Colonel Lee’s high military reputation made it natural for President Lincoln to offer him the highest command of the United States army when the Civil War broke out. But Colonel Lee did not accept the honor. He did not believe in slavery, and did not think it was right for any of the states to secede, or leave the Union. But he was a Virginian, and he could not bring himself to lead an army to burn his own home or to kill or drive out his relatives, friends, and neighbors. He had heard his father, who was once governor of the state, say with deepest feeling, “Virginia is my country; her will I obey, no matter how sad my fate may be.” So, when his native state went out of the Union, Robert E. Lee resigned as colonel in the United States army and went with her.
The southern people soon made Lee their general and it became, as he thought, his duty to defend the homes and lives of the people not only of Virginia, but also of the other states of the south.
General Lee soon proved that he was, as General Scott had said, “the greatest military genius in America.” With smaller armies and poorer supplies and weapons than those of the north, he gained great victories—the second battle of Manassas, or Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. He defeated five northern generals, one after another. It took Grant, the sixth general sent against him, a whole year to “hammer” and surround Lee’s ragged, starving heroes, and capture them at last, when they were almost as helpless as a little flock of shorn sheep. And so noble and dignified was his character that he was honored and admired by north and south alike.
The motto of West Point Military Academy is “Duty, Honor, Country.” All through his life, in all that he did, Robert E. Lee showed that he respected Honor, loved his Country, and almost worshiped Duty. He expressed this thought when he wrote, “Duty is the sublimest word in our language.”
DAVY FARRAGUT, THE HERO OF MOBILE BAY
AFTER the War of Independence, there lived in a cabin among the mountains of Tennessee a Spaniard named Farragut, who had come to America to help the people in their fight for liberty. He had married a brave little Scotch woman. While her husband was away one day several skulking Indians hung around and watched for a chance to get into the cabin. The mother had seen them and sent her two little boys up under the roof, while she stood inside the door for hours, with an ax in her small hands, to kill the first Indian who tried to enter. After a long watch, the red men stole away, as much afraid of the fire in that little woman’s eye as of the ax in her hands. One of the two boys who crouched in almost breathless silence up in the cabin loft was Davy Farragut.
When this lad was seven his father was appointed sailing master in the navy, and moved with his family to live by the large lake near New Orleans. When off duty, Farragut took his boys sailing on the lake. One day when he was out fishing he found an old man lying in the bottom of a rowboat, alone and unconscious. Farragut took the sick man home for his wife to nurse. In a few days the stranger died of yellow fever. The good wife caught the dread disease and died, too. The poor father was left to care for five motherless children under ten years of age.
It turned out that Captain David Porter, who was then in command of the naval station at New Orleans, was the dead man’s son. In gratitude for the care of his dying father, Captain Porter offered to adopt one of the Farragut boys. David was chosen, and the naval officer took the sturdy little lad to his home in New Orleans, and afterward to Washington, where he was sent to a good school.
In Washington the Secretary of the Navy saw what a bright, honest, pleasant-faced lad Davy Farragut was and, when he was ten years old, appointed him a midshipman on his adopted father’s ship. This was early in the War of 1812. After Porter’s warship, the Essex, had captured a British ship, the Alert, Middy Davy, lying awake in his hammock, saw a sailor of the Alert standing near, with a cocked pistol in his hand. Davy pretended to be asleep and the man passed on. The boy got up, crept into Captain Porter’s cabin, and whispered to him what he had just seen.
“Fire! Fire!” shouted the captain, and the sailors of the Essex came scrambling up on deck. Porter ordered them down to capture the imprisoned sailors of the Alert, who were preparing to kill the American crew and take the ship to England. Before any damage was done, the astonished Britishers were all in irons, thanks to the wide-awake shrewdness of eleven-year-old Midshipman Farragut.