of the justices of the peace of the county, city, or borough where they shall respectively inhabit.”
The law dictated the wording of the oath (which included renouncing King George III), required militia officers to disarm recusants (men who refused to take the oath), and prohibited recusants from “holding any office in this state, serving on juries, suing for any debts, electing or being elected, or buying lands, tenements, or hereditaments.”
The Oath was as follows:
We whos names are hereunto subscribed do swear that we renounce and refuse all Allegiance to George the third King of Great Britain, his heirs and successors and that I will be faithfull and bear True Allegiance to the commonwealth of Virginia as a free and independent state, and that I will not at any [time] do or cause to be done, any matter or thing that will be prejudicial or injurious to the freedom and independence thereof as declared by congress and also that we will discover and make known to some one justice of the peace for the said state all treasons or traiterous conspiracies which we now or hereafter shall know to be formed against this or any of the united states of America So help me God.
end quotes
Looking at history through the eyes of Bob Lee is considerably different from looking at history through your eyes, n’est-ce pas?
MJM says
I think I already did. But Sure. After your comment shows up. You sound locked and loaded and ready to fire one of your 2 sentence cheap shots below the knees. Have at it. Tell us what you have learned from this history and then I’ll comment. Perhaps your words will help inspire more of mine.
Paul Plante says
AWESOME!
Suzanne Hallberg says
I guess that we will just have to agree to disagree.
tokenny says
I guess it would make your cliff notes version of history a little too complicated if you thought about Lee’s oath at West Point:
I, A.B., do solemnly swear or affirm (as the case may be) that I will support the constitution of the United States.”
The second part read:
“I, A.B., do solemnly swear or affirm (as the case may be) to bear true allegiance to the United States of America, and to serve them honestly and faithfully, against all their enemies or opposers whatsoever, and to observe and obey the orders of the President of the United States of America, and the orders of the officers appointed over me.”
The next section of that chapter specified that
“the said troops shall be governed by the rules and articles of war, which have been established by the United States in Congress assembled, or by such rules and articles of war as may hereafter by law be established.”
And FYI:
The Virginia Convention of 1861, also known later as the Secession Convention, convened on February 13, 1861, on the eve of the American Civil War (1861–1865), to consider whether Virginia should secede from the United States.
Which implies that Virginia was not a “nation” and was a member of the United States.
And by the way 1/3 of Lee’s fellow West Pointers decided to uphold their oath to the United States. Lee betrayed his country no matter how you cut it.
Paul Plante says
Okay.
Get Congress, i.e. Nancy Pelosi, Ilhan Omar, the foul-mouthed and ignorant Rashida Tlaib, and Ayeanna Pressley and AOC and Charley “Chuck” Schumer to revoke his citizenship which would give “Ol’ Blackface” Northam and the howling, yowling, screaming Democrat mob the legal justification they need to tear down the statue.
If Bob Lee can come down, then so can Tommy Jefferson and Martin Luther King.
So, please. tokenny, use your clout to get Nancy and Chuck to act, and this controversy over Bob Lee will be over because he will no longer an American citizen, and thus, no longer one of us, and how that will make the Democrat mobs out lynching dead Confederates on statues howl and yowl and gibber as they get their ropes around the neck of old Bob Lee up there forever on his pedestal to get **** on by successive generations of pigeons.
Yessir, tokenny, that is going to be quite a sight to see, alright, especially if “Blackface” Northam is out there howling and gibbering with the best of them!
Paul Plante says
tokenny, where were you the day they taught American history?
Out snorting coke with Hussein Obama while the kids who didn’t have the “easy ride” were in there learning this stuff?
DUH!
Virginia was one of the THIRTEEN COLONIES, tokenny – property of Great Britain.
Read the Declaration of Independence, tokenny:
Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.
end quotes
A political revolution is going to happen, tokenny, that is going to transform the British Colony of Virginia into an INDEPENDENT NATION called the Commonwealth of Virginia, which Commonwealth was a part of the original 13 “united” states, to wit:
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.
end quotes
And there it is right there, tokenny – from a British Colony to a STATE in one sentence, and notice the word “united” is spelled with a small “u”:
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved;
end quotes
Then moving right along with what you and Obama missed while out there snorting coke while trying to figure out who you were, if you had ever bothered to look at the Articles of Confederation, of which Virginia was a member, this is exactly what you would find, and this Bob Lee would have known, as well, a lot better than you do, to wit:
Transcript of Articles of Confederation (1777)
To all to whom these Presents shall come, we, the undersigned Delegates of the States affixed to our Names send greeting.
Whereas the Delegates of the United States of America in Congress assembled did on the fifteenth day of November in the year of our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Seventy seven, and in the Second Year of the Independence of America agree to certain articles of Confederation and perpetual Union between the States of Newhampshire, Massachusetts-bay, Rhodeisland and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia in the Words following, viz. “Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union between the States of Newhampshire, Massachusetts-bay, Rhodeisland and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.”
Article I. The Stile of this confederacy shall be, “The United States of America.”
Article II. Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.
end quotes
Are you capable of comprehending what Article II would have meant to Bob Lee when Virginia exercised its sovereignty to leave what is defined in Article III, to wit:
Article III. The said states hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defence, the security of their Liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other, against all force offered to, or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any other pretence whatever.
end quotes
If you had ever bothered to go to class , tokenny, you would know that by the time of the Civil War, the Democrat-controlled slave states felt the firm league of friendship no longer existed, which point had become obvious to a blind man by 1830 as is readily apparent to a man stone deaf from the words of the Webster-Hayne Debate, consisting of speeches delivered in the United States Senate in January of 1830.
How come you don’t remember any of this, tokenny?
The debates between Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Robert Hayne of South Carolina gave fateful utterance to the differing understandings of the nature of the American Union that had come to predominate in the North and the South, respectively, by 1830.
Can you comprehend that, tokenny?
Regardless of the history book you progressive liberal Democrats are using these days, that is real American history the way real Americans who aren’t Democrats understand it.
To refresh your memory, tokenny, for Webster the Union was the indivisible expression of one nation of people.
To Hayne, however, the Union was the voluntary compact among sovereign states.
Each man spoke more or less for his section, and their classic expositions of their respective views framed the political conflicts that culminated at last in the secession of the Southern states and war between advocates of Union and champions of Confederacy.
That is a conflict Bob Lee did not create.
That is a conflict that Bob Lee got caught up in, and he made his decisions, right or wrong, according to his values and his view of who he was as a citizen of Virginia.
If you want to judge him harshly, tokenny, have at it.
I don’t waste time condemning Bob Lee for anything.
The dude is dead!
It’s a waste of time to condemn dead people, because it doesn’t bother them any.
And getting all upset about Bob Lee is weakening your immune system, tokenny!
You’re getting all freaked out about a man been in the grave longer than you have been alive, and the next thing you know, you’ll have the COVID as a result, and that will be that.
Paul Plante says
And tokenny, it most definitely makes your Cliff notes version of history way too complicated if you thought about the fact that on April 20, 1861, Robert E. Lee resigned from the U.S. Army after Virginia seceded from Union, which means you are dead wrong, as is usual for yourself in these historical debates, when you try to make out Bob Lee as an oath breaker.
If you bothered to research your position before taking your position, tokenny, you would know that in the United States Army, an officer like Bob Lee was legally entitled to resign his commission as an officer in the United States Army, so that blows your oath breaker scenario all to hell, does it not?
According to the “This Day in History” site, and tokenny, again we are talking about something that was discussed in 7th or 8th grade American history in high school here, this has never been a secret, Lee opposed secession, but he was a loyal son of Virginia.
His official resignation was only one sentence, but he wrote a longer explanation to his friend and mentor, General Winfield Scott, later that day.
Lee had fought under Scott during the Mexican-American War (1846-48), and he revealed to his former commander the depth of his struggle.
Lee spoke with Scott on April 18, and explained that he would have resigned then “but for the struggle it has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted the best years of my life and all the ability I possess.”
Lee expressed gratitude for the kindness shown him by all in the army during his 25-year service, but Lee was most grateful to Scott.
“To no one, general, have I been as much indebted as to yourself for uniform kindness and consideration…”
He concluded with this poignant sentiment: “Save in the defense of my native State, I never desire again to draw my sword.”
But draw it he would.
Two days later, Lee was appointed commander of Virginia’s forces with the rank of major general.
He spent the next few months raising troops in Virginia, and in July he was sent to western Virginia to advise Confederate commanders struggling to maintain control over the mountainous region.
Lee did little to build his reputation there as the Confederates experienced a series of setbacks, and he returned to Richmond when the Union gained control of the area.
The next year, Lee assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia after General Joseph Johnston was wounded in battle.
Lee quickly turned the tables on Union General George B. McClellan, as he would several other commanders of the Army of the Potomac.
His brilliance as a battlefield tactician earned him a place among the great military leaders of all time.
