Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 31.djvu/94

 86 Southern Historical Hociety Papers.

Lee at Gettysburg. Colonel A. K. McClure, the author of the bill, and one of the broadest minded and most generous hearted of America's public men, championed it nobly in a speech of great eloquence the other day, and said he did so not to plead the cause of the Confederacy, but the cause of the Union. In a letter to me about the present bill he says: "It is certainly the right thing for Virginia to do." In New York the picture of Lee hangs on the walls of the Hall of Fame, and the statue of one ex-Confederate, that of John E. Kenna, of West Virginia, already stands in Statuary Hall. The portrait of Jefferson Davis, for a time disappearing, has reappeared in the War Department among those of the other ex- Secretaries without creating any hysterical excitement in the army, and so that of General Samuel Cooper, a New Yorker, who became adjutant-general and ranking general in the Confederate army, also hangs in the War Department.

A pretty incident showing the change of Northern feeling on this subject is related by Mr. Charles Hallock, a Brooklyn gentleman, in a recent communication to one of the Richmond papers. In 1868, he bought a portrait of Lee, by a notable Richmond artist, named Anderson, and offered it to be placed on view at the annual exhibition of the Brooklyn Art Loan Association. It was contempt- uosly refused, with the remark that Lee should have been hung as a traitor years before. But note the sequel, which I give in the narrator's own language:

"Now as indicating the rapid amelioration of public sentiment which soon followed, and the softening of the acerbities of i86i-'65, I will state that in 1875, only ten years after the war, I presented this picture to the Long Island Historical Society, of Brooklyn, of which the Rev. Dr. Storrs was President, and the Lows, Chitten- dens and Pierponts directors, and it was not only gratefully and graciously accepted, but was at once placed vis-avis with Gilbert's portrait of Washington, in its most conspicuous corridor, and it re- mains in that position to this day. Hence if this honor was accorded 'in the green tree,' what disposition or decision shall obtain at the present time, a full third of a century later, when we all exult in a unified American history, and wear one common chaplet for bravery and heroism ? Are we not brothers ? It seems to me that there should be few dissenting voices to the courteous proposal embodied in the bill before the Virginia Senate. The precedent which I in- stance should have tremendous weight in procuring a decision favor- able to placing the Lee memorial in the Capitol hall of Statuary."