Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 40.djvu/144

140 as a whole, was made up by a clever newspaper man out of parts of different letters by Lee." But Dr. Page does not explain why the authenticity of the letter as a whole is doubtful, nor the reasons why it is said that the letter was "made up of parts of different letters by Lee." The biographers who print The Duty Letter in part, but with no intimation that it is not genuine, are John Esten Cooke, General A. L. Long, and Rev. Henry A. White, D. D. In Cooke's "Life of General R. E. Lee," published in 1871 (three years before Dr. Jones' first book), The Duty Letter is published with high praise (p. 38), but omitting, without any indication of the fact, not only the date of the letter, but the first four sentences. Why this was done must be left to conjecture. Probably the letter was taken from the Whig or Sentinel, and the biographer adopted, seeing the anachronism, The Wrong Date Theory, or The Editorial Emendation Theory, but without taking his readers into his confidence. General Long, in his "Memoirs of Robert E. Lee," published in 1886, printed The Duty Letter (p. 464) precisely as it is found in John Esten Cooke's biography, which he no doubt followed. He ignores Dr. Jones' condemnation of The Duty Letter as spurious, and says of it that it is "full of aphoristic wisdom, and breathes a high sense of duty and honor." Dr. White, in his "Robert E. Lee and the Southern Confederacy," published in 1898, quotes extracts from The Duty Letter, omitting the date and the first four sentences. He also omits the address to "G. W. Custis Lee." His introduction to the extracts is as follows (p. 49): "Lee's character breathes in the following injunctions to his son, written about the time that the father began service with the Second Cavalry." This indicates that Dr. White adopted The Erroneous Date Theory, and possibly the theory that the letter was written to General W. H. F. Lee; but like John Esten Cooke, he does not take his readers into his confidence. It must be remembered that the biographers of General Lee did not have all the facts which are disclosed in this paper. It is not surprising that students of the life of General Lee have refused to take as final Dr. Jones' condemnation, without reasons, of The Duty Letter, and have clung to it, and to the Duty Sentence.

Assuming, as I think we must, that the sentence, "Duty, then, is the sublimest word in our language," cannot be attributed to General Lee, our regret for its loss may be lessened by two reflections, one that the association of sublimity with duty would not have been original with General Lee, (as certainly it was not original with the fabricator of The Duty Letter); and the other that we have undisputed language of General Lee that more than compensates for the loss of the Duty Sentence. With these two reflections, this paper will be brought to an end.

1. Long before General Lee could have written, "Duty, then, is the sublimest 'word in our language," the German