EDITOR'S NOTE.
The Forged "Duty Letter" of General Lee.
Professor Charles A. Graves, at the meeting above, mentioned [Virginia State Bar Association, held at the White Sulphur Springs on August 4-6, 1915], "clinched the nail" which had been securely driven by his admirable article on the forged letter of General Lee, in which occurred the sentence, "Duty, then, is the sublimest word in our language," delivered at the 1914 meeting of the Association. The Association gladly gave him permission to print as a part of the proceedings of the 1915 meeting additional evidence establishing the forgery. This evidence consisted of a letter from Rev. J. William Jones, D. D., to the University Monthly, New York, of March, 1872, showing that the internal evidence of the letter itself proved it to be a forgery and that the entire Lee family so regarded it. In addition to this a trenchant editorial from the Richmond Examiner of December 17, 1864—worthy of the pen of the great John M. Daniel, though probably written by John Mitchel—showed up the inconsistencies of the author of this spurious epistle and how unworthy its "schoolmaster platitudes" were of our great Commander.
Why such a letter was ever forged is one of the mysteries of the case. And yet to us it seems that the "milk in the cocoanut" is to be easily found in the fact that the letter concludes with a high encomium upon the character of the "Old Puritan." To have this come from General Lee in the dark days of the war—to forge a tribute from this prince of Cavaliers to the dour Puritan, when Cavalier and Puritan were struggling upon the field of battle—this was the sole object, in our opinion, of the forger. His effort succeeded for awhile, but Professor Graves has thoroughly and completely made out his case, and this letter goes down to future generations with "forgery" stamped upon it as plainly as the word used to be burnt into the very fibre of forged bank notes.