That is AMERICAN HISTORY as we FREE AMERICANS who do not take our direction in how we view history and the world from a mob of howling, yowling screaming Democrats who beat people who don’t think like them with clubs see it, anyway.
tokenny says
He fought to defend his right to own slaves, not some notable cause. Maybe you should pick up a book and read instead of searching the internet.
And just to put you straight it was a stalement against McClellan. Lee withdrew. His tactics at Gettysburg and his management of resources caused him to lose the battle.
Maybe you should revisit your history lessons but then again your history lessons found nothing wrong with segregation.
Paul Plante says
tokenny, you are so full of BULL****, it isn’t funny.
SEGREGATION IS OVER!
Do you comprehend that?
And slavery is over?
Why are you unable to understand that?
WHY DO YOU LIVE IN THE PAST AND CONTINUOUSLY DREDGE UP **** FROM HUNDREDS OF YEARS AGO TO CRY OVER?
WHY DO YOU CELEBRATE SLAVERY, tokenny?
And you sound like a pure A-HOLE climbing on my back because I won’t stand up in here to denounce something that ended before I was born.
I don’t live in the past like you, tokenny.
I DO NOT OBSESS ABOUT SEGRGATION!
And unlike you, I don’t treat the black folks like they were ignorant children who just got emancipated and need your paternalism to guide them along.
No black person alive today has been a slave, tokenny!
No white person alive today has been a slave owner.
Will you never come to understand that the past is over, tokenny?
Paul Plante says
The mind is free; it may be convinced by reasoning, but cannot be compelled by laws or constitutions, no, nor by fire, faggot, or the halter.
– “Elihu” Essay
February 18, 1788
Paul Plante says
Who found nothing wrong with segregation and everything right, tokenny, was a BLACK MAN named The Right Honourable Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr., founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL, commonly known as UNIA), through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa who envisioned a unified Africa as a one-party state, governed by himself, that would enact laws to ensure black racial purity, and who collaborated with white racists such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to advance their shared interest in racial separatism.
So get off my back, tokenny, with your “segregation is okay” BULL**** and climb on his.
And while you’re at, get those ******* statues of DEMOCRAT Woodrow Wilson torn down so we no longer have to look at them and see a real symbol of “segregation is good” in America, and while you are on your high horse here, how come you have been giving Woodrow Wilson a pass?
And while we are on the subject of high horses, I personally think the elegant solution here, since the statue of Bob Lee already exists, would be to simply clip off the head of Bob Lee from the statue and replace it with the head of Al Sharpton!
Think of it, tokenny – Al Sharpton up there on his high horse looking down on all us racist white folks instead of Bob Lee!
Wouldn’t that make you feel good about yourself, tokenny, seeing one of your heroes up there instead of some dead Confederate?
Paul Plante says
People are starting to call you “THE SNIFFER,” tokenny, for your relentless campaign to sniff out those of us in here you consider to be racists who have to go through the re-education programs in special camps the DEMOCRATS are going to set up to cure white people of implicit bias.
And I am one of your first victims, being insufficiently vocal and angry about slavery and segregation before I was born.
Paul Plante says
Speaking of American history and segregation that I am not in any way, shape or manner responsible for, since I was not yet alive, although that will not deter tokenny from assailing me for not having denounced Senator Hayne for making this racist speech, we have:
Speech of Mr. Hayne, of South Carolina January 25, 1830
The honorable gentleman from Massachusetts has gone out of his way to pass a high eulogium on the State of Ohio.
In the most impassioned tones of eloquence, he described her majestic march to greatness.
He told us that, having already left all the other States far behind, she was now passing by Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and about to take her station by the side of New York.
To all this, sir, I was disposed most cordially to respond.
When, however, the gentleman proceeded to contrast the State of Ohio with Kentucky, to the disadvantage of the latter, I listened to him with regret; and when he proceeded further to attribute the great, and, as he supposed, acknowledged superiority of the former in population, wealth, and general prosperity, to the policy of Nathan Dane, of Massachusetts, which had secured to the people of Ohio (by the ordinance of ’ 87) a population of freemen, I will confess that my feelings suffered a revulsion, which I am now unable to describe in any language sufficiently respectful towards the gentleman from Massachusetts.
In contrasting the State of Ohio with Kentucky, for the purpose of pointing out the superiority of the former, and of attributing that superiority to the existence of slavery, in the one State, and its absence in the other, I thought I could discern the very spirit of the Missouri question intruded into this debate, for objects best known to the gentleman himself.
Did that gentleman, sir, when he formed the determination to cross the southern border, in order to invade the State of South Carolina, deem it prudent, or necessary, to enlist under his banners the prejudices of the world, which like Swiss troops, may be engaged in any cause, and are prepared to serve under any leader?
Did he desire to avail himself of those remorseless allies, the passions of mankind, of which it may be more truly said, than of the savage tribes of the wilderness, “that their known rule of warfare is an indiscriminate slaughter of all ages, sexes, and conditions?”
Or was it supposed, sir, that, in a premeditated and unprovoked attack upon the South, it was advisable to begin by a gentle admonition of our supposed weakness, in order to prevent us from making that firm and manly resistance, due to our own character, and our dearest interest?
Was the significant hint of the weakness of slave-holding States, when contrasted with the superior strength of free States — like the glare of the weapon half drawn from its scabbard — intended to enforce the lessons of prudence and of patriotism, which the gentleman had resolved, out of his abundant generosity, gratuitously to bestow upon us [said Mr. H.]
The impression which has gone abroad, of the weakness of the South, as connected with the slave question, exposes us to such constant attacks, has done us so much injury, and is calculated to produce such infinite mischiefs, that I embrace the occasion presented by the remarks of the gentleman from Massachusetts, to declare that we are ready to meet the question promptly and fearlessly.
It is one from which we are not disposed to shrink, in whatever form or under whatever circumstances it may be pressed upon us.
We are ready to make up the issue with the gentleman, as to the influence of slavery on individual and national character — on the prosperity and greatness, either of the United States, or of particular States.
Sir, when arraigned before the bar of public opinion, on this charge of slavery, we can stand up with conscious rectitude, plead not guilty, and put ourselves upon God and our country.
Sir, we will not stop to inquire whether the black man, as some philosophers have contended, is of an inferior race, nor whether his color and condition are the effects of a curse inflicted for the offences of his ancestors.
We deal in no abstractions.
We will not look back to inquire whether our fathers were guiltless in introducing slaves into this country.
If an inquiry should ever be instituted in these matters, however, it will be found that the profits of the slave trade were not confined to the South.
Southern ships and Southern sailors were not the instruments of bringing slaves to the shores of America, nor did our merchants reap the profits of that “accursed traffic.”
But, sir, we will pass over all this.
If slavery, as it now exists in this country, be an evil, we of the present day found it ready made to our hands.
Finding our lot cast among a people, whom God had manifestly committed to our care, we did not sit down to speculate on abstract questions of theoretical liberty.
We met it as a practical question of obligation and duty.
We resolved to make the best of the situation in which Providence had placed us, and to fulfil the high trust which had developed upon us as the owners of slaves, in the only way in which such a trust could be fulfilled, without spreading misery and ruin throughout the land.
We found that we had to deal with a people whose physical, moral, and intellectual habits and character, totally disqualified them from the enjoyment of the blessings of freedom.
We could not send them back to the shores from whence their fathers had been taken; their numbers forbade the thought, even if we did not know that their condition here is infinitely preferable to what it possibly could be among the barren sands and savage tribes of Africa; and it was wholly irreconcileable with all our notions of humanity to tear asunder the tender ties which they had formed among us, to gratify the feelings of a false philanthropy.
What a commentary on the wisdom, justice, and humanity, of the Southern slave owner is presented by the example of certain benevolent associations and charitable individuals elsewhere.
Shedding weak tears over sufferings which had existence only in their own sickly imaginations, these “friends of humanity” set themselves systematically to work to seduce the slaves of the South from their masters.
By means of missionaries and political tracts, the scheme was in a great measure successful.
Thousands of these deluded victims of fanaticism were seduced into the enjoyment of freedom in our Northern cities.
And what has been the consequence?
Go to these cities now, and ask the question.
Visit the dark and narrow lanes, and obscure recesses, which have been assigned by common consent as the abodes of those outcasts of the world — the free people of color.
Sir, there does not exist, on the face of the whole earth, a population so poor, so wretched, so vile, so loathsome, so utterly destitute of all the comforts, conveniences, and decencies of life, as the unfortunate blacks of Philadelphia, and New York, and Boston.
Liberty has been to them the greatest of calamities, the heaviest of curses.
Sir, I have had some opportunities of making comparisons between the condition of the free negroes of the North and the slaves of the South, and the comparison has left not only an indelible impression of the superior advantages of the latter, but has gone far to reconcile me to slavery itself.
