Robert E. Lee, page 80
18. “Judge Underwood’s Decision,” New York Times, April 16, 1866; Chase to Horace Greeley, June 1 and 5, 1866, Chase to Underwood, Nov. 19, 1868, and Jan. 14, 1869, and Chase to Thomas Conway, Sept. 19, 1870, in The Salmon P. Chase Papers: Correspondence, 1865–1873, ed. John Niven (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1998), 100–101, 106–7, 183, 285–86, 292.
19. REL to Martha Williams, June 20, 1865, in “To Markie,” 62–63; REL to Chauncey Burr, Jan. 5, 1866, in Jones, Personal Reminiscences, 189; Examination of Robert E. Lee, Feb. 17, 1866, in Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 133; REL to Edward Lee Childe, Jan. 16, 1866, LFDA/duPont Library.
20. Simpson, Let Us Have Peace, 101; Alexandria Gazette, July 18, 1865; “Extra Session of the Virginia Legislature—Circular from the Attorney General,” Daily Cleveland Herald, June 13, 1865; “The Indictments Against General Lee and Others,” Baltimore Sun, June 19, 1865; “The Indictment Against Gen. Lee,” Boston Post, June 19, 1865. See also Alexandria Gazette, June 12 and 21, 1865, and Norfolk Post, June 23, 1865.
21. Gambone, Lee at Gettysburg, 38–39; Freeman, R. E. Lee, 4:389–94; REL to Johnson, June 13, 1865, and Grant to REL, June 20, 1865, in Jones, Life and Letters, 384; “From Washington: Gen. Lee Takes the Amnesty Oath,” New York Times, Oct. 16, 1865; Clement Sulivane, “Last Meeting with Gen. R. E. Lee,” Confederate Veteran, Dec. 1920, 459–60; Elmer Oris Parker, “Why Was Lee Not Pardoned?,” Prologue 2 (Winter 1970): 181; John Reeves, The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee: The Forgotten Case Against an American Icon (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 2–4; REL to Dr. S. B. Anderson, May 17, 1865, duPont Library; REL to George M. Brockett, May 27, 1865, LFDA/duPont Library; Robert E. Lee Jr., Recollections and Letters, 160, 204; Jones, Personal Reminiscences, 320; Mason, Popular Life of Gen. Robert Edward Lee, 319–20.
22. REL to Letcher, Aug. 28, 1865, LFDA/duPont Library; REL to Josiah Tatnall, Sept. 7, 1865, in Jones, Life and Letters, 388; “A Talk with Gen. R. E. Lee,” New York Times, Aug. 12, 1879.
23. “General Lee and Staff,” Richmond Whig, April 21, 1865; “Brady, the Grand Old Man of American Photography,” Photographic Times: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine, June 1891, 303; Robert Wilson, Mathew Brady: A Biography (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 190–92; “The Photographic Corps,” Richmond Whig, April 27, 1865; Hopkins, Robert E. Lee in War and Peace, 71–81; Michael D. Gorman, “Lee the ‘Devil’ Discovered,” Battlefield Photographer 3 (Feb. 2006): 1, 3–5.
24. REL to Martha Williams, June 24, 1865, in “To Markie,” 64; REL to Cabell, May 24, 1865, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; Long, Memoirs of Robert E. Lee, 170; Yates, Perfect Gentleman, 2:30; Byrd Pendleton Jervey, “Derwent in Powhatan County and General Robert E. Lee’s Sojourn There in the Summer of 1865,” VMHB, Jan. 1950, 85; Robert E. Lee Jr., Recollections and Letters, 174, 178.
25. REL to Robert E. Lee Jr., July 10, 1865, Lee Family Papers, VMHC; REL to WHFL, July 29, 1865, and to CCL, Aug. 18, 1865, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; Robert E. Lee Jr., Recollections and Letters, 168, 176, 178; REL to Taylor, July 31, 1865, and to Mrs. Julie G. Chouteau, March 21, 1866, duPont Library.
