Robert E. Lee The Southerner E-Book

Thomas Nelson Page

• Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 303

Beschreibung

Thomas Nelson Page attended Washington and Lee University during Lee's tenure as president. His biography of Robert E. Lee is a great resource on the life of the general. Heraklion Press has included a linked table of contents.

Leseprobe

INTRODUCTORY

THIS sketch of a great Virginian is not written with the expectation or with even the hope that the writer can add anything to the fame of Lee; but rather in obedience to a feeling that as the son of a Confederate soldier, as a Southerner, as an American, he owes something to himself and to his countrymen, which he should endeavor to pay, though it may be but a mite cast into the Treasury of Abundance.

The subject is not one to be dealt with in the language of eulogy. To attempt to decorate it with panegyric would but belittle it. What the writer proposes to say will be based upon public records, or on the testimony of those personal witnesses who by character and opportunity for observation would be held to furnish evidence by which the gravest concerns of life would be decided.

True enough it is, Lee was assailed—and assailed with a rancor and persistence which have undoubtedly left their deep impression on the minds of a large section of his countrymen; but as the years pass by, the passions and prejudices which attempted to destroy him have been gradually giving place to a juster conception of the lineaments of Truth.

“Seest thou not how they revile thee?” said a youth to Diogenes.

“Yea,” replied the Philosopher. “But seest thou not how I am not reviled?”

Thus, as we read to-day of the reviling of Lee by those who under the sway of passion endeavored to stigmatize with the terms, “Rebel” and “Traitor,” one whom history is already proclaiming, possibly, the loftiest character of his time, the soul is filled, not so much with loathing for their malignity, as with pity for their blindness.

Unhappily, the world judges mainly by the measure of success, and though Time hath his revenges, and finally rights many wrongs, the man who fails of an immediate end appears to the body of his contemporaries, and often to the generations following, to be a failure. Yet from such seed as this have sprung the richest fruits of civilization. In the Divine Economy, indeed, appears a wonderful mystery. Through all the history of sublime endeavor would seem to run the strange truth enunciated by the Divine Mister: that, He who loses his life for the sake of the Truth shall find it.

But although, as was said by the eloquent Holcombe of Lee just after his death, “No calumny can ever darken his fame, for History has lighted up his image with her everlasting lamp,” yet after forty years there appears in certain quarters a tendency to rank General Lee, as a soldier, among those captains who failed. Some historians, looking with narrow vision at but one side, and many readers ignorant of all the facts, honestly take this view. A general he was, they say, able enough for defense; but he was uniformly defeated when he took the offensive. He failed at Antietam, he was defeated at Gettysburg; he could not drive Grant out of Virginia; therefore he must be classed among captains of the second rank only.

Iteration and reiteration, to the ordinary observer, however honest he may be, gather accumulated force and oftentimes usurp the place of truth. The Public has not time nor does it care to go deeper than the ordinary presentation of a case. It is possible, therefore, that unless the truth be set forth so plainly that it cannot be mistaken, this estimate of Lee as a Captain may in time become established as a general, if not as the universal opinion of the Public.

If, however, Lee’s reputation becomes established as among the second class of captains, rather than as among the first, the responsibility for it will rest, not upon Northern writers, but upon the Southerners themselves. For the facts are plain.

We of the South have been wont to leave the writing of history mainly to others, and it is far from a complete excuse that whilst others were writing history we were making it. It is as much the duty of a people to disprove any charge blackening their fame as it is of an individual. Indeed, the injury is infinitely more far-reaching in the former case than in the case of an individual.

It is no part of my purpose to undertake to discuss critically the great campaigns which Lee conducted or battles which he fought. This I must leave to those military scholars whose experience entitles their judgment to respect. I shall mainly confine myself to setting forth the conditions which existed and the results of the manner in which he met the forces which confronted him.

It is, therefore, rather of Lee, the man, that I propose to speak in this brief memoir, though incidentally I shall endeavor to direct the reader’s thought to one especial phase of his work as a soldier, for it appears to me to illustrate the peculiar fibre which distinguished him from other great Captains and other great men. His character I deem absolutely the fruit of the Virginian civilization which existed in times past. No drop of blood alien to Virginia coursed in his veins; his rearing was wholly within her borders and according to the principles of her life.

Whatever of praise or censure, therefore, shall be his must fall fairly on his mother, Virginia, and the civilization which existed within her borders. The history of Lee is the history of the South during the greatest crisis of her existence. For with his history is bound up the history of the Army of Northern Virginia, on whose imperishable deeds and incomparable constancy rests his fame.

The reputation of the South has suffered because we have allowed rhetoric to usurp the place of history. We have furnished many orators, but few historians. But all history at last must be the work of the orator, but of the historian. Truth, simply stated, like chastity in a woman’s face, is its own best advocate; its simplest presentation is its strongest proof.

It is then, not to Lee the Victorious, that the writer asks his reader’s attention, but to that greater Lee: the Defeated.

CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE

ON a plateau about a mile from the south bank of the Potomac River, in the old Colonial County of Westmoreland, in what used to be known as the “Northern Neck,” that portion of Virginia which Charles II. in his heedlessness once undertook to grant to his friends and favorites, Culpeper and Arlington, stands a massive brick mansion, one of the most impressive piles of brick on this continent, which even in its dilapidation looks as though it might have been built by Elizabeth and bombarded by Cromwell. It was built by Thomas Lee, grandson of Richard Lee, the emigrant, who came to Virginia about 1641–2, and founded a family which has numbered among its members as many men of distinction as any family in America. It was through him that Charles II., when an exile in Brussels, is said to have been offered an asylum and a Kingdom in Virginia. When the first mansion erected was destroyed by fire, Queen Anne, in recognition of the services of her faithful Counsellor in Virginia, sent over a liberal contribution towards its rebuilding. It bears the old English name, Stratford, after the English estate of Richard Lee, and for many generations—down to the last generation, it was the home of the Lees of Virginia.

This mansion has a unique distinction among historical houses in this country; for in one of its chambers were born two signers of the Declaration of Independence: Richard Henry Lee, who, in obedience to the mandate of the Virginia Convention, moved the Resolution in Congress to declare the Colonies free and independent States, and Francis Lightfoot Lee, his brother. But it has a yet greater distinction. In one of its chambers was born on the 19th of January, 1807, Robert E. Lee, whom we of the South believe to have been not only the greatest soldier of his time, and the greatest captain of the English-speaking race, but the loftiest character of his generation; one rarely equalled, and possibly never excelled, in all the annals of the human race.

His reputation as a soldier has been dealt with by those much better fitted to speak of it than I; and in what I have to say as to this I shall but follow them. The campaigns in which that reputation was achieved are now the studies of all military students throughout the world, quite as much as are the campaigns of Hannibal and Cæsar, of Cromwell and Marlborough; of Napoleon and Wellington.

“According to my notion of military history,” says Field-Marshal Viscount Wolseley, “there is as much instruction both in strategy and in tactics to be gleaned from General Lee’s operations of 1862 as there is to be found in Napoleon’s campaigns of 1796.”

Robert Edward Lee was the second son of “Light Horse Harry” Lee (who in his youth had been the gallant young commander of the “Partisan Legion”) and of Anne Carter, of Shirley, his second wife, a pious and gracious representative of the old Virginia family whose home still stands in simple dignity upon the banks of the James, and has been far-famed for generations as one of the best known seats of the old Virginia hospitality. In his veins flowed the best blood of the gentry of the Old Dominion and, for that matter, of England, and surrounding his life from his earliest childhood were the best traditions of the old Virginia life. Amid these, and these alone, he grew to manhood. On both sides of his house his ancestors for generations had been councillors and governors of Virginia, and had contributed their full share towards Virginia’s greatness. Richard Lee was a scion of an old family, ancient enough to have fought at Hastings and to have followed Richard of the Lion Heart to the Holy Land.* On this side of the water they had ever stood among the highest. The history of no two families was more indissolubly bound up with the history of Virginia than that of the Lees and the Carters. Thus, Lee was essentially the type of the Cavalier of the Old Dominion to whom she owed so much of her glory. Like Sir Walter Raleigh he could number a hundred gentlemen among his kindred and, even at his greatest, he was in character the type of his order.