Never have I felt so forcibly that touching description, “the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the son of man hath not where to lay his head,” as when I have seen this unhappy race, naked and houseless, almost starving in the streets, and abandoned by all the world.
Sir, I have seen in the neighborhood of one of the most moral, religious, and refined cities of the North, a family of free blacks, driven to the caves of the rock, and there obtaining a precarious subsistence from charity and plunder.
MJM says
I’m an ex yankee. I’ve been here over 20 years. I have no loyalty to Robert E. Lee. I believe that Americans should live a life of honor. He attended West Point I believe with the full intention of becoming a well trained leader and warrior and to be ready to defend the growing nation of The United States. Before he declared his loyalty to The United States Army he had declared his loyalty to his family and to Virginia. When The United States rewrote the laws and decided to send their army into deadly conflict with Virginia, Robert E. Lee honorably renounced his commission in The U.S. Army and chose to defend his beloved Virginia. His passion and genius displayed in that defense created one heck of a problem for the U.S. Army. Mr. Lee did not create the moral conflict, but he honorably followed his beliefs with his decision. I do not like what he believed he had to do, or how good he was at it. But I believe his demonstration of what an American is supposed to be, is a great story of life that we should all thoroughly know.
Light-Horse Harry Lee says
‘I do not like what he believed he had to do, or how good he was at it.’
Bless your heart, We dont give a damn what you like or dislike .
MJM says
I see Light Horse. You just loved the war between the states. You just loved all those men being killed, all the animals destroyed, the farms burned, the families destroyed, the country being set back decades. and for us to end up almost right back where we started, trying to get along. Well I don’t Bless Your Heart right back.
As far as “we”………yeah I know. You speak for everyone.
tokenny says
You need to read a book on Lee, because it’s quite embarrassing what you have stated.
MJM says
I see tokenny. I should be embarrassed. You are my intellectual and moral compass. If you don’t mind too much I will just continue to disagree with you w/o telling you how or what you should be. I had a Dad thanks. I will not confuse you two. Trust me. HAPPY FATHERS DAY !!!
Light-Horse Harry Lee says
FELLOW CITIZENS,—
A people carves its own image in the monuments of its great men. Not Virginians only, not only those who dwell in the fair land stretching from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, but all who bear the American name may proudly consent that posterity shall judge them by the structure, which we are here to dedicate and crown with a heroic figure. For, as the Latin poet said that, wherever the Roman name and sway extended, there should be the sepulchre of Pompey, so to-day, in every part of America, the character and fame of Robert Edward Lee are treasured as a “possession for all time.”
And, if this be true of that great name, what shall be said of the circumstances which surround us on this day of solemn commemoration?
That at the end of the first quarter of a century after the close of a stupendous civil war, in which more than a million men struggled for the mastery during four years of fierce and bloody conflict, we should see the Southern States in complete possession of their local self-government, the Federal Constitution unchanged save as respects the great issues submitted to the arbitrament of war, and the defeated party—whilst in full and patriotic sympathy with all the present grandeur and imperial promise of a reunited country—still not held to renounce any glorious memory, but free to heap honors upon their trusted leaders, living or dead—all this reveals a character in which the American people may well be content to be handed down to history.
All this, and more, will be the testimony of the solid fabric we here complete. It will recall the generous initiative and the unflagging zeal of those noble women of the South to whom in large measure we owe this auspicious day; it will bear its lasting witness as the voluntary offering of the people, not the governments of the Southern States; and, standing as a perpetual memorial of our great leader, it will stand not less as an enduring record of what his fellow-citizens deemed most worthy to be honored.
What kind of greatness, then—it may be fitting on this spot to ask—what kind of greatness should men most honor in their fellow-men? Vast and varied is the circle of human excellence—where is our paramount allegiance due?
In that “temple of silence and reconciliation,” that Westminster Abbey of Florence, whither so many paths of glory led, you may read one answer to this question on the cenotaph of Dante in the inscription: “Honor the sublime poet.” These words the mediæval poet himself applied to his great master, Virgil. After near six centuries they still touch some of the deepest feelings of the heart. And with them come crowding on the mind memories of a long line of poets, artists, historians, orators, thinkers who have sounded all the depths of speculation, princes of science who have advanced the frontiers of ordered knowledge, of the least of whom it may be said—as Newton’s gravestone records of the greatest—that he was an honor to the race of men. Yes, if our life were only thought and emotion, if will and action and courage did not make up its greatest part, men might justly reverence the genius of poets and thinkers above all other greatness. But strong and natural as is the inclination of those given up to the intellectual life thus to exalt the triumphs of the imagination and the reason, such is not the impulse of the great heart of the multitude. And the multitude is right. In a large and true sense conduct is more than intellect, more than art or eloquence—to have done great things is nobler than to have thought or expressed them.
Thus, in every land, the most conspicuous monuments commemorate the great actors, not the great thinkers of the world’s history; and among these men of action, the great soldier has always secured the first place in the affections of his countrymen. What means this universal outburst of the love and admiration of our race for men who have been foremost in war? Is the common sense of mankind blinded by the blaze of military glory? Or does some deep instinct teach us that the character of the ideal commander is the grandest manifestation in which man can show himself to man? The power and the fascination of this ideal are attested by the indulgent admiration we bestow on men who, on the one side, grandly fill it out, while, on the other, falling grievously below it, weighed down by something base and earthly. Thus, standing before that marvellous monument in Berlin from which Frederick “in his habit as he lived” looks down in homely greeting to his Prussian people, and seems still to warn them that the art which won empire can alone maintain it, we forget the selfish ambition, the petty foibles, the chilling life—we remember only the valor, the consummate skill, the superhuman constancy of the hero-king. Or if, turning from a career so crowned with final triumph, we recall how, for lack of a like commander, France in our own day has been trampled under foot, we may conceive the devotion with which Frenchmen still crowd about the tomb of Napoleon—a name that, in spite of all its lurid associations, in spite of all the humiliations of the Second Empire, has still had power to lift the French nation, during these latter years, from abasement and despair.
Surely there must be something superhuman in the genius of a great commander, if it can make us forgetful of the woes and crimes so often attending it. How freely, then, may we lavish our admiration and gratitude, when no allowance has to be made for human weakness, when we find military greatness allied with the noblest public and private virtue! Here, at last, in this ideal union is that rare greatness which men may most honor in their fellow-men.
It is the singular felicity of this Commonwealth of Virginia to have produced two such stainless captains. The fame of the one, consecrated by a century of universal reverence and the growth of a colossal empire, the result of his heroic labors, has been commemorated in this city by a monument, in whose majestic presence no man ever received the suggestion of a thought that did not exalt humanity. The fame of the other, not yet a generation old and won in a cause that was lost, is already established by that impartial judgment of foreign nations, which anticipates the verdict of the next age, upon an equal pinnacle, and millions of our countrymen, present here with us in their thoughts and echoing back from city and plain and mountain top the deep and reverent voice of this vast multitude, will this day confirm our solemn declaration that the monument to George Washington has found its only fitting complement and companion in a monument to Robert Lee.
I ventured to say that, if we take account of human nature in all its complexity, the character of the ideal commander is the grandest manifestation in which man can show himself to man. Consider some of the necessary elements of this great character. And let us begin with its humbler virtues, its more lowly labors. If we take the commander merely on his administrative side, what treasures of energy, forecast, and watchfulness do we not see him expending in the prosaic work of providing the means of subsistence for his army! He is always confronted on a vast scale with man’s elemental and primitive want—his daily bread. The matter is so vital that he can never commit it entirely to the staff. The control of the whole subject must be ever in his own grasp.
Then, he must have not only an intimate knowledge of the geography and resources of the theatre of war as maps and books give them, but an instinct for topography and an unerring faculty for finding the way by night or day through forest and field, usually to be met with only in men who pass their whole lives in the open air. To this add a complete acquaintance with all parts of army work and organization—a very genius for detail, an artillerist’s eye for distance, and an engineer’s judgment and inventiveness, with a wide and critical comprehension of all the great campaigns of history. But he must possess a still higher knowledge. He must know human nature, he must be wise in his judgment and selection of his own agents, and especially must he, be skilled to read his adversary’s mind and character. Upon this varied and profound knowledge will depend the success of those large plans embracing the whole theatre of war which soldiers call strategy.
Now, combine all these elements, conceive of them as expanded into genius, and you may form some idea of the merely intellectual equipment of a great commander. But he might have all this and be fit only to be a chief of staff.
The business of war is with men; the business of a general is to lead men in that most wonderful of human organizations, an army—on that dread arena, the field of battle And now come into play the qualities of heart and soul. Consecrated to his high office, a general ought to be morally the best, the most just, the most generous, the most patriotic man among his countrymen. He must not only be their greatest leader—he must know how to make every man in his army believe him to be their greatest leader. And mere belief is not enough. There must be in him a power to call forth an enthusiastic and passionate devotion. Of all careers a military life makes the heaviest demand on the self-effacement and self-sacrifice of those who are to follow and obey. Love and enthusiasm for a leader are the only forces powerful enough to raise men to this heroic pitch. Without them an army is a mob, or at most a spiritless machine. With them it becomes capable of the sublimest exhibitions of valor and devotion.
