"It is not even the Lee of Gettysburg who moves us today, the Lee who would meet Pickett after it was over, all over, and say only: "All this has been my fault." Politic leaders, with one eye on winning the next election and the other on writing their memoirs, don't say such things now. Nor did they then. Only Lee took responsibility. Only Lee did not write his memoirs.
It is not the storybook Lee who stills us this day every year, but the man who inspired the stories. Not the marble man on the pedestal, the sculpted Lee of statuary and a thousand Confederate Memorial Day speeches, but the solitary, singular Lee -- the Lee who would follow wherever Duty led. And we in turn would follow him. Because he was: Lee. And still is."
The Shattered Glass: On Lee's Birthday, 2011
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