The dearth of necessaries, save corn and bacon, became desperate.  Salt and wheat bread were rare luxuries.  In 1864 a suit of jean cost $600, a spool of cotton $30, a pound of bacon $15.  It should, of course, be borne in mind that these high prices in part represented the depreciation of Confederate paper money.  Drastic drafting and the arming of negroes could avail little for lack of accoutrements and food.  Thus Lee’s capitulation at Appomattox (April 9, 1865) represents less a defeat of his army than the breakdown of the Confederacy at large.  So true and impressive is this that reflection upon it makes the last year of Lee’s commandership seem peculiarly glorious.  Only by rarest genius, surely, were those dazzling tactics, that lynx-eyed, sleepless watchfulness, that superhuman patience and superhuman valor, protracted, incessant for a whole year, keeping intact, victorious, and full of inspiration that gray line, ever longer, ever thinner, of men outnumbered two, then three, and at last five to one, whose food and clothing grew scantier with the days, while the bounties of a continent replenished their opponents,—­keeping that tenuous line unbroken till very starvation unfitted soldiers to handle muskets which must be used empty if at all, because ammunition was spent!  And when we recall that all this was accomplished not because the Union army was cowardly, ill-led, or asleep, but in spite of Grant’s relentless push and an ably led army as brave, wary, and determined as ever marched:  let us ask critics versed in the history of war, if books tell of generalship more complete than this!

Lee’s military conduct revealed, it must be admitted, one weakness, that of undue leniency toward slack, dilatory, and opinionated subordinates.  This was, however, only in part Lee’s personal fault.  Mainly it was the military counterpart of the rope-of-sand infirmity inherent in a Confederacy which in every possible way deified the individual State and snubbed the central power.  Without jeopardizing the Confederacy, Lee could not at Gettysburg deal with Longstreet as Grant did with Warren at Five Forks, or as Sherman did with Palmer in North Carolina.  It seems that Lee’s orders to his main subordinates were habitually of the nature of requests.  Yet what obedience was not accorded him in spite of this!

Most striking among the characteristics of General Lee which made him so successful was his exalted and unmatched excellence as a man, his unselfishness, sweetness, gentleness, patience, love of justice, and general elevation of soul.  Lee much loved to quote Sir William Hamilton’s words:  “On earth nothing great but man:  in man nothing great but mind.”  He always added, however:  “In mind nothing great save devotion to truth and duty.”  Though a soldier, and at last very eminent as a soldier, he retained from the beginning to the end of his career the entire temper and character of an ideal civilian.  He did not sink the man in the military man.  He had all a soldier’s virtues, the “chevalier without fear and without reproach,” but he was glorified by a whole galaxy of excellences which soldiers too often lack.  He was pure of speech and of habit, never intemperate, never obscene, never profane, never irreverent.  In domestic life he was an absolute model.  Lofty command did not make him vain.