But, essential as is this magnetic power in the leader to draw all hearts, to quiet jealousies, to compel obedience, and to fuse the thoughts and passions of thousands of individual men into a single mass of martial ardor, all these gifts may be present and the true commander absent. Politicians have had these gifts, soldiers even have had these gifts, and utterly failed in the command of armies. To all these rich endowments there must be added an imperturbable moral courage equal to any burden or buffet of fortune, and physical intrepidity in its highest and grandest forms—not only the valor which carries a division commander under orders with overmastering rush to some desperate assault, like Cleburne’s at Franklin, or makes him stand immovable as a stone wall, as Bee saw Jackson at Manassas, but an aggressive and unresting ardor to fall on the enemy, like that which burned in Nelson, when he wrote: “I will fight them the moment I can reach their fleet, be they at anchor or under sail—I will not lose one moment in fighting the French fleet—I mean to follow them if they go to the Black Sea—not a moment shall be lost in pursuing the enemy. * * * I will not lose a moment in bringing them to action.”
With this fierce passion for fight, the general must unite the self-control, which will refuse battle or calmly await attack, and, not least, the fortitude which can endure defeat. For weeks and months he must be ready at any moment of the day or night to draw on these vast resources without ever showing weakness under the protracted strain. And over and above all there must preside some God-like power, which, in the crisis of strategy or the storm of battle, not only preserves to the commander all these high faculties, but actually intensifies and expands them. In those irrevocable moments, when the decision of an instant may determine the destiny of States, mere talents must spring into genius, and mind and outward eye send flashes of intuition through the smoke of battle and the dark curtain on which the enemy’s movements are to be read only in fitful shadows. In that hour of doom, a nation’s fate, a people’s ransom may be staked on one man’s greatness of soul.
It is the recognition in Lee of the principal elements of this high ideal—courage, will, energy, insight, authority—the organizing mind with its eagle glance, and the temperament for command broad-based upon fortitude, hopefulness, joy in battle—all exalted by heroic purpose and kindled with the glow of an unconquerable soul; it is, besides and above all, the unique combination in him of moral strength with moral beauty, of all that is great in heroic action with all that is good in common life, that will make of this pile of stone a sacred shrine, dear throughout coming ages, not to soldiers only, but to all
Helpers and friends of mankind.
Let a brief recital show that these are words of truth and soberness.
Lee was fortunate in his birth, for he sprang from a race of men who had just shown, in a world-famous struggle, all of the virtues and few of the faults of a class selected to rule because fittest to rule. His father had won a brilliant fame as a cavalry leader, and the signal honor of the warm friendship of Washington. The death of “Light-Horse” Harry Lee when Robert Lee was only eleven years old made the boy the protector of his mother—a school of virtue not unfitted to develop a character that nature had formed for honor. It was partly, no doubt, the example of his father’s brilliant service, but mainly the soldier’s blood which flowed in his veins, that impelled him to seek a place in the Military Academy at West Point. He was presented to President Jackson, and we may well believe the story that the old soldier was quickly won by the gallant youth, and willingly secured him to the army. I cannot dwell on his proficiency in the military school, or his early years of useful service in the corps of engineers, though, doubtless, those practical labors had an important influence upon the future leader of that Army of Northern Virginia, so famous for its
—looming bastions fringed with fire—
the creation of the axe and spade.
One auspicious incident of that time I must not pass by—his marriage to the great-granddaughter of Washington’s wife. Thus another tie was formed which connected him by daily associations of family and place with Washington’s fame and character. He became, in some sort, Washington’s direct personal representative. Is it fanciful to suppose that all this had an immediate effect on his nature, so moulded already to match with whatever was great and noble? It may well be believed that Lee made Washington his model of public duty, and, in every important conjuncture of his life, unconsciously, no doubt, but effectively asked himself the question: “How would Washington have acted in this case?”
The greater elements of Lee’s character must appear in the story of his later life. Let me try now to give some conception of his noble person, his grace, his social charm, his pure life—of that inborn dignity which with a look could check familiarity or convey rebuke, of that manly beauty and commanding presence, fitted alike to win child or maiden and to awaken in the sternest soldier an expectation and assurance of preeminence and distinction. It was this which drew from a great master of the art of war, whom a beneficent Providence still spares to be a model of every manly and martial virtue to the sons of the youngest soldiers who followed his unstained banner, it was the recollection of the fascination of Lee’s manner and person in the days of their early service that drew from General Joseph E. Johnston these words of vivid and loving description: “No other youth or man so united the qualities that win warm friendship and command high respect. For he was full of sympathy and kindness, genial and fond of gay conversation and even of fun * * * while his correctness of demeanor and language and attention to all duties, personal and official, and a dignity as much a part of himself as the elegance of his person, gave him a superiority that every one acknowledged in his heart.”
It was this which made Lord Wolseley say of him as he saw him in later years: “I have met many of the great men of my time, but Lee alone impressed me with the feeling that I was in the presence of a man who was cast in a grander mould, and made of different and finer metal than all other men. He is stamped upon my memory as a being apart and superior to all others in every way.”
Thus endowed to command the love and respect of every human being that came into his presence, fully equipped in every military art, temperate, pure, healthful, brave, consciously following duty as his pole star, and all unconsciously burning with ardor to win a soldier’s fame, he entered upon that war with Mexico, which was destined to prove a training-ground for the chief leaders in the conflict between the States. There he soon gave proof of great qualities for war.
But I may stay only to mention one incident in which he displayed such rare force of will, such aggressive and untiring enterprise as at once marked him out for high command. It was just before the battle of Contreras. Scott had learned through Lee’s reconnoissance that the Mexican position could be attacked in rear by a difficult movement across a pathless and rugged volcanic field called the “Pedregal.” A painful march had brought the turning division at nightfall to the decisive point, and Lee was called into council by the division commander. The council sat long. At last, about nine at night, it resolved on Lee’s advice upon an attack at dawn. But it was essential that communication should be established with Scott’s headquarters. Lee declared his purpose to effect this communication, and through the stormy night, alone and on foot, with enemies on either hand, he pushed his way across that volcanic waste, comparable only in the difficulties it presented to some Alpine glacier rent with yawning chasms. He won his way to Scott by midnight. At daybreak as engineer he guided the front attack led by Twiggs. The turning column heard their comrades’ guns. They fell on the Mexican rear. A brief and bloody resistance served only to heighten the triumph of American skill and valor. The position was won, and Contreras, to the eye of history, prefigures Chancellorsville.
General Scott described this exploit of Lee’s as “the greatest feat of physical and moral courage performed by any individual, in his knowledge, pending the campaign.” History will record, as Scott himself nobly admitted, that Lee was Scott’s right arm in Mexico.
I may not dwell on the round of engineering duties which Lee discharged with exactness and fidelity during the years following the Mexican war. Of more interest is his first actual command of troops, on his appointment as lieutenant-colonel of the famous Second cavalry serving in Texas. This frontier service of three or four years was important in developing his military character, though it may seem an inadequate preparation in the details of command when compared, for instance, with Wellington’s long apprenticeship in India. But genius has many schools, and an earnest, observant mind quickly grasps the lessons of practice.
A dark cloud of war was now threatening to burst over a hitherto peaceful country. The routine of frontier administration and Indian police must have seemed but idle child’s play amid the fierce passions of that rising tempest of civil strife. No man who could think could think of anything but the impending danger. And Lee, the son of a leader of the Revolution, closely linked by descent and association with the men who won American independence and made the American Constitution, Lee, inheriting along with the most ardent love of the Union, a paramount loyalty to his native State, now saw himself obliged to make his choice and take his side in an irrepressible conflict. No more painful struggle ever tore the heart of a patriot. He had served the whole country in a gallant army, which commanded all his affection. He, better than most men, knew the great resources of the North and West. He had sojourned and labored in every part of the land, and could appreciate the arguments drawn from its physical characteristics, from its great river systems and mountain ranges for an indissoluble union. He knew Northern men in their homes; he knew the bravery of the Northern soldiers who filled our regular regiments in Mexico. He was above the prejudices and taunts of the day, which belittled Northern virtue and courage. He knew that, with slight external differences, there was a substantial identity of the American race in all the States, North and South. He was equally above the weak and passionate view of slavery as good in itself, into which the fanatical and unconstitutional agitation of the Abolition party had driven many strong minds in the South. He regarded slavery as an evil which the South had inherited and must be left to mitigate and, if possible, extirpate by wise and gradual measures. He, if any man of that time, was capable of weighing with calmness the duty of the hour. With him, the only question then, as at every moment of his spotless life, was to find out which way duty pointed.
