A single incident of public importance marks the life of Lee between 1855 and 1861.  This was what is known to the world as the “John Brown raid”—­an incident of the year 1859, and preluding the approaching storm.  This occurrence is too well known to require a minute account in these pages, and we shall accordingly pass over it briefly, indicating simply the part borne in the affair by Lee.  He was in Washington at the time—­the fall of 1859—­on a visit to his family, then residing at Arlington, near the city, when intelligence came that a party of desperadoes had attacked and captured Harper’s Ferry, with the avowed intent of arming and inciting to insurrection the slaves of the neighborhood and entire State.  Lee was immediately, thereupon, directed by President Buchanan to proceed to the point of danger and arrest the rioters.  He did so promptly; found upon his arrival that Brown and his confederates had shut themselves up in an engine-house of the town, with a number of their prisoners.  Brown was summoned to surrender, to be delivered over to the authorities for civil trial—­he refused; and Lee then proceeded to assault, with a force of marines, the stronghold to which Brown had retreated.  The doors were driven in, Brown firing upon the assailants and killing or wounding two; but he and his men were cut down and captured; they were turned over to the Virginia authorities, and Lee, having performed the duty assigned him returned to Washington, and soon afterward to Texas.

He remained there, commanding the department, until the early spring of 1861.  He was then recalled to Washington at the moment when the conflict between the North and the South was about to commence.

VI.

LEE AND SCOTT.

Lee found the country burning as with fever, and the air hot with contending passions.  The animosity, long smouldering between the two sections, was about to burst into the flame of civil war; all men were taking sides; the war of discussion on the floor of Congress was about to yield to the clash of bayonets and the roar of cannon on the battle-field.

Any enumeration of the causes which led to this unhappy state of affairs would be worse than useless in a volume like the present.  Even less desirable would be a discussion of the respective blame to be attached to each of the great opponents in inaugurating the bitter and long-continued struggle.  Such a discussion would lead to nothing, and would probably leave every reader of the same opinion as before.  It would also be the repetition of a worn-out and wearisome story.  These events are known of all men; for the political history of the United States, from 1820, when the slavery agitation began, on the question of the Missouri restriction, to 1861, when it ended in civil convulsion, has been discussed, rediscussed, and discussed again, in every journal, great and small, in the whole country.  The person