LEE
THE LEADER OF A LOST CAUSE
A gray-haired college president sat talking kindly with a young sophomore who had fallen behind in his studies.
"My boy," he said, "you must study if you would succeed. Only patience and industry will prevent your failure here and your failure in after life."
"But, General, you failed," replied the sophomore with an amazing impertinence.
"I hope that you may be more fortunate than I," was the quiet answer.
Literature contains nothing finer than that by way of the retort courteous.
The speaker was Robert E. Lee—the time not many months after the surrender of the Southern army. Many were there to brand him as a "failure," just as this thoughtless sophomore had done, and to all such critics his reply was silence. In the seclusion of a small Virginia college he lived and worked, keeping sedulously out of public affairs, writing and saying nothing about his campaigns. He left to history the final verdict, which has found him, not a failure, but one of the most brilliant soldiers of this or any land.
In Lee's early life and ancestry his nearest parallel is Washington. These two greatest Virginians were born within a few miles of each other, in Westmoreland County. Lee was born just seventy-five years after Washington, (January 19, 1807) and like him was descended of famous lineage. His father, Light Horse Harry Lee, fought by the side of Washington in the Revolutionary War; and it was he who in a memorial address on the great leader coined the immortal phrase: "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen."
Still another ancestor, Richard Henry Lee, had been born many years earlier in the same old mansion where Robert Edward Lee first saw the light of day. Richard Lee it was, who was a boyhood friend and confidant of George Washington; and who later became one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.