Chapter Nineteen: Every Student Must Be a Gentleman
1. Oren F. Morton, A History of Rockbridge County, Virginia (Baltimore: Regional, 1980), 188–93; Jared Sparks, The Life of George Washington (Boston: Ferdinand Andrews, 1839), 384; Archibald Alexander, Address Delivered Before the Alumni Association of Washington College, Virginia, on Commencement Day, June 29, 1843 (Lexington, Va.: R. H. Glass, 1843), 11–12.
2. The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge for the Year 1859, 201–2; Washington College Records of Board of Trustees, Feb. 21, 1845–Sept. 1873, 104, 118, 123, 140–41, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; Scott, “Some Personal Memories of General Robert E. Lee,” 283; Morton, History of Rockbridge County, 126–27; Charles A. Bodie, Remarkable Rockbridge: The Story of Rockbridge County, Virginia (Lexington, Va.: Rockbridge County Historical Society, 2011), 181; Committee on Finance to the Board of Trustees, July 1, 1865, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; Fishwick, Lee After the War, 142–43; “James Jones White and Carter Johns Harris,” Alumni Bulletin of the University of Virginia 1 (Nov. 1894): 83–84; “Professor John L. Campbell,” Journal of Education for Home and School 8 (March 1886): 9. The University of Virginia’s highest prewar enrollment occurred in 1856, when it counted 645 students. See Virginius Dabney, Mr. Jefferson’s University: A History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1981), 24.
3. Washington College Trustee Minute Book, Aug. 4, 1865, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; Alexander L. Nelson, “How Lee Became a College President,” in General Robert E. Lee After Appomattox, ed. F. L. Riley (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 1–3; Ollinger Crenshaw, General Lee’s College: The Rise and Growth of Washington and Lee University (New York: Random House, 1969), 146; Preston, Lee: West Point and Lexington, 50–51.
4. Brockenbrough to REL, Aug. 10, 1865, in Allen W. Moger, “Letters to General Lee After the War,” VMHB 64 (1956): 45; “Capt. Edmund Randolph Cocke,” Confederate Veteran, June 1922, 226.
5. REL to the Trustees of Washington College, Aug. 24, 1865, in Robert E. Lee Jr., Recollections and Letters, 181–82; Washington College Trustee Minute Book, Aug. 4, 1865, 149, and Washington College Records of Board of Trustees, Feb. 21, 1845–Sept. 1873, Sept. 20 and Oct. 2, 1865, 152, 153–54, 165–66, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; Jones, Personal Reminiscences, 86; MCL to Emily Mason, in MacDonald, Mrs. Robert E. Lee, 204.
6. “Gen. Lee Accepts the College Presidency,” Charleston Daily News, Sept. 12, 1865; “Robert E. Lee in a New Role,” New-York Tribune, Oct. 3, 1865; “Gen. Lee and Washington College,” Alexandria Gazette, Sept. 5, 1865; Trimble to Brockenbrough, Sept. 7, 1865, Washington College Trustee Minute Book, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; Jones, Personal Reminiscences, 284–85.
7. REL to Leyburn, in Jones, Personal Reminiscences, 214; Lee to Minor, Jan. 17, 1867, Lee Letterbook 1 and Memorandum Book (Oct. 1865), Special Collections, Leyburn Library; E. S. Joynes, “General Robert E. Lee as College President,” in Riley, General Robert E. Lee After Appomattox, 20; Thomas, Robert E. Lee, 399.
8. M. W. Humphreys, “Reminiscences of General Lee as President of Washington College,” in Riley, General Robert E. Lee After Appomattox, 38; Michael David Cohen, Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 61–65; REL to Edward Lee Childe, Jan. 22, 1867, and July 10, 1868, duPont Library; REL to W. W. Corcoran, Aug. 23 and Sept. 23, 1870, W. W. Corcoran Papers, Library of Congress; REL, “Letters of Gen. R. E. Lee,” SHSP 7 (March 1879): 154; Flood, Lee: The Last Years, 156; Fishwick, Lee After the War, 179; Preston, Lee: West Point and Lexington, 78–79.
9. Washington College Records of Board of Trustees, Feb. 21, 1845–Sept. 1873, Oct. 24, 1865, and April 26, 1866, 167–68, 177, and REL to the Washington College Board of Trustees, Jan. 9, 1869, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; Goode, Recollections of a Lifetime, 27; Preston, Lee: West Point and Lexington, 61–62; Flood, Lee: The Last Years, 111, 133.
10. REL to J. B. Baldwin and M. S. Harmon, Nov. 22, 1865, to S. G. Cabell and A. A. Graham, Dec. 15, 1865, and to James J. Wall, Oct. 1865, Lee Letterbook 1, and McCormick to Brockenbrough, Jan. 1, 1865, Washington College Trustee Minute Book, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; Sean M. Heuvel and Lisa L. Heuvel, The College of William and Mary in the Civil War (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2013), 135, 138, 153, 159; REL to McCormick, Nov. 28, 1865, LFDA/duPont Library; Crenshaw, General Lee’s College, 170.
11. REL to Newcomb, March 22, 1866, in Jones, Personal Reminiscences, 245; Franklin Parker, “Robert E. Lee, George Peabody, and Sectional Reunion,” Peabody Journal of Education 78 (2003): 91–97; “To the Hon. John W. Brockenbrough,” April 26, 1866, and June 19, 1867, Washington College Trustee Minute Book, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; Catharine Roach, “Robert E. Lee’s Financial Impact on Washington College,” Washington and Lee Spectator (Fall 2014): 9; “Education in the South,” New York Times, March 3, 1868.
12. M. H. Thomas, “Professor McCulloh of Princeton, Columbia, and Points South,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 9 (Nov. 1947): 17–29; Jane Singer, The Confederate Dirty War: Arson, Bombings, Assassination, and Plots for Chemical and Germ Attacks on the Union (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005), 100–116; Donald W. Gunter, “William Allan,” Dictionary of Virginia Biography, ed. J. T. Kneebone et al. (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2006), 1:70–71; “Rev. John Lycan Kirkpatrick,” in Encyclopaedia of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, ed. Alfred Nevin (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Encyclopedia, 1884), 1172–73.
13. Scott, “Some Personal Memories of General Robert E. Lee,” 283; REL to Churchill S. Gibson, Jan. 24, 1866, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; Cox, Religious Life of Robert E. Lee, 215; REL to Ann Upshur Jones, June 24, 1867, Robert E. Lee Letterbook 1, Special Collections, Leyburn Library.
14. REL to the Ministers of the Baptist, Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian Churches in Lexington, Va., Sept. 11, 1869, and Sept. 12, 1870, Robert E. Lee Letterbook 1, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; Kirkpatrick, in Jones, Personal Reminiscences, 112, 424.
15. “General Lee’s College: The University of Southern Principles,” New York Sun, Oct. 26, 1869; Sara Mordecai to Lee, April 18, 1866, and Hill to Brockenbrough, Feb. 8, 1866, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; Hal Bridges, Lee’s Maverick General: Daniel Harvey Hill (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 23; see also Hal Bridges, ed., “A Lee Letter on the ‘Lost Dispatch’ and the Maryland Campaign of 1862,” VMHB, April 1958, 164–66.
16. REL, Report to the Board of Trustees, June 1866, June 19, 1867, June 16, 1868, June 22, 1869, Washington College Trustee Minute Book, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; Richmond Times, Aug. 31, 1866; Heuvel and Heuvel, College of William and Mary, 147; Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1871 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1871), 16, 648–49; The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1892 (New York: Press Publishing), 175; The World Almanac and Encyclopedia (New York: Press Publishing, 1914), 588; Dabney, Mr. Jefferson’s University, 28; J. Rainey to brother, Feb. 27, 1868, in J. Rainey Correspondence, Library of Congress. Two of Breckinridge’s sons, Clifton and Owen, were attending Washington College. See REL to Breckinridge, June 26, 1869, in Breckinridge Family Papers, Library of Congress.
17. REL to Messrs. Edwards Lee & Co., Sept. 25, 1868, and to J. Weatherby & Sons, July 8, 1868, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; Edward Joynes, “General Lee, as a College President,” University Monthly: A Journal of School and Home Education 1 (March 1871): 5.
18. John B. Collyar, “A College Boy’s Observation of General Lee,” in Riley, Robert E. Lee After Appomattox, 66; S. H. Chester memoir, in Henry Boley, Lexington in Old Virginia (Richmond: Garrett & Massie, 1936), 121; REL to Wesley E. Gatewood, June 2, 1866, at Bruce Gimelson Autographs, www.brucegimelson.com/content.asp?c=1; grade report for W. S. Graves, Feb. 8, 1868, Robert E. Lee Letterbook 2, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; REL to Colonel J. W. Lapsley, June 5, 1866, in Jones, Personal Reminiscences, 253.
19. REL to H. S. Moss, Jan. 31, 1867, and Lee to Mrs. E. H. Bierly, April 6, 1868, Robert E. Lee Letterbook 2, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; John William Jones, Christ in the Camp; or, Religion in Lee’s Army (Richmond: B. F. Johnson, 1887), 66.
20. M. Le B—— to Johnson, Oct. 1, 1865, in Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational, and Industrial, 1865 to the Present Time, ed. W. L. Fleming (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clarke, 1906), 1:36; Bright to Sumner, Oct. 20, 1865, in “The Bright-Sumner Letters, 1862–1872,” ed. J. F. Rhodes, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1913), 12:145; Hugh Moran to Mrs. N. M. Moran, Feb. 26, 1868, Hugh A. Moran Papers, Special Collections, Leyburn Library.
21. “General Lee’s College: The University of Southern Principles”; David W. Coffey, “Reconstruction and Redemption in Lexington,” Proceedings of the Rockbridge Historical Society 12 (1995–2002): 275, 279; John M. McClure, “The Freedmen’s Bureau School in Lexington Versus ‘General Lee’s Boys,’ ” in Wallenstein and Wyatt-Brown, Virginia’s Civil War, 189; Freeman, R. E. Lee, 4:354–55.
22. “Records Relating to Murders and Outrages,” Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865–1869, National Archives Microfilm Publication No. 1048, roll 59; Bodie, Remarkable Rockbridge, 191, 193; McClure, “Freedmen’s Bureau School,” 193–94; “The Lexington Outrage,” Staunton Spectator, May 19, 1868; “Letter from Lexington,” Richmond Dispatch, Sept. 18, 1868; Flood, Lee: The Last Years, 183–84.
23. “General Lee’s College,” New York Independent, April 2, 1868; College Courant, April 8, 1868; Chicago Tribune, April 6, 1868; “Alleged Outrage at Lynchburg, Va.,” New-York Tribune, April 20, 1868; Freeman, R. E. Lee, 4:345–48; McClure, “Freedmen’s Bureau School,” 194–95; Bodie, Remarkable Rockbridge, 195; David W. Coffey, “Reconstruction and Redemption in Lexington,” in After the Backcountry: Rural Life in the Great Valley of Virginia, 1800–1900, ed. Kenneth E. Koons and Warren R. Hofstra (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), 218; Preston, Lee: West Point and Lexington, 76, 78–79, 84–86; Crenshaw, General Lee’s College, 154.
24. REL to Sistare, April 10, 1868, to Captain J. W. Sharp, April 13, 1867, to Wagner, May 4 and 11, 1868, to G. B. Strickler, May 10, 1868, to F. B. Lewis, May 18, 1868, to Colonel John W. Jordan, Nov. 20, 1868, in Robert E. Lee Jr., Recollections and Letters, 299–300; Jones, Life and Letters, 429; Jones, Personal Reminiscences, 99; Robert E. Lee Letterbook 2, Special Collections, Leyburn Library.
25. REL to Mrs. E. Neel, Jan. 29, 1869, Robert E. Lee Letterbook 2, Special Collections, Leyburn Library; MCL, in Pryor, Six Encounters with Lincoln, 278.
