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Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 11. (ed. Reverend J. William Jones), Lee and Scott. (search)
times fear that others may suspect my encomiums of General Lee as the outflow of merely personal friendship and its admirations, or else of that zeal, or affected zeal, of an exaggerated advocacy, which is so fashionable in America, and which seems to be a tendency in all forms of hero worship. But I assure you neither is true. For I have or had several personal friends on each side of that wretched war whom I admired and loved just as much as Robert E. Lee—notably A. Sidney Johnston, George H. Thomas, W. T. Sherman, and General McDowell and others. But my naked, solid judgment is this: that 1 can neither find, within my own observation and experience, nor yet in modern nor ancient history, one single case of any hero or patriot or philosopher of them all who turned his back upon a more than imperial crown, and his face and steps towards doubts and fears, uncertainties, failures and subjugation, save one alone—Robert E. Lee! These, my friend, are my reasons for having said that
Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 11. (ed. Reverend J. William Jones), The Virginia campaign of 1864-1865. (search)
ines in both directions. The Federals thus seized the Weldon railroad in August, and Fort Harrison, on the north side, at the end of September, but all other efforts against Lee's lines during the autumn proved costly and abortive. The winter, however, brought worse enemies to the Confederates than even the splendid army in their front. The signs of exhaustion were everywhere evident in the South. A succession of disasters had given Georgia and South Carolina to Sherman, and Tennessee to Thomas. Sheridan had ruthlessly harried the Shenandoah Valley. For months Lee's men, in the trenches at Petersburg, were but half fed and half clothed, while every letter that came to the camp told of suffering and starvation at home. The spring came, to find Lee holding thirty-five miles of entrenchments with 57,000 men of all arms (according to General Humphreys), while Grant had 129,000 in his front. Lee's strength was steadily weakening; desertions were numerous; the privations of the win