Against the urgent solicitations of General Scott, in defiance of the temptations of ambition—for the evidence is complete that the command of the United States army was offered to him—in manifest sacrifice of all his pecuniary interests, he determined that duty bade him side with his beloved Virginia. He laid down his commission, and solemnly declared his purpose never to draw his sword save in behalf of his native State.
And what was that native State to whose defence he henceforth devoted his matchless sword?
It was a Commonwealth older than the Union of the States; it was the first abode of English freedom in the Western World; it was the scene of the earliest organized legislative resistance to the encroachments of the mother country; it was the birthplace of the immortal leader of our Revolutionary armies, and of many of the architects of the Federal Constitution; it was the central seat of that doctrine of State sovereignty sanctioned by the great names of Jefferson and Madison; it was a land rich in every gift of the earth and sky—richer still in its race of men, brave, frugal, pious, loving honor, but fearing God; it was a land hallowed then by memories of an almost unbroken series of patriotic triumphs, but now, after the wreck and ruin of four years of unsuccessful war, consecrated anew by deeds of heroism and devotion, whose increasing lustre will borrow a brighter radiance from their sombre background of suffering and defeat. And this day and on this spot, with heightened pride and undiminished love, the sons of that Old Dominion may still salute her in the patriot Roman’s verse—
Salve magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus, Magna virum.
This was the land that Lee defended.
Accepting the commission of major-general of the forces of Virginia, he soon passed by the necessary and rapid sway of events into the service of the Confederate States. Virginia had become the battleground on which the Confederacy was to win or lose its independence, and Lee could only defend Virginia as a general of the Confederate army.
During the early months of the war he labored unceasingly and with success in the organization of those armies, which stemmed and dashed back the first flood of invasion. Here his patience, his careful and minute attention to details, his knowledge of men, and particularly of those officers of the old army who espoused the Southern cause, his thorough military preparation, and, more than all else, his conviction that the war would be long and desperate, made him an invaluable counsellor of the Confederate Executive. His co-operation with the more fortunate generals, chosen to lead armies in the field, was zealous and cordial, and he did not murmur when at last, in August, 1861, his turn for active service came in what promised to be a thankless and inauspicious duty.
The Confederate arms had been unfortunate in Northwestern Virginia. Garnett had been overwhelmed and defeated. Loring, with large reinforcements, had not pressed forward to snatch the lost ground from an enemy weakened by great detachments. So Lee was sent to Valley Mountain to combine all the elements of our strength, and by a stroke of daring recover West Virginia. The Confederate President was convinced that he was the leader for such a campaign—the opinion of the army and of the people enthusiastically confirmed his choice.
Lee quickly mastered the problem before him by personal reconnoissances, and laid his plans with skill and vigor. But the attack on Cheat Mountain, which a year later would have been a brilliant success, ended in failure and mortification. Lee was able to show to the public but one of the high qualities of a great general—magnanimity under disappointment and defeat. His old comrades of the Mexican war knew him; the Confederate President knew him and still believed in him; but the verdict of the general public on Robert Lee in the winter of 1861–62 might have been summed up in the historian’s judgment of Galba, who “by common consent would have been deemed fit to command, had he never commanded.”
In such a school of patience and self-control was our great leader destined to pass the first fourteen months of the war.
The first day of “Seven Pines” had been fought, the fierce temper and stern valor of the Army of Northern Virginia had been established, a brilliant success had been won on our right by Longstreet and D. H. Hill, and General Johnston, about nightfall, was arranging a vigorous and combined attack for the morrow. At that moment, Johnston, whose body was already covered with honorable scars, was stricken down by two severe wounds, and the army was deprived of its leader.
On the afternoon of the next day, about five miles below Richmond, Lee assumed command of that army called of Northern Virginia, but fitly representing the valor and the virtue of every Southern State, that army which henceforth was to be the inseparable partner of his fame, that army whose heroic toils, marches, battles would still, if every friendly record perished, be emblazoned for the admiration of future ages in its adversary’s recital of the blood and treasure expended to destroy it. So we are able now to measure Hannibal’s greatness only by the magnitude of Rome’s sacrifices and devotion.
At any period of the war the loss of Richmond would probably have been fatal to the Confederacy. This truth is the key to the campaigns of the Army of Northern Virginia. It will explain and justify in Lee’s conduct many apparent violations of sound principles of war. Ordinarily, nothing is more fatal than to make the fortunes of an army turn on the defence of a position. This was Pemberton’s error at Vicksburg—it was Osman’s at Plevna. But the political importance of Richmond as the capital of a great State and of the Confederacy, its real strategic advantages as the nucleus of a railway system and other communications, embracing Virginia and the States to the South and West, and still more, the startling fact that its manufacturing establishments, though poor and inadequate, were at first absolutely, and always practically, the sole resource of the South for artillery and railway material—these considerations, in their combined strength, brought about, in the minds of those directing the Confederate government, a conviction of the indispensable necessity of Richmond to the life of the Southern cause.
Washington talked of retreating, in the last resort, to the mountains of West Augusta, and there maintaining an undying resistance to the British invaders. It is possible that such a guerilla warfare might have succeeded a hundred years ago against an enemy coming across the Atlantic, before the use of steam on sea and river and railway, and before even turnpikes connected the coast with the mountains. It is-possible. But the probability is that, as in other contests, the end of organized regular warfare would have been the virtual end of the struggle. How much more must this have been the case in our recent war, when military armaments had already become complex and artificial! Modern armies, with their elaborate small arms, artillery, and ammunition, cannot be maintained without great mechanical appliances. They cannot even be fed without great lines of railway. And how can railways be utilized in a country closely blockaded without these same manufacturing resources?
All this was true from 1861 to 1865. At no time during that period did there exist, south of Richmond, foundries and rolling-mills, capable, in a year’s work, of supplying the Confederate armies and railways for three months. In the first part of the war, the nucleus of such establishments could not be found elsewhere in the South. In the latter part, beginnings had been made, but the new production of cannon and railway material never became adequate to the demands of a campaign. If the requisite machinery could have been improvised, the product could not have been hastily increased, because of the absolute lack of skilled workmen. The loss of the skilled artisans of Richmond would have been as fatal, in our poverty, as the loss of its mills and workshops.
The defence of Richmond, then, was the superhuman task to which Lee now found himself committed by the policy of the Confederate Government, and by the pressure of conditions, independent of his will or control.
How precious for us Virginians is this intimate association of his immortal labors with this city of our affections—for more than a century the centre of our State life, for four years of heroic struggle the inviolate citadel of a people in arms! The familiar objects about us are memorials of him; the streets which his feet have trodden, the church where he worshipped, the modest dwelling which sheltered those nearest his heart, the heights overlooking river and land which make up the military topography he had so deeply studied, and the graves of that silent army by which our city is still begirt. You can hardly prolong your evening walk without coming upon fields, once like any others, but now touched with that mysterious meaning which speaks from every spot where for home and kindred men have fought and died.
Thus, at the critical moment when a trifling advance of McClellan’s forces would have begun a siege of Richmond, Lee took command of the army marshalled for its defence. His first step was to overrule opinions tending to a retirement of our line. His next was to fortify that line, and to summon to his aid, for a great aggressive effort, all the forces that could be spared in Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas. In his comprehensive plan for the great day of battle now at hand was embraced that small but heroic band with which Jackson had just defeated three armies, filled the Federal capital with alarm, and diverted from McClellan McDowell’s powerful reinforcement.
The secrecy in which Lee knew how to wrap this movement was itself a presage of generalship. He not only concealed Jackson’s rapid march, so that Shields and McDowell should not follow on his heels, but, by an actual movement by rail of Whiting’s division to Charlottesville, he made McClellan believe that he was sending a strong detachment to the Valley. Then, with an army still inferior to its adversary by at least one-fourth, he burst upon McClellan’s right wing. By Lee’s wise and bold combinations, the weaker army showed, at the point of attack, double the strength of the stronger. The Federal general saw his communications snatched from his control, his right wing, after an obstinate and bloody conflict, broken and put to flight, his whole army turning its back upon the goal of the campaign, and fighting now, as men fight on issues of life and death—not for Richmond—but for safety and a refuge-place under the guns of the fleet.
I need not recall the valor, the sacrifices, the chequered fortunes, or the visible trophies of those seven days of heroic struggle. Whatever criticism may be passed upon the details of the several actions, the broad fact remains that, as their direct result, that moral ascendency, which is the real genius of victory, forsook the Federal and passed over to the Confederate camp. And Lee rose up, in the minds of friend and foe, to the full stature of a great and daring leader.
