the deliverance of Richmond from danger.  On the 9th of June, 1863, there occurred near Brandy Station, in the county of Culpeper, Va., one of the most extensive and stubborn cavalry fights of the whole war.  Two divisions of Federal cavalry, commanded by Gens.  Buford and Gregg, and supported by two brigades of “picked infantry,” fell upon Stuart with such suddenness and fierceness that the attack was almost crowned with victory.  Nothing saved him from defeat, if not from greater calamity, but his own coolness and that of his lieutenants, coupled with the indomitable pluck and intrepidity of his troopers.

In this engagement that brave Georgian Gen. Young, formerly a member of this House, by a splendid charge with sabers, without carbine or pistol, repulsed a dangerous and gallant assault on the rear, while Gen. WILLIAM H.F.  LEE, with equal courage and dash, protected the left of the Confederate position.  In this encounter Gen. LEE received a severe wound, which necessitated his retirement from the field.  He was carried to Hickory Hill, in Hanover County, the home of Gen. Wickham, a near relative of his wife, and here he was captured and placed in solitary confinement in Fort Monroe as a hostage, certain officers of the United States being then held under sentence of death in Libby Prison in retaliation for the execution of certain Confederate officers in the West.

Gen. Custis Lee, being then a young unmarried man, on the staff of the Confederate President, met, under special flag of truce, representatives of the Government at Washington, and begged to be permitted to take the place of Gen. WILLIAM H.F.  LEE, giving as a reason for the proposed exchange his desire to save from punishment the innocent wife and children of his wounded brother.  The offer was declined, and he was told that the burdens of war must fall where chance or fortune placed them.

In this incident we have a beautiful and touching illustration of the strength and warmth of brotherly love and of the knightly bearing of the Lees of Virginia.  While thus detained as a prisoner of war, racked with physical suffering and those mental tortures which a sensitive and high-strung man must feel under such circumstances, there came the sad tidings of the death of his loved wife and two children; and thus was added another, the most poignant of all the griefs with which he had been afflicted.  His old Virginia home, associated with so many sacred memories, had been reduced to ashes, and now there remained of the once happy family which formerly occupied it only the captive father.  This weight of woe would seem too much for human endurance, but he bore it with the fortitude of a Christian soldier.  He was exchanged in the spring of 1864, and returning to his division, led it in all the engagements, from the Rapidan to the Appomattox, where the curtain fell upon the stirring and bloody scenes in which he had been such an active participant.