It has been well said that knowledge of a man’s ideals is the key to his character. Tell us his ideals and we can tell you what manner of man he is. Lee’s ideal character was close at hand from his earliest boyhood. His earliest days were spent in a region filled with traditions of him who, having consecrated his life to duty, had attained such a standard of virtue that if we would liken him to other governors we must go back to Marcus Aurelius, to St. Louis and to William the Silent.

Not far from Stratford, within an easy ride, in the same old colonial county of Westmoreland, of the same noble river whose broad waters reflect the arching sky, there spanning Virginia and Maryland, was Wakefield, the plantation which had the distinction of having given birth to the Father of His Country. Thus, on this neighborhood, the splendor of the evening of his noble life just closed had shed a peculiar glory. And not a great way off, in a neighboring county on the banks of the same river, was the home of his manhood, where in majestic simplicity his ashes repose, making Mt. Vernon a shrine for lovers of Liberty of every age and every clime.

On the wall at Shirley, Lee’s mother’s home, among the portraits of the Carters hangs a full-length portrait of Washington in a general’s uniform, given by him to General Nelson who gave it to his daughter, Mrs. Carter. Thus, in both his ancestral homes the boy from his cradle found an atmosphere redolent at once of the greatness of Virginia’s past and of the of the preserver of his country.

It was Lee’s own father, the gallant and gifted “Light Horse Harry” Lee, who, as eloquent in debate as he had been eager in battle, had been selected by Congress to deliver the memorial address on Washington, and had coined the golden phrase which, reaching the heart of America, has become his epitaph and declared him by the unanimous voice of a grateful people, “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

How passionately the memory of “Light Horse Harry” Lee was revered by his sons we know, not only from the life of Robert E. Lee, himself; but from that most caustic of American philippics: the “Observations on the Writings of Thomas Jefferson, with Particular Reference to the Attacks they contain on the Memory of the Late General Henry Lee, in a Series of Letters by Henry Lee of Virginia.”

Mr. Jefferson with all his prestige and genius had found a match when he aroused “Black Harry” Lee by a charge of ingratitude on the part of his father to the adored Washington. In no family throughout Virginia was Washington’s name more revered than among the Lees, who were bound to him by every tie of gratitude, of sentiment, and of devotion.

Thus, the impress of the character of Washington was natural on the plastic and serious mind of the thoughtful son of “Light Horse Harry.”

One familiar with the life of Lee cannot help noting the strong resemblance of his character in its strength, its poise, its rounded completeness, to that of Washington, or fail to mark what influence the life of Washington had on the life of Lee. The stamp appears upon it from his boyhood and grows more plain as his years progress.

Just when the youth definitely set before himself the character of Washington we may not know; but it must have been at an early date. The famous story of the sturdy little lad and the cherry tree must have been well known to young Lee from his earliest boyhood, for it was floating about that region when Parson Weems came across it as a neighborhood tradition, and made it a part of our literature.* It has become the fashion to deride such anecdotes; but this much, at least, may be said of this story, that however it may rest solely on the authority of the simple itinerant preacher, it is absolutely characteristic of Washington, and it is equally characteristic of him who since his time most nearly resembled him.

However this was, the lad grew up amid the traditions of that greatest of great men, whose life he so manifestly takes as his model, and with whose fame his own fame was to be so closely allied in the minds and hearts of the people of the South.

Like Washington, Robert E. Lee became an orphan at an early age, his father dying when the lad was only eleven years old, and, like Washington, he was brought up by a devoted mother, the gentle and pious Anne Carter of Shirley, a representative, as already stated, of one of the old families of Tidewater Virginia and a descendant of Robert Carter, known as “King Carter,” equally because of his great possessions, his dominant character, and his high position in the Colony. Through his mother, as through his father, Lee was related to most of the families of distinction in the Old Dominion, and, by at least one strain of blood, to Washington himself. To his mother he was ever a dutiful and devoted son and we have a glimpse of him, none the less interesting and significant because it is casual, leaving his playfellows to go and take his invalid mother driving in the old family carriage, where he was careful to fasten the curtains and close up the cracks with newspapers to keep the draughts from her.

Early in his life his father and mother moved from Stratford to Alexandria, one of the two or three Virginia towns that were homes of the gentry, and his boyhood was passed in the old town that was redolent of the memory of Washington. He worshipped in the same church in which Washington had been a pew-holder, and was a frequent visitor both at the noble mansion where the Father of his Country had made his home and at that where lived the Custises, the descendants and representatives of his adopted son.

Sprung from such stock and nurtured on such traditions, the lad soon gave evidence of the character that was to place him next to his model. “He was always a good boy,” said his father. “You have been both son and daughter to me,” wrote his mother, in her loneliness, after he had left home for West Point. “The other boys used to drink from the glasses of the gentlemen,” said one of the family; “but Robert never would join them. He was different.”

A light is thrown on his character at this time in a pleasant reference to his boyhood made by himself long afterwards in writing of his youngest son, then a lad. “A young gentleman,” he says, “who has read Virgil must surely be competent to take care of two ladies; for before I had advanced that far I was my mother’s outdoor agent and confidential messenger.”*

Notes

* “Lee of Virginia.” By Edmund I. Lee.

* A Japanese officer, a military attaché at Washington, related to the writer that when he was a boy in a hill-town of Japan where his father was an officer of one of the old Samurai, his mother told him the story of George Washington and the cherry tree and tried to impress on him the lessons of truth.

* Letter of June 25, 1857.

CHAPTER II. FIRST SERVICE

YOUNG LEE selected at an early age the military profession, which had given his father and his great prototype their fame. It was the profession to which all young men of spirit turned. It was in the blood. And young Lee was the son of him of whom General Greene had said that “he became a soldier from his womb,” a bit of characterization which this soldier’s distinguished son was to quote with filial satisfaction when, after he himself had become possibly the most famous soldier of his time, he wrote his father’s biography. At the proper time, 1825, when he was eighteen years of age, he was entered as a cadet among Virginia’s representatives at the military academy of the country, having received his appointment from Andrew Jackson, to whom he applied in person. And there is a tradition that the hero of New Orleans was much impressed at the interview between them with the frank and sturdy youth who applied for the appointment. At the academy, as in the case of young Bonaparte, those soldierly qualities which were to bring him later so great a measure of fame were apparent from the first; and he bore off the highest honor that a cadet can secure: the coveted cadet-adjutancy of the corps. Here, too, he gave evidence of the character that was to prove his most distinguished attribute, and he graduated second in his class of forty-six; but with the extraordinary distinction of not having received a demerit. Thus early his solid character manifested itself. “Even at West Point,” says Holcombe, “the solid and lofty qualities of the young cadet were remarked on as bearing a resemblance to those of Washington.”

The impress of his character was already becoming stamped upon his countenance. One who knew him about this time, records that as she observed his face in repose while he read to the assembled family circle or sat in church, the reflection crossed her mind that he looked more like a great man than any one she had ever seen.

Among his classmates and fellow students at West Point were many of those men whom he was afterwards to serve with or against in the great Civil War, and doubtless a part of his extraordinary success in that Homeric contest was due to the accurate gauge which he formed in his youth or a little later in Mexico of their abilities and character. Indeed, as may be shown, this was made almost plainly manifest in his dealings in, at least, three great campaigns of the war: that in which he confronted the overprudent McClellan and defeated him, and those in which he balked the vainglorious Pope and Hooker.