An act of vigor quickly showed how correctly he estimated the staggering effect of the mighty blow he had dealt. He hurried Jackson to Gordonsville to meet Pope’s threatening force, and soon he dispatched A. P. Hill’s division on the same service. Jackson’s fierce attack on Banks at Cedar Mountain at once caused new alarm for Washington. A rapid weakening of McClellan’s force was the result. Reading this with that intuitive perception of what is passing behind the enemy’s lines, which henceforth marks him as fit to command, Lee recognizes that the initiative is now in his hands, and presently moves with nearly his whole army to the line of the Rapidan. His design is by celerity and vigor to counterbalance the enormous preponderance of his enemies. He means to fall upon Pope before McClellan’s army can join him. You know the splendid boldness of Jackson’s immortal march to Pope’s rear, which Lee approved and ordered. You know how, after prodigies of rapid movement, obstinate fighting, and intrepid guidance, the Army of Northern Virginia stood once more united on the plains of Manassas, and there baffled and crushed an adversary its superior by one-half in numbers. Again the Federal army turned its back upon the goal of the campaign, again the Federal army bent its march—not to its commander’s, but to Lee’s imperious will. The invasion of Maryland, the capture of Harper’s Ferry attested it, and Lee’s victorious sweep was only checked by one of those unlucky accidents inseparable from war. His order for the combined movements of his troops fell into McClellan’s hands when the ink upon it was scarcely dry
This precipitated the great battle of Sharpsburg.
On that sanguinary field 40,000 Confederates finally repulsed every attack of an army of 87,000 Federal soldiers. On the day following the battle they grimly stood in their long, thin lines, inviting the assault which, as history will record, was not delivered.
If ever commander was tried by overwhelming and continuous peril, and rose superior to it, and triumphed by sheer moral power over force and fortune, Lee on those two fateful days gave that supreme proof of a greatness of soul as much above depression under reverses as elation in success. In such moments the army feel the lofty genius of their leader. They acknowledge his royal right to command. They recognize their proud privilege to follow and obey. To such leaders only is it given to form heroic soldiers. Such were the ragged, half-starved men in gray who stood with Lee at Sharpsburg.
It is a vision of some such moment, perhaps, that our sculptor, Mercié, has caught with the eye of genius, and fixed in imperishable bronze. The General has ridden up, it seems to me, in some pause of battle, to the swelling crest of the front line, and, while the eyes of his soldiers are fastened on him in keen expectancy, but unwavering trust, the great leader—silent and alone with his dread responsibility—is scanning, with calm and penetrating glance, the shifting phases and chances of the stricken field. Such is the commanding figure which will presently be unveiled to your view, and dull, indeed, must be the imagination that does not henceforth people this plain with invisible hosts, and compass Lee about—now and forever—with the love and devotion of embattled ranks of heroic men in gray.
But the campaign of 1862 was yet to close in a dramatic scene of unequalled grandeur.
As in some colossal amphitheatre, Lee’s soldiers stood ranked on the bold hills encircling Fredericksburg to witness the deployment on the plain beneath, with glittering bayonets and banners and every martial pomp, of Burnside’s splendid army. A gorgeous spectacle was spread out under their feet. It was hard to realize that such a pageant was the prelude to bloody battle. But the roar of a hundred great guns from the Stafford heights quickly dispelled any illusion, and the youngest recruit could see and applaud the marvellous skill with which the Confederate commander, so recently baffled in his plan of invasion, was now interposing a proud and confident army across the latest-discovered road to Richmond. At the opportune moment, Lee’s line of twenty-five miles contracted to five, and 78,000 Confederates calmly awaited the assault of 113,000 Federal soldiers. That assault was delivered. On rushed line after line of undaunted Northern soldiers. Braver men never marched more boldly to the cannon’s mouth. But their valor was unavailing. As Stonewall Jackson said, his men sometimes failed to carry a position, but never to hold one. The most determined courage and a carnage, appalling from its concentration, served only to mark the heroism of the Northern soldier. But the prize of victory remained with Lee. At one blow the Federal invasion was paralyzed, and for months and months the great Northern host lay torpid in the mud and snow of a Virginian winter.
The repose of that winter strengthened the Federal army, but weakened Lee’s, for he had been obliged to detach Longstreet with two divisions to Southeastern Virginia. Hence the last days of April, 1863, found Lee confronting Hooker’s army of 131,000 men with only 57,000 Confederates.
If I mention these respective numbers so often, it is because they constitute the indestructible basis of Lee’s military fame. You will search in vain in history for a parallel to such uniform, excessive, and prolonged disparity in numbers, such amazing inferiority in all the material and appliances of war, crowned by such a succession of brilliant, though dearly-bought victories. If these considerations in themselves establish Lee’s fame, they also vindicate it from the only criticism to which it has been subjected. They justify and explain the comparatively indecisive character of those victories. When the odds are four to five, three to five, three to seven, when every man has fought, and there are no reserves, the victories of the weaker army must of their very nature fail to destroy an adversary of the same proud race, of equal, if of different valor.
The events we now approach present Lee in every phase of the consummate commander. Can you imagine an attitude of grander firmness than that in which we see him on Hooker’s crossing the Rappahannock? There was a letter from him to the Confederate Secretary of War, written at that moment, which showed him in this mood of heroic calm, waiting for the development of the enemy’s purpose, determined to fight, but giving no hint of that tremendous lion-spring at Chancellorsville, which was to pluck out the very heart of the Federal invasion.
The plan of that great battle, as happens with many master-works, was struck out at a single blow, in a brief conference with Jackson, on the evening of the 1st of May.
An eye-witness has depicted the scene—the solemn forest, the rude bivouac, the grave and courteous commander, heir of all the knightly graces of the cavaliers, the silent, stern lieutenant, with the faith and the fire of Cromwell, the brief interchange of question and answer, the swiftly following order for the movement of the morrow.
The facts of the enemy’s position and the surrounding topography had just been ascertained. The genius of the commander, justly weighing the character of his adversary, the nature of the country, and the priceless gift in his own hands of such a thunderbolt of war, such a Titanic force as Jackson, instantly devised that immortal flank march which will emblazon Chancellorsville on the same roll of deathless fame with Blenheim, with Leuthen, with Austerlitz, and Jena.
The battle of Chancellorsville will rank with the model battles of history. It displayed Lee in every character of military greatness. Nothing could exceed the sublime intrepidity with which, leaving Early to dispute the heights of Fredericksburg against Sedgwick’s imposing force, he himself led five weak divisions to confront Hooker’s mighty host Lee meant to fight, but not in the dark. He meant first to look his adversary in the eye. He meant to see himself how to aim his blow. Where shall we find a match for the vigor, the swiftness, the audacity of that flank march assigned to Jackson—for the fierce and determined front attack led by Lee himself? There is nothing equal to it save only Frederick’s immortal stroke of daring on the Austrian flank at Leuthen. But the second day brings out the strongest and grandest lines of the Confederate commander’s heroic character. Jackson has been stricken down, Lee’s right arm has been torn from him; but, the unconquerable firmness of his nature resisting every suggestion of weakness, and that inborn love of fight, without which no general can be great, blazing out and kindling all it touched, he forces on the fierce attack along the whole line till, in a wild tumult of battle, the Federal army wavers, gives ground, melts away. The advance, if pushed, will drive the enemy in confusion to the river. And Lee is preparing for a combined assault. But a new element now bursts into the action. News is brought from ten miles away that the Confederates have been driven from the heights of Fredericksburg towards Richmond, and Sedgwick is marching on Lee’s rear. Lee’s celerity and firmness are equal to the crisis. He promptly hurls four brigades from under his own hand at the head of Sedgwick’s column, and with bold countenance hems in Hooker’s army of nearly thrice his own numbers. If it were not the sternest tragedy, it might be comedy—this feat of thirty thousand men shutting up eighty thousand. But Hooker has been beaten, the decisive point is not there, as the eye of genius can intuitively see. It is with Sedgwick six miles away, and, realizing in his practice the golden maxim of the schools, Lee is quickly at that point in sufficient, if not superior force. Sedgwick is crushed on the third day, and driven across the river. Lee now concentrates all his force to fall upon Hooker with a final and overwhelming blow. The fifth day breaks, and lo! the Federal army has vanished, not a man of them save the dead, the wounded, and the prisoners remaining on the Richmond side of the Rappahannock.
What was left undone by Lee that genius, constancy, and daring could effect? Will any man say that the Confederate army should have followed its defeated, but colossal adversary across the river? This would have been to invite disaster.
The substantial and astounding fruits of victory were won in the collapse for that season of the Federal invasion, in the masterly, initiative which Lee was now able to seize, in the submissive and tell tale docility with which Hooker thenceforth followed every motion of the magic wand of the Confederate commander.
