If Mrs. Lee's conversation, as above supposed, was really the source of Dr. Jones' assertion concerning the Duty Sentence, this would explain the strange indefiniteness of the phrase "to his son"; and the positiveness of his statement, for which he was unwilling to give Mrs. Lee as his authority. But every lawyer knows the danger of such evidence. Dr. Jones may not have remembered Mrs. Lee's precise words. He may not have understood her correctly, and may have taken her words more strongly than she intended. It is not likely that Mrs. Lee would have declared that General Lee did write such a sentence, unless she had more definite knowledge than is indicated by the vague description, "to his son."[1]
XII.
But apart from Dr. Jones' assertion (whatever may have been its authority), the question recurs: May not General Lee have written the Duty Sentence, in some letter, to somebody? Undoubtedly he may have done so; and so may Stonewall Jackson or Jefferson Davis; and so may any other man of high character and devotion to duty. It is, of course, impossible to prove a negative. But it must be remembered that when The Duty
- ↑ It should be borne in mind that the suggestion above that Dr. Jones had, or supposed he had, the authority of Mrs. Lee for his statement, twice repeated, that General Lee did write the Duty Sentence "to his son," is mere surmise, without a particle of evidence to sustain it. This statement of Dr. Jones, in its emphatic form, is the unsolved mystery connected with The Duty Letter.
Dr. Jones was an honest, sincere man (the writer knew him for many years), and he would not have made the statement unless he believed it to be true. But what was the ground of his belief? It is astonishing, considering the importance attached to the Duty Sentence, that no one ever wrote (so far as I know) to Dr. Jones, demanding that he publish the reasons for his assertion. That he did not give them in his lost letter, proving by exhaustive argument that the remainder of The Duty Letter was spurious, is indicated by the fact that he did not vouchsafe any reasons in his second book (published in 1906, a few years before his death), but contented himself with the former statement—"in a letter to his son."
We have, however, the authority of his son, Rev. Dr. E. Pendleton Jones, for the statement (already quoted): "I know that my father always said that the quotation, 'Duty is the sublimest word in the English language,' was not written in a letter to General Custis Lee, but was written to another son, on another occasion. I have never been able to find that letter." (Italics mine.)
