The late commander-in-chief of the British armies has recently written of our great leader, that "in a long and varied life of wandering, I have" (he says) "only met two men whom I prized as being above all the world I have ever known, and the greater of these two was General Lee, America's greatest man, as I understand history."
The present Chief Magistrate of this country wrote twelve years ago, that "the world has never seen better soldiers than those who followed Lee, and that their leader will undoubtedly rank as, without any exception, the greatest of all great captains that the English-speaking people have brought forth." See Life of Benton, page 38.
Is it a matter of surprise, then, that the same hand should have recently written:
"I am extremely proud of the fact that one of my uncles was an admiral in the Confederate Navy, and that another fired the last gun fired aboard the Alabama. I think" (he says) "the time has now come when we can, all of us, be proud of the valor shown on both sides in the civil war."
If President Roosevelt really believed that his uncles were ever "rebels" and "traitors," would he be "extremely proud" of that fact? Would he be proud to be the nephew of Benedict Arnold? No; and no man at the North who knows anything of the formation of this Government believes for a moment that any Confederate soldier was a "rebel" or "traitor," or that the war on our part was a "Rebellion." Even Goldwin Smith, the harshest and most unjust historian to the South, who has ever written about the war (as demonstrated by our distinguished Past Grand Commander, Captain Cussons), says:
"The Southern leaders ought not to have been treated as rebels," for, says he, "Secession was not a rebellion."
And so we say the time has come when these intended opprobrious epithets should cease to be used. But whether called "rebels" or not, the Confederate soldier has nothing to he ashamed of. Can the soldiers of the Federal armies read this record and say the same?
