A Letter to General Lee

by BRANCH CABELL

1

WITH all proper deference, Sir, I introduce myself to your attention as being a grandson of that Dr, Cabell who, in Richmond, lived next door to you, at 709 East Franklin Street, and with whom you were medicinally familiar. My father likewise you would remember, as that Robert Cabell who at the age of sixteen, as a cadet of the Virginia Military Institute, took part in the Battle of New Market, where his elder brother, William, another cadet, then eighteen years old, was killed.

I present these credentials not in vainglory but to attest that I, born of your people and of your caste and of your adherents, was reared among them who remembered and who spoke of you, in affectionate rather than in religious terms, as a friend whom one had treated for rheumatism, or as a neighbor with whom one conversed, daily and casually, as to household affairs and the current weather. I have heard even of some personal foibles not at all to my present purpose beyond the fact that their attested existence has kept you always, in my thoughts, human.

It has been since infancy my privilege, in brief, to comprehend that you were not the marmoreal effigy which, along with Jehovah, the South at large yet worships as a matter of good form and as a prerequisite for political preferment. That fervently I applaud Virginia’s loyal, outrageous romanticizing of Virginia’s history and of “Virginia’s former leaders has been explained in another place. Even so, I incline to distinguish: for about you alone of historic irginians I have need to think, perforce, in the unglamorous aspect of a not young next-door neighbor, who was troubled with rheumatism; and because of one or two yet other reasons you appear to me best left untouched by the well-meant titivations of our historians and by the blatant adulations of oratory.

I pause here to reflect with gratitude upon the circumstance that I was not honored with your acquaintance. For I can imagine no more harrowing experience than to be seated facing you, for the first time, tête-à-tête. You would be courteous, and impressive-looking, and very conscientiously jocular, in dealing with young Bob Cabell’s son. You would inquire if I was writing anything nowadays. When I confessed to a book in progress, then you would ask me what I was going to call it. You would not pretend, or at least not with precision, that immediately after the concerned book had been published, its perusal” would become for you an “evening’s recreation”—as did Philip Stanhope Worsley’s translation of the complete Iliad, which he dedicated to you. I have sometimes wondered what Mr. Worsley thought about that special form of acknowledgment, when connected with an epic poem in twenty-four books.

To me at any rate you would convey merely a vague but genial impression that you meant to read several of my novels, some time next summer, at Rockbridge Baths, when one would have leisure for novels. You would then speak (I very much fear) as to the importance of good literature. You would regret that in Virginia we have perhaps tended somewhat to neglect the production of literature, in favor of statesmanship and oratory. You would feel it your duty to admit that, as a rule, you preferred to read historical books, as being works of truth, rather than novels and romances. For history, you would add, enables one to get correct views of life and to see the world in its true light. That will help one to live pleasantly, to do good, and when summoned away, to leave this world without regret. You would, I think, refer to Shakespeare and Milton as being desirable models for a writer of fiction to keep in mind.

And I, because of my very great reverence for you, I would fidget; and I would try my utmost to get you to talk about some of the hundreds of mutters which you understood better than you did literary affairs, and you would still go on and on, like a highly courteous steam-roller, until I was able to effect my escape.

But after that, if only I too lived next door to you, and were thus able to speak with you informally from time to time, without being petrified by the dictates of your amiability and of your conscience, why, we would get on, I believe, fairly well together. For I once knew a great many of your well-bearded contemporaries among the well-born Virginians to whom it was permitted to survive you. And to say that I found almost every one of these my dignified elders to be dull-minded would be wrong, because the statement, far too flagrantly, would be an understatement. And the true point, after all, is that I found these stately and sedate and large-hearted gentlemen, even in their dull-mindedness, to be wholly admirable.

2

IT MAY please you, Sir, to hear, in the event of this letter’s ever reaching you, that nowadays you rank so very highly among the military geniuses of historic record that several Englishmen have been moved to commend your campaigns as being, for an American, remarkably well executed. The Germans likewise have studied your tactics with profit. All we Virginians, therefore, expatiate concerning your martial exploits, and do not dwell sufficingly, I submit, upon the circumstance that, through defeat, you passed from relative greatness to a unique greatness.

There have been many other talented generals (and among them a fair sprinkling of scoundrels), and with all the more admirable of these you may be compared, variously, so far as went your activities until and including the afternoon of the ninth of April, 1805, when at Appomattox Court House you surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia. For your conduct afterward, throughout the five and a half years of living which as yet remained for you, after Appomattox, there is no parallel; and for this reason we incline, nowadays, to regard your behavior during this same period with a perplexed incredulity, and to say little about it.

Our main difficulty is that although you did not ever utter, in blunt point of fact, your one notable apothegm, to the effect that “duty” is the most sublime word in the English language, yet at every moment, throughout some sixty-three years, you would seem to have been guided by this apothegm. And most, upsettingly did this become noticeable after Appomattox.

