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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 September 2014
This essay explains the surprising set of circumstances surrounding perhaps the best-known quotation commonly attributed to Robert E. Lee (“Duty is the sublimest word in the English language”) and explains several significant things about the famous quotation and its broader significance: (1) Lee never said any such thing. (2) The famous line appears in a forged letter. (3) It is quite likely that a Union soldier forged the letter when the US Army occupied Lee's Arlington, Virginia estate during the American Civil War. (4) The phony quotation also shows up in an amazing range of sources, from academic books and scholarly journals, to Forbes magazine, to legal briefs and judicial decisions, to speeches by major political figures. (5) Although at one point early in the twentieth century it was fairly widely known that the letter was a forgery, the bogus quotation persists in widespread usage as something like a southern (and, perhaps surprisingly, a national) equivalent of George Washington's apocryphal “I cannot tell a lie.” (6) The long, strange career of this bogus quotation has larger implications for professional and general conversations about Lee, the Civil War, and American cultural memory.
1 “FORGED LETTER WITH LEE'S NAME; Expert Investigation Shows the Document Sold in London Was Not Written by Confederate General,” New York Times, 11 Nov. 1917, p. 84.
2 Southall Freeman, Douglas, R. E. Lee: A Biography, Volume I (New York and London: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), 316Google Scholar n. 47.
3 Lawton, Christopher R., “Constructing the Cause, Bridging the Divide: Lee's Tomb at Washington's College,” Southern Cultures, 15, 2 (2009), 5–39, 6Google Scholar.
4 Gerald R. Ford, “Remarks in New Orleans at Groundbreaking Ceremonies for the F. Edward Hebert Library,” in The American Presidency Project: The Public Papers of President Gerald R. Ford, at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=4857.
5 Fellman, Michael, “Struggling with Robert E. Lee,” Southern Cultures, 8, 3 (2002), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foster, Gaines M., Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South 1865 to 1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 6–17, 51Google Scholar; Horwitz, Tony, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York: Random House, 1998), 269Google Scholar.
6 Shelby Foote to Walker Percy, 1955, in The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy, ed. Jay Tolson, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 99.
7 Thomas, Emory, Robert E. Lee: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 19, 151Google Scholar.
8 Nolan, Alan T., Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 124Google Scholar, 53, 55–56, 125.
9 Ibid., 52; Pryor, Elizabeth Brown, “Robert E. Lee's ‘Severest Struggle,’” American Heritage, 58, 3 (2008), 18–25Google Scholar; Pryor, , Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters (New York: Viking, 2007), 300Google Scholar.
10 Nolan, 6–7, 153–54.
11 Fellman, 9; Nolan, 8.
12 Nolan, 24, 317 n. 1.
13 Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 109Google Scholar.
14 Thomas, 417.
15 Auden, W. H., “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” in Auden, , Selected Poems (New York: Random House, 1989), 81Google Scholar; Auden, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” in ibid., 93.
16 Kreyling, Michael, Figures of the Hero in Southern Narrative (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 51Google Scholar; Woodward, C. Vann, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 264Google Scholar.
17 Nolan, 171–73.
18 Horwitz, Confederates, 156; Kreyling, 120, 117.
19 Horwitz, 265.
20 Nolan, 127.
21 Donaldson, Susan V., “Tate's Profession of Letters in the South,” in Goodwin Jones, Anne and Donaldson, Susan V., eds., Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 492–518, 507Google Scholar.
22 Warren, Robert Penn, Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), xiiiGoogle Scholar. This is the 1979 version of Brother to Dragons, which is markedly different from the 1953 version.
23 Warren, , The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial (New York: Random House, 1961), 54–55Google Scholar.
24 Ibid., 58–9.
25 Ibid., 75.
26 Ibid., 60.
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