When Dr. —— got up to go home, General Lee went with him to the door and said to him, “Doctor, there is a good book which I read, and which you preach from, which says, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.’ Do you think your speech just now quite in that spirit?”
When Dr. —— made some excuse, General Lee said: “I fought the people of the North because I believed that they were seeking to wrest from the South her rights. * * * I have never seen the day when I did not pray for them.”
One day during the war, as they were looking at the hosts of the foe, one of his generals said, “I wish those people were all dead!” General Lee, with that grace which was his own, said, “How can you say so? Now, I wish that they would all go home and leave us to do the same.”
At the close of the war, some of our best men went to seek homes in other lands. This, General Lee deemed wrong. He thought that the men of the South should stay at home and build up what had been laid waste by war. He wrote to one of his friends thus: “She (Virginia) has need for all of her sons, and can ill afford to spare you.” Once more he wrote: “I think the South needs the aid of her sons more than at any time of her history. As you ask, I will state that I have no thought of leaving her.”
In a word, the welfare of the impoverished, desolated South was his chief concern. He kept in sight the honor of the South, but not that hate to the North which brought no good.
A lady who had lost her husband in the war, and had brought her two sons to college, spoke in sharp terms of the North to General Lee. He gently said: “Madam, do not train up your children as foes to the Government of the United States. * * We are one country now. Bring them up to be Americans.” Thus did this grand man, with a sad heart, try to do his duty at all times and on all occasions.
Though meek in the way I have told you, General Lee was at the same time too proud to take the aid which, from time to time, his friends would offer him. They knew that he had lost his “all” by the war, and felt that he should now be helped, so that he might pass his days without care. But this proud man would take no aid. When, in a quiet way, the trustees of the college gave the house in which he lived to Mrs. Lee, and also the sum of three thousand dollars each year, he wrote, in Mrs. Lee’s name, a kind but firm letter and declined the gift.
After his death, they again deeded the home to Mrs. Lee and sent her a check for a large sum of money. But she, with the pride of her husband, sent back the check and would not let the funds of the college be taken for her use.
General Lee was always neat in his attire. This trait was the cause of much comment at the time of the “surrender.”
General Sharp, of the Federal Army, says: