Lee The Matchless Hero

"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions."
--James Madison
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A venerated American hero, General Lee’s abilities are legendary and even his adversaries would praise him. General Granville Dodge of the Northern military said that Lee’s “unfailing equipoise and sturdy courage prolonged the life of the Confederacy from month to month [and a] dispassionate judgment places Robert E. Lee among the greatest generals of modern times.”

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
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Lee the Matchless American Hero:

“In discussing Pompey’s greatness on the field of battle, Cicero, a master of ordered thought, asserts that four qualities are united in supreme military chieftains. These, as he thinks, are…Military knowledge…Valor…Authority…Good fortune. No soldiers will long fight whole-heartedly for an unlucky chief. Did Lee possess these traits?

Knowledge? How otherwise, with an army necessarily diminishing, did he compel President Lincoln to try McClellan, Halleck, Pope, Burnside, Hooker, Meade, Grant in an effort to match him in the field, and this, too, when these capable officers excelled him in every material equipment of war?

Valor? It is needed only to recall how, with McClellan still lying at the doors of Richmond, Lee sent off Jackson to jar Pope’s complacency and then followed himself with the larger part of his army to complete Jackson’s task, or how, when fighting in the ratio of only two to five, he divided his army at Chancellorsville and overthrew the self-sufficient Hooker.

The last quality mentioned by Cicero, good fortune, is a relative term. Although Lee was fought to a standstill at Sharpsburg, and baffled at Gettysburg, the admiration, even veneration, of his soldiers was undiminished. They still believed that, while circumstances might prove too much for him, no skill of an antagonist would ever surpass his battlefield strategy.

Such was the chieftain the North Carolina troops, in common with the soldiers of the South, were henceforth to follow until Appomattox came. Bomb-proof critics might assail him with shallow criticisms, but the “hardiest troops that ever laughed at hunger, cold or danger,” never wavered in their conviction that their leader was matchless.”

(The History of North Carolina in the War Between the States, Volume II, Bethel to Sharpsburg,
Daniel Harvey Hill, Edwards & Broughton, 1926, pp. 91-92)
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Lee The Matchless Hero

President Jefferson Davis, Died 6 December 1889

Jefferson Davis Funeral Richmond, Virginia - May 31, 1893
Richmonders lined the streets to watch the procession and over twenty thousand gathered at Hollywood Cemetery to witness the burial
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“The lamp of life waned low as the hour of midnight arrived; nor did it flicker into the brightness of consciousness at any time. Eagerly, yet tenderly, the watchers gazed at the face of the dying chieftain. His face, always calm and pale, gained additional pallor, and at a quarter to 1 o’clock of the morning of the 6^th day of December death came to the venerable leader.

There was nothing remarkable about the death-bed scene. The departure of the spirit was gentle and utterly painless. There were no dry eyes in the little assembly about the bed, and every heart bled with the anguish which found vent in Mrs. Davis’s sobs and cries.”

The Times-Democrat gave the following account of the closing scene: At 12:45 o’clock this morning Hon. Jefferson Davis, ex-President of the Confederate States, passed away at the residence of Associate Justice Charles E. Fenner. Only once did he waver in his belief that his case showed no improvement, and that was at an early hour yesterday morning, when he playfully remarked to Mr. Payne: “I am afraid that I shall be compelled to agree with the doctors for once, and admit that I am a little better.” At 7 o’clock Mrs. Davis administered some medicine, but the ex-President declined to receive the whole dose. She urged upon his the necessity of taking the remainder, but putting it aside, with the gentlest of gestures whispered,

“Pray, excuse me.” These were his last words.”

The Daily States said in its editorial:

“Throughout all the South there are lamentations and tears; in every country on the globe where there are lovers of liberty there is mourning; wherever there are men who admire heroic patriotism, dauntless resolution, fortitude, or intellectual power and supremacy, there is sincere sorrowing. The beloved of our land, the unfaltering upholder of constitutional liberty…is no more…” “Jefferson Davis is dead; but the principles for which he struggled, for the vindication of which he devoted his life, for which he suffered defeat, and unto which he clung unto death, still live. The fanatical howlings of the abolitionists, the tumult and thunders of civil war, the fierce mouthings of the organizers of reconstruction, and reconstruction itself, that black and foul disgrace of humanity, are all departed, sunk into silence like a tavern brawl, but the constitutional principles upon which the Confederacy was founded and for which Jefferson Davis spoke and struggled, for which he gave life and fortune, still survive in all their living power; and when they shall have been, if ever, really destroyed, this Republic will be transformed into one of the most oppressive and offensive oligarchies that has ever arisen amongst the civilized nations of the earth.”

The Times-Democrat of the 10^th had this editorial:

“If there was ever the shadow of doubt in the minds of the people of the United States of the hold of Jefferson Davis upon the hearts of the Southern people that doubt has been removed. From city and country, from every nook and hamlet, have come expressions of profoundest sorrow over his death; of grief at the passing away of the great Confederate chieftain. They turned to him as the Mussulman to his Mecca---the shrine at which all true Southern-born should worship. There has never been any division of sentiment as to the greatness of Jefferson Davis. He has always been the hero of his people---their best beloved. From the day that Lee laid down his arms at Appomattox to the hour of Jefferson Davis’s death the Southern people look upon the ex-President of the Confederacy as the embodiment of all that was grand and glorious in the Lost Cause. Standing alone as a citizen without the power to exercise his citizenship, the last surviving victim of sectional hate and malevolence, he was an exile while on the soil of his native land and in the midst of his own people. Jefferson Davis will go to the grave bathed in a people’s tears.”

(The Memorial Volume of Jefferson Davis, J.W. Jones, 1889, pp.473-509)

Via Bernhard

Hampton Author Files Suit To Stop Revision Of Controversial History Textbook

"Information about African American soldiers deserves to be in there," she said in an interview Thursday after filing the suit. "To eliminate the passage totally was wrong. To not consult an African American scholar and form a committee to revise the passage was wrong."

WBTS Dolls Get X-Rayed For Signs Of Quinine/Morphine

"Two Civil War-era dolls thought to have been used to smuggle medicine past Union blockades were X-rayed Wednesday, disclosing hollowed papier-mache heads that once could have contained quinine or morphine for wounded or malaria-stricken Confederate troops."

Via daughter Bonnie

Court To Hear SC Confederate Clothing Case

"A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond will hear arguments Wednesday in the case of Candice Hardwick, who claims the Latta School District violated her free-speech rights by prohibiting her from wearing shirts depicting the Confederate battle flag."

Via Jamey, Sam Davis Youth Camp

10 Southern Pictures 1900-1939

Here.

Home For Confederate Women & Captain Sallie Tompkins

(I visited the ladies at the home in the eighties and it was an absolutely delightful visit. I particularly remember the beautiful, grand furniture. Legally the home was supposed to stay open until the last died, but the crooked powers to be decided to move the remaining few to another location. Criminals all. BT) See the links HERE.

Rare Footage Of Confederate Veterans

HERE. Plus Home For Confederate Women & Captain Sallie Tompkins HERE.