Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 40.djvu/147

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A forged letter, signed "R. E. Lee," and purporting to have been written to G. W. Custis Lee on 5th April, 1852, is published in newspapers all over the North. That is nothing: but when the production is reprinted in Richmond papers, with a certain awful reverence, and the sons of Confederate fathers are solemnly conjured to take to heart the Yankee scribbler's trash as addressed to each of them individually by his own father, the thing becomes too stupid. It is enough for General Lee to be a great Captain; there is no need to present him also as the model father, the great common parent of us all, upon the credit of a Philadelphia journalist's dull forgery to fill up a corner of his paper.

Forgery, indeed, has become one large branch of industry with our Northern brethren; it has risen almost to the dignity of a fine art; but, like the other arts and sciences, is only regarded and employed by that accomplished people with a view to making it pay. By each performance of this kind there is always something to be gained; and they never practice as amateurs. If they produce, for example, an official letter from our Secretary of the Navy, it is to impose on a court of justice in England, and procure a judgment against Confederate rams. If they invent a correspondence between French shipbuilders and Confederate agents, it is to stimulate the French Government to interfere with our cruisers. If they forge letters said to have been taken from our dead soldiers on the field, expressing their private opinion that "the Confederacy has about gone up," it is to inspire their own people with more implicit confidence in the Government. When they turn out a letter from General Lee, it is first to give a special interest to that newspaper which has had the good fortune to get hold of an original letter of the Confederate General, "found at Arlington House"; and second, to show that this great and wise Virginian, when he would set before his son an exemplar of virtue and "heavenly wisdom," had to go for this exemplar to Connecticut, of all places in the world!