Robert E. Lee was one of the greatest four Virginians. He ranks with George Washington, George Mason, and Thomas Jefferson. No praise could be greater. When "the Lost Cause," as the Southerners fondly call their great fight for what they believed to be right, reeled down to decisive defeat, the general whom they had worshiped in war proved himself a great patriot in peace. His last years were passed as President of Washington and Lee University in Virginia. Long before his death, his name was honored by every fair-minded man on the Northern as well as the Southern side of Mason and Dixon's line. One of the noblest eulogies of him was voiced upon the centennial of his birth, January 9, 1907, at Washington and Lee University, by Charles Francis Adams. The best blood of Massachusetts honored the best blood of Virginia. Our country was then again one country and all of it was free.
Tom Strong was standing with a group of other prisoners, all Northern officers, under guard, beside the Provost Marshal's tent at Lee's headquarters. These were upon a little knoll, from which the eye ranged over the long lines of rotten tents, huts, and heaps of brush that gave such shelter as they could to the ragged, hungry, and undaunted legions of the Confederacy. It was early in the morning. Scanty breakfasts were cooking over a thousand fires. From the cook-tent at headquarters, there came an odor of bubbling coffee that made the prisoners' hunger the harder to bear. The whole camp was strangely silent.
Then, in the distance, there was a storm of cheering. It gained in sound and shrillness. The soldiers poured out of their tents by the thousand. Those who had hats waved them; those who had not waved their arms; and every throat joined in the famous "rebel yell." Through the shouting thousands rode a half-dozen superbly mounted horsemen, at their head a gallant figure, with close-cropped white beard, whiskers, and mustache, seated upon a superb iron-gray horse, sixteen hands high, the famous Traveler.
GEN. ROBERT E. LEE ON TRAVELER
It was Robert E. Lee, the one hope of the Confederacy. Even his iron self-control almost broke, as he saw the passionate joy with which he was hailed by the survivors of the gallant gray army he had launched in vain against the bayonet-crowned hills of Gettysburg. A flush almost as red as that of youth crept across his pale cheeks and a mist crept into his eyes. His charger bore him proudly up the grassy knoll where the Union prisoners were huddled together. As his glance swept over them, he noted with surprise the youthfulness of the boy who stood in the front line. Many a boy as young as Tom or even younger was in the ranks Lee led. Many an old man bent under the weight of his gun in those ranks. The Confederacy, by this time almost bled white, was said to have "robbed the cradle and the grave" to keep its armies at fighting strength. The North, with many more millions of people, had not been driven to do this. Tom was one of the few boys in the armies of the Union.
"Who is this?" asked Lee, as he checked Traveler before the group.