I have seen a Northern history in which Lee was represented as presenting his sword to Grant. Correct history is all we ask for — no prevaricating on either side. And I would ask that our young people especially be taught the truth of this matter. Respectfully,[160] one of the company. The old hero straightened himself up and replied: “No, sir, he did not. I was determined that the side-arms of officers should be exempt by the terms of the surrender, and, of course, I did not offer him mine. All that was said about swords was that General Grant apologized to me for not having his own sword, saying that it had been taken off in his baggage, and he had been unable to get it in time.”General John B. Gordon, in his Reminiscences of the Civil war, page 462, says, in speaking of General Grant:In his ‘Memoirs’ he has given a quietus to that widely circulated romance that he returned to Lee his proffered sword. I do not doubt that he would have done so; but there was no occasion for Lee's offering it, because in the terms agreed upon it was stipulated that the Confederate officers retain their sidearms.
This text is part of:
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.