Letter is proved a forgery, the Duty Sentence shares its fate, unless it can be found elsewhere in General Lee's writings. But this has not been done. General Lee speaks often of duty, but always in plain, unadorned language. Why suppose that, on this occasion, he changed his style, and employed rhetoric and the superlative? The burden of proof rests heavily on those, who conceding The Duty Letter to be a forgery, would, nevertheless, save the Duty Sentence. Up to the present time, not a scintilla of evidence, if we except Dr. Jones' ipse dixit, has been produced even tending to prove that General Lee ever wrote the sentence, "Duty, then, is the sublimest word in our language."[1]
- ↑ At the conclusion of the discussion of the authenticity of The Duty Letter, inquiry may be made as to the mode in which it has been dealt with by General Lee's biographers. Some of them, notably General Fitzhugh Lee, in his "General Lee," published in 1894, and Captain Robert E. Lee, in "Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee," published in 1904, have ignored The Duty Letter, not mentioning it, nor giving any reasons for its omission. Why Captain Lee omitted The Duty Letter we now know from his letter to the writer, quoted from on a former page. Presumably, General Fitzhugh Lee omitted it for the same reason, viz: doubt as to its genuineness.
On the other hand, the only biographer of General Lee who has printed The Duty Letter in full is Edmund Jennings Lee, M. D., in his "Lee of Virginia," published in 1895, a genealogy of the Lee family, with which he was connected. He pronounces The Duty Letter (p. 432) "a grand letter," in blissful ignorance, apparently, that it had been declared by Dr. Jones, as far back as 1874, "unquestionably spurious." Whether he was ignorant of this condemnation, or chose to ignore it because Dr. Jones gave no reasons, we have no means of knowing.
Other biographers of General Lee who have noticed The Duty Letter have merely referred to it, or printed it in part only; and, with the exception of Dr. Bradford and Dr. Thomas Nelson Page, with no intimation that its genuineness had been questioned. Dr. Bradford, in his "Lee the American," published in 1912, follows Dr. Jones, both as to the spuriousness of The Duty Letter as a whole (p. 211) and the genuineness of the Duty Sentence (p. 47). Dr. Page, in his "Robert E. Lee, Man and Soldier," published in 1911, after summarizing the first three sentences of The Duty Letter, printed the remainder in his text, but appended a footnote as follows (p. 35): "It is said that this letter
"My father always said." So Dr. Jones did discuss the Duty Sentence with his sons. But why make such a mystery of it? Why not say to what son (General W. H. F. Lee was no doubt meant), instead of "to his son"? And why not tell his own sons where the letter could be found, if he knew; and if not, on what authority he had asserted its existence? What is the meaning of it all? To the writer it is bewildering. It would seem probable, if Mrs. Lee was the authority, that she requested that her name be not used; and that Dr. Jones kept faith with her to the end.
