74REL to John Dalberg Acton, December 15, 1866, Richmond, Times-Dispatch, January 20, 1924.
75Richmond, Southern Opinion, March 27, 1869.
76William Preston Johnston, “Memoranda of Conversations with General R. E. Lee,” Gallagher, Lee the Soldier, p. 32.
77Allan et al., “Memoranda,” Gallagher, Lee the Soldier, pp. 7–34 passim.
78REL to Anna Jackson, January 25, 1866, Dabney Collection, Union Theological Seminary.
79Fitz-John Porter to Charles Marshall, January 22, 1870, January 24, 1882, Swann Galleries Catalog Sale March 24, 1988, item #142.
80REL to Mrs. A. M. Keiley, n.d. [March, 1867], Richmond, Whig, April 5, 1867; REL to Mrs. E. A. F. Mears, March 27, 1867, Washington, Evening Star, April 5, 1867; REL to Mrs. J. C. Thompson, January 28, 1867, Baltimore, American, May 28, 1905; REL to Julia Gratiot Chouteau, March 21, 1866, Augusta, GA, Chronicle, May 3, 2000.
81Richmond, Whig, October 12, 1869.
82REL to J. G. Arrington, January 25, 1867, Macon, Weekly Telegraph, March 22, 1867.
83REL to [D. McConaghy], August 5, 1869, Norwich, CT, Aurora, September 1, 1869.
84Washington, Critic-Record, November 8, 1869.
85REL to John Dalberg Acton, December 15, 1866, Richmond, Times-Dispatch, January 20, 1924. John Leyburn, “An Interview with General Robert E. Lee,” Century Magazine, 30 (No. 1, May, 1885) p. 167, says that in 1869 Lee told Leyburn “he had emancipated most of his slaves years before the war, and had sent to Liberia those who were willing to go; that the latter were writing back most affectionate letters to him, some of which he received through the lines during the war.” He went on to quote Lee as saying, “So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interests of the South. So fully am I satisfied of this, as regards Virginia especially, that I would cheerfully have lost all I have lost by the war, and have suffered all I have suffered, to have this object attained.” Lee, 4, pp. 400–401, accepts Leyburn’s account without question, but it is highly suspect. Like so many, Leyburn confused the Custis slaves Lee emancipated as being Lee’s own, and did the same with the family sent to Liberia, neither of which was a mistake Lee would make if he was being honest. As for Lee’s supposed comments on slavery and abolition, they hardly square with everything else he wrote about doubting that the time was right for emancipation, or what place blacks should have in the postwar South. If Lee said anything to Leyburn on slavery, Leyburn badly garbled the recollection of it in the ensuing sixteen years.
86Milwaukee, Semi-Weekly Madison, March 31, 1866. Lee’s name and the whipping episode had appeared in the press in May and again in November 1865 when he was dubbed a “whipper of slaves,” but he ignored those at the time. Columbus, Daily Ohio Statesman, November 2, 1865.
87REL to E. S. Quick, March 1, 1866, Lee Papers, VHS. It is hard to say just what Lee was responding to, though it could be the accounts appearing in May 1865 starting with the New York, Tribune, May 9, 1865, article rehashing the whipping episode. The Wesley Norris account seems not to have started circulating until early April, a month after Lee’s letter.
88REL to [George K. Fox], April 13, 1866, in Lee, Recollections, pp. 224–25. The Baltimore, American was not available to locate the date of the article’s appearance, but Lee’s letter is in response to one dated April 5, and extracts of the Wesley Norris statement began appearing at least as early as April 5 in the New York, Independent and perhaps elsewhere.
89REL to Mackay, June 27, 1838, Gilder Lehrman Collection. In fact, it is Sancho who says this, his words being “the more you stir this business the more it will stink.” By 1888 the remaining slaves at Arlington remembered Lee as “a kind master” who sometimes worked in the fields with them, and held Sunday services for them if they did not go to church. “The negroes at Arlington remember the Lees, and speak of them with uniform kindness,” wrote a reporter. “Colonel Lee must have been a kind master.” His informant was Mariah Syphax, who also said that old Custis was her father. Rockford, IL, Morning Star, September 4, 1888.
90Boston, Journal, March 23, 1867.
91Richmond, Whig, April 9, 1867.
92Atlanta, Era, April 2, 1867, quoted in New Orleans, Times, April 5, 1867; Augusta, GA, Daily Constitutionalist, April 9, 1867.
93REL to Frank Fuller, April 20, 1867, The Raab Collection Catalog, January 2012, pp. 5–6.
94REL to “My Dear Major,” April 3, 1867, Augusta, GA, Chronicle, November 28, 1880. Content in the letter indicates that the addressee had been a commissary officer on Lee’s staff. The best match is Robert G. Cole. Though he finished the war as a lieutenant colonel, he lived after the war in Georgia, and this letter surfaced and was used in a political speech in Georgia in 1880.
95REL to D. H. Maury, May 23, 1867, New Orleans, Times-Picayune, February 28, 1871.
96REL to Edward G. W. Butler, October 11, 1867, Gilder Lehrman Collection; REL to Edward G. W. Butler, March 2, 1868, Swann Auction Galleries, Sale 2333, New York, November 16, 2013, item 15.
97New York, Tribune, May 25, 1866; USG Report, June 20, 1865, PUSG, 15, pp. 205–206.
98New York, Herald, November 17, 1865.
99Marquis De Lorne, A Trip Through the Tropics and Home Through America (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1867), pp. 249–50.
100REL to Edward G. W. Butler, October 11, 1867, Gilder Lehrman Collection.
101New York, Tribune, May 25, 1866.
