Note 24 — Chapter XVI
Reading edition
Lee at Arlington.—Visitors to this noted place are so frequent that his appearance attracted no attention. He walked through the dreary hall, and looked in on the wide, vacant rooms, and passing to the front, stood for some time gazing out over the beautiful panorama, with its one great feature, the new dome of the old capitol, surmounted by a bronze statue of Liberty armed, and with her back to him, gazing seaward.
From this he passed to the garden, and looked over the line of the officers' graves that bound its sides, saw the dying flowers and wilted borders and leaf strewn walks, and continuing after a slight pause, he stopped on the edge of the field where the sixteen thousand Union soldiers lie buried in lines, as if they had lain down after a review to be interred in their places. Some negroes were at work here raking up the falling leaves, and one old man stopped suddenly and stared at the visitor as if struck mute with astonishment. He continued to gaze in this way until the stranger, walking slowly, regained his horse and rode away, when he dropped his rake and said to his companions: "Shuah as de Lord, men, dat was ole Massa Lee!"
One hastens to imagine the thoughts and feelings that must have agitated this fallen chief as he stood thus, like Marius amid the ruins of Carthage, on the one spot of all others, to realize the fact of the Lost Cause and its eventful history. About him were the scenes of his youth, the home of his honored manhood, the scenery that gave beauty to the peaceful joys of domestic life. They were nearly all the same, and yet between then and now, came the fierce war, the huge campaigns and hundred battles loud with the roar of mouthing cannons and rattling musketry, and stained into history by the blood of thousands, the smoke of burning houses, the devastation of wide States, and the desolation of the households, and all in vain. He stood there, old before his time, the nationality so fiercely struggled for, unrecognized; the great confederacy a dream, his home a grave-yard, and the capitol he sought to destroy grown to twice its size, with the bronze goddess gazing calmly to the East.—Correspondence of the Cincinnati Commercial, 1866.