26. REL to William S. Rosecrans, Aug. 26, 1868, Staunton Valley Spirit, Sept. 16, 1868; REL to Edward Lee Childe, Jan. 16, 1868, duPont Library; REL to Cousin Ellen, Feb. 22, 1867, Robert E. Lee Collection, Missouri Historical Society Archives; William Preston Johnston, “Memoranda of Conversations with General R. E. Lee,” in Gallagher, Lee the Soldier, 30; REL to Robert E. Lee Jr., March 12, 1868, in Robert E. Lee Jr., Recollections and Letters, 306; Crenshaw, General Lee’s College, 167. Forty years after Appomattox, “Col. T. L. Broun, of Charleston, W. Va.,” told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that “two months after the evacuation of Richmond,” he had been present in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church for Sunday services when, at the invitation to the Eucharist, the white congregation was shocked to see “a tall, well dressed negro man; very black…with an air of military authority,” come forward to the altar rail (“Negro Communed at St. Paul’s Church,” April 16, 1905). This was interpreted by the congregation as a deliberate provocation by “the Federal authorities, to offensively humiliate them.” But Robert E. Lee saved the day by going forward to the rail himself “and reverently knelt down to partake of the communion, and not far from where the negro was.” This was interpreted by the Times-Dispatch as a token of genteel defiance, “a grand exhibition of superiority shown by a true Christian and great soldier under the most trying offensive circumstances.” The story was repeated several months later in the August issue of Confederate Veteran (p. 360), although the date now became a question. In the Times-Dispatch article, Broun placed the timing of the event as “two months after the evacuation of Richmond,” which would have been June 1865, but he instead identified that moment as “June 1866.” The Confederate Veteran version presents the date firmly as “June, 1865.” Thomas Broun was a lawyer and Confederate veteran—in fact, it was Broun who sold Traveller to Lee in 1862—but his story would eventually be taken up as evidence that Lee was attempting to promote racial reconciliation in Virginia by this gesture. That was certainly not Broun’s intention, but it became the point of how the story was told in Flood, Lee: The Last Years, 65–66, and Thomas, Robert E. Lee, 19, and in a more muted fashion by David Cox in Religious Life of Robert E. Lee, 253.
The reliability of Broun’s story cannot be rated very highly. The reminiscence was separated by four decades from the event it purported to describe; no subsequent witness ever stepped forward to corroborate it; there is no clue to the identity of the black communicant; and the original dating in the Times-Dispatch article (as June 1866) would have made it unlikely that either Broun or Lee would have been in Richmond. The officiating clergyman, Charles Minnigerode, left no memoir that might have described this event, nor is there any reference to it in the lengthy memorial essay written after his death in the Southern Churchman, “The Late Rev. Dr. Minnigerode,” Oct. 27, 1894, 523–24, or in a biographical feature that appeared in the Times-Dispatch: “Immigrant Boy to St. Paul’s Rector,” Nov. 11, 1934. There is also no mention of it in the Richmond newspapers for either June 1865 or June 1866.
Chapter Twenty: From the Great Deep to the Great Deep He Goes
1. REL to Philip Slaughter, Aug. 31, 1865, LFDA/duPont Library; REL to Early, March 16, 1866, and to Varina Davis, Feb. 23, 1866, and Edmund Randolph Cocke to Robert E. Lee Jr., in Robert E. Lee Jr., Recollections and Letters, 221–23; REL to Richard L. Maury, July 31, 1865, to Matthew F. Maury, Sept. 3, 1865, and to Cadmus Wilcox, Dec. 23, 1865, in Jones, Personal Reminiscences, 196–97; REL to Thomas L. Rosser, Dec. 13, 1866, Robert E. Lee Papers, Small Special Collections Library.
2. REL to Early, March 15, 1866, in Jubal Anderson Early Papers, Library of Congress; Testimony of Robert E. Lee, Feb. 17, 1866, in Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction at the First Session, Thirty-Ninth Congress (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1866), 2:130; “Robert E. Lee Before the Reconstruction Committee,” New York Daily Herald, Feb. 18, 1866; Thomas, Robert E. Lee, 381.