Here is a picture of him at this time, from the pen of one who knew and loved him all his life and had cause to know and love him as a true friend and faithful comrade: his old class mate and comrade in arms, Joseph E. Johnston. They had, as he states, entered the Military Academy together as classmates and formed there a friendship never impaired, a friendship that was hereditary, as Johnston’s father had served under Lee’s father in the celebrated Lee Legion during the Revolutionary War.

“We had,” says General Johnston, “the same intimate associates, who thought as I did, that no other youth or man so united the qualities that win warm friendship and command high respect. For he was full of sympathy and kindness, genial and fond of gay conversation, and even of fun, while his correctness of demeanor and attention to all duties, personal and official, and a dignity as much a part of himself as the elegance of his person, gave him a superiority that every one acknowledged in his heart. He was the only one of all the men I have known that could laugh at the faults and follies of his friends in such a manner as to make them ashamed without touching their affection for him, and to confirm their respect and sense of his superiority.” He mentions as an instance of the depth of his sympathy an occurrence which took place the morning after a battle in Mexico in which he had lost a cherished young relative. Lee, meeting him and seeing the grief in his face, burst into tears and soothed him with a sympathy as tender, declared the veteran long years after, “as his lovely wife would have done.”

Small wonder that the soldiers who followed Lee faced death with a devotion that was well-nigh without a parallel.

Still influenced in part, perhaps, by his worship for his great hero, the young officer chose as the partner of his life, his old playmate, Miss Mary Parke Custis, the granddaughter of Washington’s step-son, the surviving representative Washington. Mrs. Lee was the daughter and heiress of George W. Parke Custis, while Lieutenant Lee was poor; but such was her pride in her husband and her sense of what was his due that on her marriage to him she determined to live on her husband’s income as a lieutenant, and for some time she thus lived.* It was a fitting training for the hardships she was called on to face when her husband as Commander-in-Chief of the Confederate Armies, deemed himself happy to be able to send her one nearly dried up lemon. Their domestic life was one of ideal devotion and happiness. Should we seek through all the annals of time for an illustration of the best that exists in family life, we need not go further to find the perfection and refinement of elegance and of purity, than that stately mansion, the home of Lee, which from the wooded heights of Arlington looks down upon the city of Washington; and has by a strange fate, become the last resting-place of many of those whose chief renown has been that they fought bravely against Lee.

With the distinction of such a high graduation as his, young Lee was, of course, assigned to the Engineers, that corps of intellectual aristocracy from which came, with the notable exceptions of Grant and Jackson, nearly all the officers who attained high rank during the war. His first service was in Virginia, and he was stationed at Fortress Monroe when occurred in a neighboring county the bloody negro-uprising known as the “Nat Turner Rebellion,” which thrilled Virginia as thirty years later thrilled her the yet more perilous “John Brown Raid” which Lee was sent to quell, and quelled. Lee’s letters to his wife touching this episode, while self-contained as was his wont, show the deep gravity with which he regarded this bloody outbreak.

His early manhood was devoted to his profession, wherein he made, while still a young man, a reputation for ability of so high an order, and for such devotion to duty, that when the Mississippi, owing to a gradual change in its banks, threatened the city of St. Louis, General Scott, having been appealed to to lend his aid to prevent so dire a calamity, said he knew of but one man who was equal to the task, Brevet Captain Lee. “He is young,” he wrote, “but if the work can be done, he can do it.” The city government, it is said, impatient at the young engineer’s methodical way, withdrew the appropriation for the work; but he went on quietly, with the comment, “They can do as they like with their own, but I was sent here to do certain work and I shall do it.” And he did it. Feeling in the city ran high, riots broke out, and it is said that cannon were placed in position to fire on his working force; but he kept calmly on to the end. The work he wrought there stands to-day—the bulwark of the great city which has so recently invited America and the nations of the world within her gates.

