It was in this supreme kind of boldness that Robert Lee pre-eminently excelled.  Cautious always, he still took risks and responsibilities which common generals would not have dared to take; and when he had assumed these, his mighty will forbade him to sink under the load.  The braying of bitter critics, the obloquy of men who should have supported him, the shots from behind, dismayed him no more than did Burnside’s cannon at Fredericksburg.  On he pressed, stout as a Titan, relentless as fate.  What time bravest hearts failed at victory’s delay, this Dreadnaught rose to his best, and furnished courage for the whole Confederacy.

Lee’s campaigns and battles “exhibit the triumph of profound intelligence, of calculation, and of well-employed force over numbers and disunited counsels.”

Lee always manoeuvred; he never merely “pitched in.”  As he right-flanked McClellan, so both at Manassas and at Chantilly he right-flanked Pope,—­all three times using for the work Jackson, the tireless and the terrible.  At Second Bull Run, to show that he was no slave to one form of strategy, he muffled up Pope’s left instead of his right, here using Longstreet.  His tactics were as masterful as his strategy.  At Second Bull Run, fearfully hammered by the noble Fifth Corps, that had fought like so many tigers at Gaines’s Mill and Malvern Hill, even Stonewall Jackson cried to Lee for aid.  Aid came, but not in men.  Longstreet’s cannon, cunningly planted to enfilade the Fifth Corps’ front, shattered the Federals’ attacking column and placed Stonewall at his ease.

Considering everything, his paucity of men and means, the necessity always upon him of reckoning with political as well as with military situations, and his success in holding even Grant at bay so long, Lee’s masterful campaigns of 1862, 1863, 1864, and 1865 not only constitute him the foremost military virtuoso of his own land, but write his name high on the scroll of the greatest captains of history, beside those of Gustavus Adolphus, William of Orange, Tilly, Frederic the Great, Prince Eugene, Napoleon, Wellington, and Von Moltke.

In a sense, of course, the cause for which Lee fought was “lost;” yet a very great part of what he and his confreres sought, the war actually secured and assured.  His cause was not “lost” as Hannibal’s was, whose country, with its institutions, spite of his genius and devotion, utterly perished from the earth.  Yet Hannibal is remembered more widely than Scipio.  Were Lee in the same case with Hannibal, men would magnify his name as long as history is read.  “Of illustrious men,” says Thucydides, “the whole earth is the sepulchre.  They are immortalized not alone by columns and inscriptions in their own lands; memorials to them rise in foreign countries as well,—­not of stone, it may be, but unwritten, in the thoughts of posterity.”

Lee’s case resembles Cromwell’s much more than Hannibal’s.  The regime against which Cromwell warred returned in spite of him; but it returned modified, involving all the reforms for which the chieftain had bled.  So the best of what Lee drew sword for is here in our actual America, and, please God, shall remain here forever.