Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 40.djvu/141

Rh the word "sublime," or "sublimest," in connection with duty. No living member of the Lee family has any knowledge on the subject. As the matter is important, and it seems impossible to obtain any further evidence concerning it, I venture to offer a conjecture as to the authority on which Dr. Jones made his statement (repeated in the same words thirty-two years later) that the Duty Sentence "did occur in a letter by General Lee to his son." In both of Dr. Jones' books this statement follows immediately after the equally positive assertion that The Duty Letter is "unquestionably spurious." For neither of these statements is any authority given. This suggests that the authority for both was the same, and that, for some reason, Dr. Jones preferred not to give it, and to let the statements rest on his own ipse dixit.

My conjecture (I cannot call it more) is that Dr. Jones' authority was Mrs. Mary Custis Lee, widow of General Lee. Dr. Jones' first book, "Personal Reminiscences of General Robert E. Lee," was written soon after General Lee's death; and in the preface he says, "Mrs. Lee did me the kindness to read carefully, and very warmly approve, my manuscript." And on page 287 he gives an instance of Mrs. Lee's comment on what he had written.

Now, I think it almost certain that this manuscript, when submitted to Mrs. Lee, contained The Duty Letter, and that it was Mrs. Lee who told Dr. Jones that this letter was "unquestionably spurious." That she was right has been, I think, demonstrated. But Dr. Jones, while accepting her statement as to the spuriousness of the letter as a whole (probably based on the authority of General Lee), lamented, no doubt, the loss of the sentence: "Duty, then, is the sublimest word in our language." And Mrs. Lee may have consoled him by saying she thought General Lee had written this sentence in another letter to one of his sons. Or she may have said (mistakenly, as I believe), that General Lee did write a letter containing the Duty Sentence "to one of his sons."