General Lee's Rebuke.
When the great war was over and defeat had come to the armies Lee had led, he was visiting the house of a friend in Richmond. With that love of children that always characterized him, the old hero took upon his knee a fair-haired boy. The proud mother, to please her guest, asked the child, "Who is General Lee?" Parrot-like the expected answer came, "The great Virginian who was a patriot, true to his native State." And then came the question, "Who is General Scott?" and the reply, "A Virginian who was a traitor to his country."
Putting down the child and turning to the mother, the general said:
"Madam, you should not teach your child such lessons. I will not listen to such talk. General Scott is not a traitor. He was true to his convictions of duty, as I was to mine."
What General Lee here said and what even when the fires of the late war were still smoldering he would have the mothers of the South teach to their children was that he and General Scott were both right, because each believed himself to be right.
And that is precisely what that noble son of New England, Charles Francis Adams, himself a gallant Union soldier, has more recently said in a public address—that the North and the South were both right, because each believed itself right. And such is to be the verdict of history. We were all patriots settling on the field of battle a constitutional question that could be settled in no other way. Public opinion is already moving, and moving rapidly, to the mark of that final verdict.
With the interment of Confederate dead at Arlington much bitterness disappears. The comradeship of death is unassailable by the arguments of the living.