Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 34.djvu/345

 Advance Jrom Appomattox. 387

country stricken from the map and now but a loved name and a cherished memory.

As Lee is among the few who from defeat and disaster have grown to glory ever increasing, so the people whom he led and whose old ideals his life expressed, are conspicuous in history in marching from surrender to conquest, in coming through humiliation to victory, to dazzling achievement through subjugation. The South has marched straight over stone strewn roads and towering obstacles from Appomattox to Empire.

During weeks of early springtime weather in that fateful year of 1865, the roads were crowded with men wearily trodding to distant homes men who were ragged and ill-fed, war-worn and weather- beaten, the valiant units of peerless armies overcome and disinte- grated. Behind them lay glory veiled in cloud and hope smitten down, and they faced doubt and desolation. Each man carried a sore and anxious heart to the home from which he had marched long months before with heart beating high, throbbing for the fierce joy of battle and confident of conquest. Some of the homes to which thoughts and footsteps turned when the last gun had been stacked and the last flag furled were humble and remote, some stately, and formerly the centers of bountiful and princely hospitality, some but heaps of ashes and all were in the shadow of fear for the future in the very grip and bitterness of poverty. Yet to each of these homes in the lonely mountains, along the coasts or plains, in city, village and hamlet each man returning from the war bore with him a purpose and an inspiration.

General Lee did not need the stern discipline of the army or the articles of war to exact obedience from those who followed him. His spirit pervaded his camps. The mightiness and the beauty of his soul were felt and shared regardless of distance or difference in military rank. These men continued to be Lee's men after they had ceased to be Lee's soldiers. They bore home with them his pure courage, his deathless faith, his calm but indomitable deter- mination that for the South defeat should not meam despair, and disppointment should not bring with it ruin and obliteration. At Spotsylvania the Texans sent "Lee to the rear," and by the power of their love for Lee burst through smoke and with bullets crowding the air swept over tangled field of the wilderness. Lee was sent to the rear at Appomattox, but Lee's men and Lee's woman have come steadily forward against dangers such as never before had