The march to the Potomac, and the captures by the way renewed the glories of 1862. For a few short weeks Virginia was freed from the tramp of armies. But, as before, the invasion, begun with an intoxicating outburst of martial hope, was doomed to end in a drawn and doubtful battle. After a bloody struggle on the heights of Gettysburg, the two armies stood the greater part of two long summer days defiantly looking into each other’s eyes. Neither was willing to attack its adversary. However deeply Lee may have felt the failure of his daring stroke, he took upon himself all the reproach and all the responsibility of the result. No word of criticism or censure passed his lips. But, confident of the devotion and the steadiness of his army, he promptly turned to the duty of the hour. What an example of serenity, of imperturbable firmness! We owe to Gettysburg not only the most thrilling spectacle, of the unsurpassed valor of the Confederate soldier, but a matchless exhibition of composure and magnanimity in the Confederate commander. The aggressive campaign failed, but neither the army nor its general was shaken. We find them during the remainder of 1863 facing their old foe with undiminished spirit. And soon Lee gives proof of equal firmness, enterprise, and generosity in detaching Longstreet’s corps to strike a decisive blow, eight hundred miles away, by the side of Bragg at Chickamauga. The annals of war do not exhibit a more unselfish act.
How shall I briefly describe the added titles to enduring fame with which the campaign of the next year, 1864, invested our great leader? Who that lived through that time can forget the awful hush of those calm spring days, which ushered in the tremendous outburst of the Federal attack along a thousand miles of front?
In every quarter, at one and the same moment, the Confederacy felt the furious impact of a whole nation’s force driven on by the resistless will of a single commander. Grant’s aggressiveness, Grant’s stubbornness, Grant’s unyielding resolve to destroy the Confederate armies, seemed suddenly to animate every corps, every division, almost every man of the Federal host. Even now we stand aghast at the awful disparity in the numbers and resources of the two armies. Swinton puts the force under Grant’s immediate eye on the first day of the campaign at 140,000 men. Grant himself puts it at 116,000. It is certain that Lee had less than 64,000 soldiers of all arms. But, in addition, Grant was directing, against Richmond or its communications 30,000 men under Butler, 17,000 under Sigel and Crook, and a numerous and powerful fleet.
Let me give two examples of the extraordinary means at his disposal. He never went into camp but that, within an hour or two, every division was placed in telegraphic communication with his headquarters. Lee could only reach the several parts of his army by the aid of mounted couriers. But this is the most striking. On four several occasions Grant shifted his base by a simple mandate to Washington to lodge supplies at Fredericksburg, at Port Royal, at the White House, at City Point. Thus, his communications were absolutely invulnerable. With the boundless wealth at his control, he laid under contribution the resources of the commerce and manufactures of the world, and, combining all the agencies of destruction in the vast host under his command, fired now with something of his own smothered, but relentless passion, he hurled it in repeated and bloody assaults at the heart of the Confederacy.
The heart of the Confederacy was the Army of Northern Virginia.
Surely, heroic courage never faced a more tremendous crisis than Lee now met and mastered. Grant had crossed the Rapidan. No idea of retreat entered Lee’s mind. He only waited to discover the purpose of the enemy. Then, with fierce energy, he hurled two corps at the heads of his columns, not even halting for Longstreet to come up.
For two days that awful struggle raged in the dark and gruesome thickets of the Wilderness. Lee could not drive back his stubborn adversary, but he staggered and stunned and foiled him. Any previous commander of the Army of the Potomac would have retreated. Grant sullenly steals off by night to Spotsylvania.
But a lion is there in his path. The road to Richmond is blocked by Lee. Grant’s determination to force a passage brings on one of the fiercest and most protracted struggles of the war. For four days out of twelve that raging fire-flood surges about the lines of Spotsylvania. The very forest is consumed by it. How can man withstand its fury? Only by that courage which in its contempt of death is a presage of immortality. On such a field the human spirit rises even in common men to transcendent heights of valor and self-sacrifice, the great soul of the commander moves through the wild chaos like some elemental force, and the terrible majesty of war veils its horrors.
Grant cannot take those lines. The solitary advantage won at the salient by his overwhelming masses does but display on an immortal page the quick resource, the commanding authority, the unconquerable tenacity of the Confederate General. Grant could not drive him from those lines; but the commander of a greatly superior army can never find it hard to turn his adversary’s position, especially if by means of a fleet and convenient rivers, he can shift his base as easily as write a dispatch. Yet Lee always divined every turning movement, and always placed his army in time across the path of its adversary.
In the succession of bloody battles ending with the slaughter of Cold Harbor, he everywhere won the substantial fruits as well as the honors of victory, and between the Wilderness and the Chickahominy, in twenty-eight days he inflicted on Grant a loss of 60,000 men—an appalling number, equal to the strength of Lee’s own army at the beginning of the campaign.
Try to conceive the intense strain of those twenty-eight days. Jackson is no longer by Lee’s side, Longstreet has been stricken down severely wounded on the first day. Suppose a single moment of hesitation in the commander, a single false interpretation of obscure and conflicting appearances, a failure at any hour of the day or night to maintain in their perfect balance all those high faculties which we see united in Lee, and what would have availed the valor of those matchless Confederate soldiers? Can we wonder that they loved him, can we wonder that, like Scipio’s veterans, they were ready to die for him, if he would only spare himself? Thrice in this campaign did they give him this supreme proof of personal devotion.
Of the siege of Petersburg I have only time to say that in it for nine months the Confederate commander displayed every art by which genius and courage can make good the lack of numbers and resources. But the increasing misfortunes of the Confederate arms on other theatres of war gradually cut off the supply of men and means. The Army of Northern Virginia ceased to be recruited. It ceased to he adequately fed. It lived for months on less than one-third rations. It was demoralized, not by the enemy in its front, but by the enemy in Georgia and the Carolinas. It dwindled to 35,000 men Holding a front of thirty-five miles; but over the enemy it still cast the shadow of its great name. Again and. again, by a bold offensive, it arrested the Federal movement to fasten on its communications. At last, an irresistible concentration of forces broke through its long, thin line of battle. Petersburg had to be abandoned. Richmond was evacuated. Trains bearing supplies were intercepted, and a starving army, harassed for seven days by incessant attacks on rear and flank, found itself completely hemmed in by overwhelming masses. Nothing remained to it but its stainless honor, its unbroken courage.
In those last solemn scenes, when strong men, losing all self-control, broke down and sobbed like children, Lee stood forth as great as in the days of victory and triumph. No disaster crushed his spirit, no extremity of danger ruffled his bearing. In the agony of dissolution now invading that proud army, which for four years had wrested victory from every peril, in that blackness of utter darkness, he preserved the serene lucidity of his mind. He looked the stubborn facts calmly in the face, and, when no military resource remained, when he recognized the impossibility of making another march or fighting another battle, he bowed his head in submission to that Power, which makes and unmakes nations.
The surrender of the fragments of the Army of Northern Virginia closed the imperishable record of his military life.
What a catastrophe! What a moving and pathetic contrast! On the one side, complete and dazzling triumph after a long succession of humiliating disasters; on the other, absolute ruin and defeat—a crown of thorns for that peerless army which hitherto had known only the victor’s laurel! But the magnanimity of the conqueror, not less than the fortitude of the vanquished shone out over the solemn scene, and softened its tragic outlines of fate and doom. The moderation and good sense of the Northern people, breathing the large and generous air of our western world, quickly responded to Grant’s example, and, though the North was afterwards betrayed into fanatical and baleful excess on more than one great subject, all the fiercer passions of a bloody civil war were rapidly extinguished. There was to be no Poland, no Ireland in America. When the Hollywood pyramid was rising over the Confederate dead soon after the close of the contest, some one suggested for the inscription a classic verse, which may be rendered:
They died for their country—their country perished with them.
Thus would have spoken the voice of despair.
Far different were the thoughts of Lee. He had drawn his sword in obedience only to the dictates of duty and honor, and, looking back in that moment of utter defeat, he might have exclaimed with Demosthenes: “I say that, if the event had been manifest to the whole world beforehand, not even then ought Athens to have forsaken this course, if Athens had any regard for her glory, or for her past, or for the ages to come.” But, facing the duty of the hour, Lee saw now that the question submitted to the arbitrament of war had been finally answered. He recognized that the unity of the American people had been irrevocably established. He felt that it would be impiety and crime to dishonor by the petty strife of faction that pure and unselfish struggle for constitutional rights, which, while a single hope remained, had been loyally fought out by great armies, led by heroic captains, and sustained by the patriotic sacrifices of a noble and resolute people. He, therefore, promptly counselled his old soldiers to look upon the great country thus reunited by blood and iron as their own, and to live and labor for its honor and welfare. His own conduct was in accord with these teachings. Day by day his example illustrated what his manly words declared: “that human virtue should be equal to human calamity.”
