“The universal and profound grief of our Southern countrymen is natural and honorable alike to themselves and to him whom they mourn, and is respected throughout the world; for Robert E. Lee was allied and endeared to them by all the most sacred ties that can unite an individual to a community.  He was born and reared in their midst, and shared their local peculiarities, opinions, and traditional characteristics; and his preeminent abilities and exalted personal integrity and Christian character made him, by common consent, their leader and representative in a great national conflict in which they had staked life, fortune, and honor; and in Virginia his family was coeval with the existence of the State, and its name was emblazoned upon those bright pages of her early civil and military annals which record the patriotic deeds of Washington and his compeers.

“By no act of his did he ever forfeit or impair the confidence thus reposed in him by his own peculiar people; and when he had, through years of heroic trial and suffering, done all that mortal man could do in discharge of the high trust confided by them to his hands, and failed, he bowed with dignified submission to the decree of Providence; and from the day he gave his parole at Appomattox to the hour of his death, he so lived and acted as to deprive enmity of its malignity, and became to his defeated soldiers and countrymen a bright example of unqualified obedience to the laws of the land, and of support to its established government.  Nay, more.  With a spirit of Christian and affectionate duty to his impoverished and suffering people, and with a high estimate of the importance of mental and moral culture to a generation of youth whose earlier years were attended by war’s rough teachings, he went from the tented field and the command of armies to the quiet shades of a scholastic institution in the secluded valleys of his own native Virginia, and entered with all the earnestness of his nature upon the duties of instruction, and there spent the closing years of his life in training the minds and hearts of young men from all parts of the country for the highest usefulness ‘in their day and generation.’  By these pursuits, and his exemplary and unobtrusive life since the close of the great war in America, he won the respect and admiration of the enlightened and the good of the whole world.  It is meet and natural, therefore, that his own people should bewail his death as a sore personal bereavement to each one of them.  Those of us here assembled who were his soldiers, friends, and supporters, sharing all the trials and many of the responsibilities of that period of his life which brought him so prominently before the world, honored and trusted him then, have loved and admired him, have been guided by his example since; and now that he is dead, we should be unworthy of ourselves, and unworthy to be called his countrymen, did we not feel and express the same poignant grief which now afflicts those among whom he lived and died.