that such genuine letters were left at Arlington, accessible to all comers, and (2) that they contained allusions, at least, to the two topics, Frankness and Duty, treated of in The Duty Letter. We shall now show that both assumptions are true.
1. I have before me the dates of a number of letters written to G. W. Custis Lee by General Lee, which were taken from Arlington, during the war, and which have since been returned to General Custis Lee, or to Miss Mary Lee, General Lee's oldest daughter. They were all written in the years 1851 and 1852, some of them very near to the date of the forged letter, April 5, 1852.[1]
As recently as July 11, 1913, Mr. W. H. Hawkins, of Springfield, Massachusetts, returned to Miss Mary Lee four letters found by him, during the war, at Arlington. He gave this account of finding these letters, in a communication to the Times-Dispatch, offering to return them: "I found these letters on the walk, leading from the front to the rear, along one side of the Lee mansion, at Arlington, when my regiment was stationed in that vicinity, in the Spring of 1863." These letters were dated in 1851 and 1852; and one of them from General Lee to Custis Lee, was dated February 1, 1852, about two months before the date of the forged letter.[2]
- ↑ In the years 1851 and 1852, Custis Lee was a cadet at West Point. He entered the Academy in 1850, and graduated in 1854. The letters received by him, while a cadet, were, no doubt, brought to Arlington, and left there when, at the opening of the war, he resigned his commission and came South. The dates of these letters, so close to that of the forged letter, April 5, 1852, is a strong argument that this is the true date of The Duty Letter and that The Wrong Date Theory is untenable.
- ↑ I am indebted to Miss Mary Lee (letter to the writer August 10, 1913,) for this account of the letter by General Lee to Custis Lee, dated "Baltimore, February 1, 1852:" "He was then anticipating the return of Custis from West Point, on his furlough; but though he was stimulating him to be No. 1 in his class, (which he was), the word Duty was not mentioned." This stimulating Custis to be No. 1 in his class is the burden of several other letters by General Lee to him, written about this time.
It has been suggested that the original of The Duty Letter may be in existence, and may yet be returned to the Lee family. The same may be suggested of some letter containing the sentence, "Duty, then, is the sublimest word in our language." But the evidence is so strong