102De Lorne, A Trip Through the Tropics, p. 250
103REL to Robert Ould, February 4, 1867, Richmond, Dispatch, May 29, 1890.
104Dallas, Weekly Herald, August 4, 1866.
105REL to Robert Ould, February 4, 1867, Richmond, Dispatch, May 29, 1890.
106Macon, Daily Telegraph, May 4, 1866.
107Trenton, NJ, State Gazette, January 23, 1867.
108Jackson, MI, Daily Citizen, January 28, 1867.
109Philadelphia, Evening Telegraph, March 13, 1867.
110Augusta, GA, Daily Constitutionalist, April 9, 1867, quoted the New York, Herald, April 1, 1867.
111Galveston, Flake’s Bulletin, November 16, 1867; New York, Herald, June 10, 1867.
112John Echols to Beauregard, March 11, 1874, item 145, Signature House Catalog, n.d., Bridgeport, WV, p. 39.
113A. H. H. Stuart to Nathaniel B. Meade, January 29, 1874, Richmond, Whig, March 3, 1874.
114Rosecrans to REL, August 26, 1868, REL et al. to Rosecrans, August 26, 1868, Richmond, Whig, September 8, 1868.
115A. H. H. Stuart to Nathaniel B. Meade, January 29, 1874, Richmond, Whig, March 3, 1874; Alexandria, Gazette, February 5, 1869.
116Richmond, Whig, January 27, 1874.
CHAPTER 18: THE LAST MEETING
1New York, Herald, November 25, 1867, December 8, 1867; Boston, American Traveller, November 30, 1867; New York, Herald, December 8, 1867; Memphis, Daily Avalanche, October 17, 1868.
2James May to USG, June 2, 1869, REL to May, April 28, 30, 1869, PUSG, 19, pp. 488–89.
3New York, Herald, July 24, 1878; Richmond, Dispatch, May 8, 1869. This is a secondhand account given to a New York, Herald reporter in Alexandria the next day, by someone repeating what Lee had told him. As such it is suspect, especially since Grant is stated as wanting a long interview while Lee cuts it short and leaves, while May to Grant, June 2, 1869, PUSG, 19, p. 489, says that Lee “was deeply mortified that the interview was so short & formal.”
4Quincy, IL, Daily Whig, May 7, 1869; Cincinnati, Commercial Tribune, May 3, 1869.
5Boston, Journal, May 4, 1869; Cleveland, Plain Dealer, May 4, 1869.
6New York, Commercial Advertiser, May 3, 1869; Richmond, Whig, May 4, 1869.
7May to Grant, June 2, 1869, PUSG, 19, p. 489, says that Lee “was deeply mortified that the interview was so short & formal.”
8New York, Herald, June 15, 20, 1869.
9REL to Hill Carter, April 25, 1868, May 28, SPC.
10REL to Thomas H. Ellis, September 30, 1869,
Cincinnati, Commercial Tribune, February 1, 1870.
11REL to William G. Bullock, March 26, 1869, Alexander Autographs Catalog Sale, November 6, 2008, item #119.
12REL to Edward G. W. Butler, February 10, 1870, item 211, Swann Auction Catalog, April 17, 2012.
13REL to H. D. Capers, July 8, 1868, Philadelphia, Inquirer, August 25, 1868.
14REL letter n.d. [1869] paraphrased in Charleston, Daily News, April 30, 1869.
15REL to “My Dear Sir,” May 17, 1869, Richmond, Whig, May 21, 1869.
16REL to Blanton Duncan, September 13, 1869, Charleston, Courier, September 25, 1869.
17Columbus, GA, Daily Enquirer, July 7, 1868.
18MacDonald, Mrs. Robert E. Lee, pp. 278–79; MCL to Louise H. Carter, November 9, 1870, SPC; Macon, Weekly Telegraph, November 1, 1870. It is noteworthy that in Mary’s November 9 letter, Lee’s famous “strike the tent” is not given as his last words, and context places them perhaps a day or two before his death. Also, Mary wrote to Mary Meade the evening of his death and made no mention of such final words (MacDonald, Mrs. Robert E. Lee, p. 283).
19New York, Herald, July 24, 1878.
20De Lorne, Trip to the Tropics, p. 250.
21PMJDG, pp. 330–31.
22USG to John H. Douglas, July 16, 1885 PUSG, 31, p. 437.
23San Diego, Union, April 26, 1885.
24USG to McKinstry Griffith, September 22, 1839, PUSG, 1, p. 5.
25Omaha, Omaha World Herald, April 8, 1895.
26Randolph H. McKim, The Soul of Lee (New York: Longmans, Green, 1918), pp. 200, 202, 210; J. William Jones, Army of Northern Virginia Memorial Volume (Richmond: Randolph and English, 1880), p. 120. Perhaps the height of this deification of Lee came in 1964: a United Kingdom branch of a tiny Nashville group calling itself the Confederate High Command wrote a letter to the home group averring that no human since Jesus had demonstrated his qualities to the extent Lee had; it concluded by declaring that “the patron saint of the Confederate High Command is that great general, Robert E. Lee, our Commander in Chief, the Lord in Heaven.” Marcus Hinton, “Christmas Greetings,” Rebel No. 9 (United Kingdom Division, Confederate High Command, 1964), n.p.
27Jones, Army of Northern Virginia, p. 120.
28Sherman to John E. Tourtellotte, February 4, 1887, PUSG, 8, pp. 323–24n.
29J. F. Lee to Fitz-John Porter, January 24, 1870, “Knapsack,” North & South, 5 (July 2002), p. 11.
30New York, Tribune, May 31, 1886.
31Lee, Recollections, p. 416.
32Interview, July 6, 1878, PUSG, 28, pp. 414–15, 419.
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