So are we condemned to read with a stunned amazement about your unbusinesslike conduct when you were then tendered any number of substantial tributes, ranging from a manor house in England (with an annuity thrown in) to the control of large corporations in New York City, and including the governorship of Virginia as well as command of the Rumanian Army and the presidency of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. The highly remunerative and purely ornamental offices which were urged upon you by the directors of life insurance companies, from all quarters of the country, would appear to defy computation; and at this period so unrelentingly were you pressed for money in hand that the final acre of your once considerable landholdings had been confiscated for taxes, when the bland charms of so many sinecures implored your acceptance.

Yet every one of these offers, when they thus came to you in shoals, you declined, saying courteously: — “I am grateful; but I have a self-imposed task which I must accomplish. I have led the young men of the South in battle. I have seen many of them die on the field. I shall devote my remaining energies to training young men to do their duty in life.”

And with that, you took over the presidency of poverty-stricken and obscure and dilapidated Washington College, in the gaunt hill-town of Lexington, Virginia, at the gaunt salary of $1500 a year.

In this manner did you dismiss the homage and the amenities which were yours for the taking. You chose instead to become the headmaster of a country boarding school in a mountain village, with four teachers to aid you in the instructing of about fifty pupils. For this, as you remarked equably, was the one task in civilian life for which your four years’ experience as an instructor at West Point had fitted you; and the age-stricken fallen champion was still resolute, as in a letter to your wife you explained your set purpose, “to accomplish something for the benefit of mankind and the honor of God.”

Here is a saying which surprises and which stirs the blood with its naïve nobility and what I can but term its arrogant meekness. It is a phrase, one feels, which Valiant-for-Truth would have uttered, if only John Bunyan had been so happily inspired as to think of it. And indeed I do not know but that, with a glow of justifiable auctorial pride, Miguel de Cervantes might have ascribed this same phrase to the Knight of La Mancha.

So then, of your own free will and against the protests of common sense, did you obey those old-world considerations which in Virginia our leaders as yet honor between election days, and lay aside the command of an army in order to take up the petty duties of a country schoolmaster.

Now, as a married man, I confess to some wonderment that Mrs. Lee did not, as it were, put her foot down and take a firm stand in this matter. But I dismiss the ignoble thought. I blush to have harbored it, howsoever transiently; and I believe that in a life overbrimming with magnanimities this was your most heroic action. I take this quiet, stubborn putting aside of all self-interest to be admirable beyond wording. And indeed it is an event which, occurring as it does in the so constantly overcolored history of Virginia, quite frankly staggers me, because one does not at all know what to say about it with a proper flamboyance.

For it did happen, attestedly; it seems to me a most noteworthy happening; and yet by no stretch of the imagination, or through any athletics in the way of rhetoric, can it be made a romantic happening. “On October 2, 1865, in the presence of the trustees, professors and students, after a prayer by the Rev. W. S. White, Robert E. Lee took the oath of office as required by the laws of the College, and was thus legally inaugurated as its president.” Not even a Virginian can very well romanticize any proceedings so humdrum.

Nor did you romanticize them. You quite simply and in a wholly matter-of-fact manner did that which seemed right to you, “for the benefit of mankind and the honor of God.”

3

IT IS through this unbending and invincible and even somewhat stolid integrity that you have become divided from the other leaders in the War Between the States, upon both sides; for to no one of them, upon either side, was a judicious amount of compromise and of self-advancement wholly unknown — after, at any rate, the war had ended. Each one of them then did, in one way or another, make use of his famousness as an asset which, to phrase the affair bluntly, he cashed in at the best market value obtainable.

There was no blame involved. Such was, and such remains, the customary practice of all leaders after all wars. But you, with a heroic obtuseness, did not know how to compromise; and you went to what we, your successors and your inferiors in the presentday State of Virginia, cannot but regard as somewhat fantastic lengths, in order to prevent your celebrity from becoming a source of income.

You thus seem to move among your contemporaries, if not quite as a perceptibly un-Puckish changeling, at least like a foreigner; and I imagine that, just somehow, an elderly Roman of the Republic may have wandered into the middle of the nineteenth century. I then check these irresponsible fancies. I resolve to be the one Southerner who does not babble about you balderdash. You were so far human, I remind myself that you developed during the latter years of your life an embarrassing habit about which rumor yet whispers; one hears that your last words required to be edited; my own grandfather used to solace your undignified groanings when you had rheumatism; and if only Mary Custis Lee had combined a quiet, quite firm stand with a few frozen observations as to what already she had put up with, over and yet over again, why, then you would have surrendered, I imagine, like most other husbands.

Even so, Sir, I cannot avoid remarking the unChristian and beneficent manner in which you denied to your final years that customary solace of the retired warrior, alike in victory and defeat, of producing his memoirs, in which to expose unflinchingly their waiter’s grandeur of soul and to acknowledge, with a manly regret, the stupidity and the viciousness of his competitors and adversaries. That you did come rather perilously close to writing a book about the War Between the States, there is no denying. Even upon the sheer brink of bespotting in this way your unique glory with printers’ ink did you pause during the latter half of 1865, when temporarily you had been divorced from discretion by a desire “that the bravery and devotion of the Army of Northern Virginia [may] be correctly transmitted to posterity.” And one flinches to conjecture what would have been the result if you had addressed toward posterity at large that amicably heavy-handed instructiveness which was far better reserved for the tiny classrooms of Washington College.