The Mexican War was the training-ground of most of those who fought with distinction in the later and more terrible strife of the Civil War, and many of the greatest campaigns and fiercest battles of that war were planned and fought with a science learned upon the pampas and amid the mountains of Mexico. During the Mexican War, Lee, starting in as an engineer officer on the staff of General Wool, achieved more renown than any other soldier of his rank, and possibly more than any other officer in the army of invasion, except the commander-in-chief.

The scope of this volume will not admit of going into the details of his distinguished services there which kept him ever at the crucial point and which led General Scott to declare long afterwards that he was the “very best soldier he ever saw in the field.” His scouts and reconnaissances at Cerro Gordo, Contreras, Churubusco, and Chapultepec, brought him the brevets of Major at Cerro Gordo, April 18, 1874, of Lieutenant-Colonel at Contreras and Churubusco, and of Colonel at Chapultepec, September 13th. His first marked distinction was won by a reconnaissance made at night with a single guide, whom he compelled to serve at the muzzle of the pistol, wherein he ascertained the falsity of a report that Santa Anna’s army had crossed the mountains and lay in their front. This distinction he greatly increased by work at Vera Cruz, by which that strategic point, protected, as was believed, by impregnable defences, was captured. But this, as notable as it was, was as far excelled by his services at Cerro Gordo as that was in turn by his work at Contreras. At Cerro Gordo, where Santa Anna with 13,000 troops and forty-two guns posted in a pass barred the way in an apparently impregnable position, Lee discovered a mountain pass, and having in person led Twigg’s division to the point for assault in front, and having worked all night posting batteries, at dawn next morning led Riley’s brigade up the mountains in the turning movement which forced Santa Anna from his stronghold. At Contreras again, he showed the divinely given endowments on which his future fame was to rest.

At Contreras the army of invasion found itself in danger of being balked almost at the Gates of the Capital, and Lee’s ability shone forth even more brilliantly than at Cerro Gordo. The defences of the City of Mexico on the eastward appeared impregnable, while an attack from the south, where the approach was naturally less difficult, was rendered apparently almost as unassailable by powerful batteries constructed at San Antonio Hill commanding the only avenue of approach, the road which wound between Lake Chalco with its deep morass on one side, and impassable lava beds on the other. Lee by careful reconnaissance discovered a mule-trail over the Pedregal, as this wild and broken tract of petrified lava was termed, and this trail having been opened sufficiently to admit of the passage of troops, though with difficulty and danger, he conducted over it the commands of Generals Pillow and Worth, and the village of Contreras was seized and held till night against all assaults of the enemy. The position of the American troops, however, was one of extreme peril, as it was known that heavy reinforcements were being rushed forward by the Mexicans, and at a council of war it was decided to advance before dawn rather than await attack from the Mexican forces. It became necessary to inform General Scott of the situation and Captain Lee volunteered for the perilous service. He accordingly set out in the darkness and alone, and in the midst of a furious tropical storm, he made his way back across the lava beds infested by bands of Mexicans, advised the Commander-in-Chief of the proposed movement, and having secured his co-operation, returned across the Pedregal in time to assist in the assault which forced the Mexicans to abandon their position, and opened the way to Churubusco, Molino del Rey and Chapultepec, and, finally, led to the occupation of the capital and the close of the War.

This was, declared Scott, “The greatest feat of physical and moral courage performed by any individual, to my knowledge, pending the campaign.”

The “gallantry and good conduct,” the “invaluable services,” “the intrepid coolness and gallantry of Captain Lee of the Engineers,” of “Captain Lee, so constantly distinguished,” fill all the dispatches of all the battles of the war, and Lee came out of this war with such a reputation for ability that his old commander, Scott, declared to General Preston, that he was “the greatest living soldier in America.” Indeed, Scott, with prescient vision, declared his opinion that he was “the greatest soldier now living in the world.“ ”If I were on my deathbed to-morrow,” he said to General Preston, long before the breaking out of the war, “and the President of the United States should tell me that a great battle were to be fought for the liberty or slavery of the country, and asked my judgment as to the ability of a commander, I would say with my dying breath, ‘Let it be Robert e. Lee’.”