For five years he was now permitted to exhibit to his countrymen, in the discharge of the duties of president of Washington College, the best qualities of citizen, sage, and patriot. In Plato’s account of the education of a Persian king, four tutors are chosen from among the Persian nobles—one the wisest, another the most just, a third the most temperate, and a fourth the bravest. It was the unique fortune of the students of Washington College to find these four great characters united in one man—their peerless Lee. As the people saw him fulfilling these modest, but noble functions; as they saw him with antique simplicity putting aside every temptation to use his great fame for vulgar gain; as they saw him, in self-respecting contentment with the frugal earnings of his personal labor, refusing every offer of pecuniary assistance; as they realized his unselfish devotion of all that remained of strength and life to the nurture of the Southern youth in knowledge and morals, a new conviction of his wisdom and virtue gathered force and volume, and spread abroad into all lands.
The failure of the righteous cause for which he fought denied him that eminence of civil station, in which his great qualities in their happy mixture might well have afforded a parallel to the strength and the moderation of Washington. But what failure could obscure that moral perfection which places him as easily by the side of the best men that have ever lived, as his heroic actions make him the peer of the greatest? There are men whose influence on mankind neither worldly success nor worldly failure can affect.
The greatest gift the hero leaves his race
Is to have been a hero.
This moral perfection, breathing the very spirit of his Christian faith, is no illusive legend of a succeeding generation exaggerating the worth of the past. Our belief in it rests upon the unanimous testimony of the men who lived and acted with him, among whom nothing is more common than the declaration, that Lee was the purest and best man of action whose career history has recorded. In his whole life, laid bare to the gaze of the world, the least friendly criticism has never discovered one single deviation from the narrow path of rectitude and honor.
What was strained eulogy when Montesquieu said of another great soldier—Turenne—that “his life was a hymn in praise of humanity”—is, if applied to Lee, the language of sober truth. No man can consider his life without a feeling of renewed hope and trust in mankind. There is about his exhibitions of moral excellence the same quality of power in reserve that marks him as a soldier. He never failed to come up to the full requirements of any situation, and his conduct communicated the impression that nothing could arise to which he would be found unequal. His every action went straight to the mark without affectation or display. It cost him no visible effort to be good or great. He was not conscious that he was exceptional in either way, and he died in the belief that, as he had been sometimes unjustly blamed, so he had as often been too highly praised.
Such is the holy simplicity of the noblest minds. Such was the pure and lofty man, in whom we see the perfect union of Christian virtue and old Roman manhood. His goodness makes us love his greatness, and the fascination, which this matchless combination exerts, is itself a symptom and a source in us of moral health. As long as our people truly love and venerate him, there will remain in them a principle of good. For all the stupendous wealth and power, which in the last thirty years have lifted these States to foremost rank among the nations of the earth, are less a subject for pride than this one heroic man—this human product of our country and its institutions.
Let this monument, then, teach to generations yet unborn these lessons of his life! Let it stand, not as a record of civil strife, but as a perpetual protest against whatever is low and sordid in our public and private objects! Let it stand as a memorial of personal honor that never brooked a stain, of knightly valor without thought of self, of far-reaching military genius unsoiled by ambition, of heroic constancy from which no cloud of misfortune could ever hide the path of duty! Let it stand for reproof and censure, if our people shall ever sink below the standards of their fathers! Let it stand for patriotic hope and cheer, if a day of national gloom and disaster shall ever dawn upon our country! Let it stand as the embodiment of a brave and virtuous people’s ideal leader! Let it stand as a great public act of thanksgiving and praise, for that it pleased Almighty God to bestow upon these Southern States a man so formed to reflect His attributes of power, majesty, and goodness!
tokenny says
Beautiful example of copywrite infraction.
Light Horse Henry Lee says
What are you going to do about it?
Marse Lee says
Just what, pray tell, are you going to do about it?
tokenny says
i don’t have to worry about it Wayne needs to worry about it
Paul Plante says
tokenny, dude, what exactly is it that Wayne needs to worry about?
That is the text of AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE Dedication of the Monument To GENERAL ROBERT EDWARD LEE AT RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, MAY 29, 1890, BY ARCHER ANDERSON.
Born at Fortress Monroe on Old Point Comfort, Virginia, Archer Anderson (1838–1918) was the eldest child of Confederate army Bragidier General Joseph Reid Anderson (1813–1892) of Botetourt County, a West Point graduate who managed the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond.
Archer Anderson was educated at the University of Virginia and at the University of Berlin.
During the Civil War he served in the Confederate army, in both the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of Tennessee, eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel.
After the war he served as Tredegar’s secretary and treasurer, and, after his father’s death, president.
He is buried in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.
His daughter, Sally Archer Anderson (1862–1954), was from 1912 to 1952 president of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society, the organization responsible for preserving the White House of the Confederacy and assembling the collections of the Museum of the Confederacy.
The following address was published the same year that it was delivered.
Given the dude died in 1918, over a hundred years ago, and given that the speech does not appear to be copyrighted, what dire fate is it exactly that to see befalling Wayne for publishing the speech one more time?
It’s freely available on the internet, you know.
Marse Lee says
Then why did you mention it?
King of Spades says
You could not make a pimple on the a$$ of a leader like R.E. Lee.
And you darn well know it. We had a ball with your kind when I served our country in the military, I mean a barrel of monkeys kind of fun.
Stuart Bell says
Bless your heart…
Paul Plante says
OMG!
NO!
Say it ain’t so!
(I thought those were some good lines regardless of who wrote them, but I won’t say that to tokenny because small things set him off and make him flip out)
Is it against the law?
It sounds very serious.
Should we call in the Police?
Or the FBI!
Paul Plante says
There is no more enduring symbol of racism and slavery in this country than the DEMOCRAT PARTY!
If there are any symbols of slavery and racism that should be torn down, it is the DEMOCRAT PARTY!
And instead of going after Bobby Lee as a racist, who “Ol” Blackface” Northam and his gang of history book burners and statue destroyers should be going after is DEMOCRAT Woodrow Wilson, as we clearly see in the story “When Woodrow Wilson Segregated the Federal Workforce – An inconvenient truth about a former president” by Tom Shoop on November 20, 2015, to wit:
This week, Woodrow Wilson became the latest historical figure to be drawn into ongoing battles over the legacy of racism at colleges and universities.
A group of Princeton students demanded that Wilson’s name be erased from campus facilities and programs — a huge undertaking, given that there’s an entire school at the university (where Wilson served as president before entering the White House) named in his honor.
It’s tempting to dismiss this crusade as an exercise in political correctness, but, as Vox’s Dylan Matthews points out today, Wilson has a checkered past when it comes to race relations.
Indeed, he was an ardent segregationist, even by the standards of his time — especially when it came to managing the federal workforce.
end quotes
How come “Ol’ Blackface” and his gang aren’t howling and screeching and gibbering and capering around the base of a statue of Woodrow Wilson with their lynching ropes to tear it down?
Why Bob Lee, and not Woodrow Wilson?
Getting back to that story about another racist Democrat in a long line of racist Democrats, the party of slavery, we have:
Here’s how William Keylor, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, describes the atmosphere in government when Wilson took office in 1913:
Washington was a rigidly segregated town — except for federal government agencies.
They had been integrated during the post-war Reconstruction period, enabling African Americans to obtain federal jobs and work side by side with whites in government agencies.
Wilson promptly authorized members of his cabinet to reverse this long-standing policy of racial integration in the federal civil service.
end quotes
So, Ralph Northam, when is Wilson Hall, an administrative building at James Madison University, a public research university in Harrisonburg, Virginia, situated in the Shenandoah Valley, just west of Massanutten Mountain, named in his honor, going to be re-named to something more appropriate like Al Sharpton Hall?
And what about the Woodrow Wilson Complex in Fishersville, Virginia, near Wilson’s birthplace of Staunton, Virginia, which complex includes the Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center, Wilson Memorial High School, Wilson Middle School and Wilson Elementary School?
When are those names coming down?
Getting back to the reasons why they should, we have:
At a cabinet meeting in April 1913, Matthews writes, Postmaster General Albert Burleson made the case for resegregating the Railway Mail Service.
Hearing no objection from Wilson, Burleson went ahead.
Soon, the discriminatory policy expanded, according to a history of African Americans’ experience at the Postal Service published by the National Postal Museum:
Segregation was quickly implemented at the Post Office Department headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Many African American employees were downgraded and even fired.
Employees who were downgraded were transferred to the dead letter office, where they did not interact with the public.
The few African Americans who remained at the main post offices were put to work behind screens, out of customers’ sight.
Both the Post Office and the Treasury Department also created separate bathrooms and lunchrooms for African American and white employees.
Wilson’s predecessors in the post-Civil War era had appointed several African Americans to high-ranking government posts.
He not only put a stop to that practice, but in 1914 instituted a policy requiring federal job seekers to attach photographs to their applications.
Despite protests from civil rights leaders during his administration, Wilson refused to budge on such measures.
“I would say that I do approve of the segregation that is being attempted in several of the departments…,” he wrote at one point, declaring that it was in African Americans’ interest to be separate from their white coworkers.
end quotes
So why the silence, Ralph Northam?
The candid world watching this insanity over slavery playing out would like to know.