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last months of the war the Confederate authorities canvassed seriously the policy of arming the Southern slaves and putting them in the field as soldiers.
I was told by a leading member of the Senate of Virginia that, by special invitation, General Lee came over from Petersburg and appeared before, as I remember, a joint committee of the two Houses, to which this matter had been referred, and gave his opinion in favor of the experiment upon the ground, mainly, that unhesitating and unlimited obedience — the first great lesson of the soldier — was ingrained, if not inborn, in the Southern slave.
Yet once more — to christen Lee “Master” was an act of homage peculiarly appropriate to his lofty and masterful personality.
There never could have been a second “Marse Robert;” as, but for the unparalleled elevation and majesty of his character and bearing, there would never have been the first.
He was of all men most attractive to us, yet by no means most approachable.
We loved him much, but we revered him more.
We never criticised, never doubted him; never attributed to him either moral error or mental weakness; no, not even in our secret hearts or most audacious thoughts.
I really believe it would have strained and blurred our strongest and clearest conceptions of the distinction between right and wrong to have entertained, even for a moment, the thought that he had ever acted from any other than the purest and loftiest motive.
I never but once heard of such a suggestion, and then it so transported the hearers that military subordination was forgotten and the colonel who heard it rushed with drawn sword against the major-general who made it.
The proviso with which a ragged rebel accepted the doctrine of evolution, that “the rest of us may have descended or ascended from monkeys, but it took a God to make Marse Robert,” had more than mere humor in it.
I am not informed whether the figure of speech to which I am about to refer ever obtained outside the South, or whether its use among us was generally known beyond our borders.
It undoubtedly originated with our negroes, being
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