Lee, himself, however, declared that it was General Scott’s stout heart and military skill which overcame all obstacles and while others croaked pushed the campaign through to final success.

During the period following the Mexican War, Lee was engaged for a time in constructing the defences of Baltimore. Then he was, in 1852, assigned to duty as Superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, and three years later was assigned to active duty on the southwestern frontier as Lieutenant Colonel of one of the two regiments of cavalry which Mr. Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, had organized on the recommendation of General Scott and made a separate branch of the service.* He soon rose to the rank of colonel of cavalry, a position which a great critic of war has asserted to be the best of all training schools for a great captain, and he held this rank when, having been brought to Washington to revise the tactics of the army, he was unexpectedly called on in the summer of 1859 to take charge of the force of marines sent to Harper’s Ferry to capture John Brown and his followers in their crazy and murderous invasion of Virginia, with the design of starting a servile war which should lead to the negroes achieving their emancipation. This duty he performed promptly and efficiently.

Long afterwards when he was a defeated general on parole, without means, his every act and word watched by enemies thirsting for his blood, one of the men he had commanded in the 2d Cavalry, but who had fought in the Union army throughout the war, called at his house in Richmond with a basket of provisions for his old commander, and when he saw him seized him in his arms and kissed him.

A light is thrown on his character in the letters he wrote about and to his children during his long absences from home on duty in the West and in Mexico. And it is one of the pathetic elements in the history of this loving and tender father, that with a nature which would have reveled in the joys of domestic life, he should have been called by duty to spend so large a part of his time away from home that he did not even know his youngest son when he met him. He was ever devoted to children, and amid the most tragic scenes of his eventful life, his love for them speaks from his letters. Writing to his wife from St. Louis in 1837, when he was engaged in engineering work for the government, he speaks with deep feeling of the sadness he felt at being separated from his family, and of his anxiety about the training of his little son. “Our dear little boy,” he says, “seems to have among his friends the reputation of being hard to manage—a distinction not at all desirable, as it indicates self-will and obstinacy. Perhaps, these are qualities which he really possesses, and he may have a better right to them than I am willing to acknowledge; but it is our duty, if possible, to counteract them, and assist him to bring them under his control. I have endeavored, in my intercourse with him, to require nothing but what was, in my opinion, necessary or proper, and to explain to him temperately its propriety, and at a time when he could listen to my arguments and not at the moment of his being vexed and his little faculties warped by passion. I have also tried to show him that I was firm in my demands and constant in their enforcement and that he must comply with them, and I let him see that I look to their execution in order to relieve him as much as possible from the temptation to break them.”

Wise words from a father, and the significant thing was that they represented his conduct throughout his life. He was the personification of reasonableness. Small wonder that his youngest son, in his memoir of his father, recorded that among his first impressions was the recognition of a difference between his father and other persons, and a knowledge that he had to be obeyed. A touch in one of his letters to an old friend and classmate, then Lieutenant, afterwards Lieutenant General Joseph E. Johnston, gives a glimpse of his love for children, and also of that of another old friend: “He complains bitterly of his present waste of life, looks thin and dispirited and is acquainted with the cry of every child in Iowa.”

His son and namesake in his “Recollections” of his father makes mention of many little instances of his love of and care for animals, and the same love of and care for animals constantly shines from his letters.

At one time he picked up a dog lost and swimming wildly in “the Narrows” and cared for it through life; at another he takes a long, roundabout journey by steamer for the sake of his horse; at another he writes, “Cannot you cure poor ‘Spec’?” (his dog), “Cheer him up! take him to walk with you—tell the children to cheer him up.” In fact, his love for animals, like his love for children, was a marked characteristic throughout his life, and long after the war he took the trouble to write a description of his horse “Traveller,” which none but a true lover of horses could have written.

On his return from Mexico, after an absence so long that he failed to recognize his own child whom he had left a babe in arms, he was, like Ulysses, first recognized by his faithful dog.*