But accident, or your infirm health, or the lack of authentic data, or else (as one very much prefers to think) those unlimited funds of common sense such as you displayed always in dealing with any matter which did not threaten to beget your self-advancement, adverted you from blundering into the barren, and dreary, and the necessarily forever dubious, verbose quagmires of self-justification and of special pleading into which, a while later, floundered Jefferson Davis and most of the other surviving overlords of the Lost Cause and — how far more calamitously! — the shrill widows of them who had not survived.

Here I am tempted. I am moved to speak about that loud locust-plague of deplorable volumes emanating from the households of your former generals and army chaplains which, during the late 1860’s and throughout the next twenty-five years or thereabouts, in attempting to belaud the Confederacy, so very nearly succeeded, through their writers’ naive egotism and their mutual jealousy, in convincing mankind in general that the Confederacy must have been organized and controlled by the mentally handicapped.

But instead of being thus foolhardy, I prefer to borrow, very cautiously, from my adroit sage friend, Douglas Freeman, the reserved statement, “Perhaps it is well that General Lee did not write his memorial of his Army.”

I, to the other side, — as being not quite an historian who regards the income earned by his books with an indifference wholly glacial, — I cannot but marvel over the opportunities which, hereabouts also, you ignored, in the approved manner of Virginia, politely, without any comment. If you had written your memoirs, or had you connived in a stratagem not unknown among military circles, of merely signing your memoirs, you overnight would have become affluent. As Stephen Benet has remarked, “Every Southern family would have bought that book, if it had to starve to do so.” And very nearly every Northern family would have purchased it likewise, because of somewhat, different motives, during those late 1860’s, when you remained — as with an immortal mildness you acknowledged the ever recurrent demand for your imprisonment and execution — “an object of censure to a portion of the country.”

Nor would your book’s foreign sales have been less than unprecedented. Like Mrs. Calvin Ellis Stowe, your contemporary, who under the regrettable influence of intuition wrote, in Brunswick, Maine, a book devoted for the most part to life in an unvisited Louisiana, — that very famous treatise which she called Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and to which you beyond doubt must have accorded a “perusal,” — you also might have flourished in every known language which ranks, alphabetically, between the Armenian and the Wallachian. And you refused, you refused with an equable and courteous finality, thus to flourish.

You had reached late middle life. Your health had failed. You were, like all other Virginians then living in Virginia, as poor as that perhaps fabulous fowl to which Virginians refer without any specified Biblical warrant as “Job’s blue turkey hen.” The world awaited your memoirs. Many publishers pleaded for your memoirs. You had merely to authorize the appearance of your memoirs in order to ensure your life’s future material welfare. You did not even have to be at pains to write your memoirs; for hundreds upon hundreds of your loyal adorers would have performed for you this taskwork with a delighted gratitude. Your name would sell the results; but you were not willing to sell your name.

Daily, during those bitter years when carpetbaggers reigned in Virginia, you thus faced with a polite stubbornness all temptings to advance your own private welfare. In order to win affluence and applause and every other agreeability of life, you had merely to do nothing. You had only not to thrust away that which your circumstances now proffered to you with a devoted and incessant profusion. Yet you declined to be pampered by fortune. You hardheadedly preferred to sacrifice, to your own ideas about honor, your private welfare.

So then did it fall about that, always with a courteous but unshaken finality, you refused to accept any benefits whatever which were offered to you because of your part in the War Between the States, a war in which always your part had been, quite simply and quite explicitly, and indeed with a sort of prosaic humbleness, to defend the rights of your mother state against violation. A gentleman, so you quietly contended, does not either expect or take a reward for having attempted to save his mother from being raped.

A creed so improvident was not universal in your own day, and it has become so much more incomprehensible, to our later times, that even your most sympathetic biographers still cast about for some further motives to prompt you. But I do not think that any common-sense motives were needed, so far as went your decision in a matter which touched your sense of honor; and to purvey them through guesswork seems rather like suggesting that a son in defending his mother may have been actuated, yet furthermore, by his belief that the assailant had a venereal disease.

That I begin to speak with magniloquence, and become a prey to the illogic of lofty emotions, I observe with discomfort. Very vainly, through a desire to be the one Southerner who does not babble about you balderdash, had I resolved to address you with your own equanimity. It cannot be done — or at least not by any Virginian. And so, when I attempt to think about you as you appeared in the body, and to appraise you as being a conscientious and somewhat ponderous, quiet-spoken and gray-bearded and stoopshouldered Confederate veteran, such as in my youth I knew by scores, the affair does not come off. For my blood warms to you, betrayingly; and reason, defeated by atavism, quits the field.

You were General Lee; you might have done this, that, or the other, it may be, with more wisdom or with a larger profit; but there is no living Virginian who can convince himself of the possibility. We prefer instead to revere you; should your career reveal any mistakes or shortcomings, why, then we stand ready to revere them also; for in remembering you, we believe, with a loyalty which we of Virginia do not accord to any other person, “that the man who had done the best of which he had knowledge could leave the rest to God.” Nor, in the event of an unfavorable decision, is it with Jehovah, Sir, that your people would be siding.