ee
was sore beset. He had no interest in the perpetuation of slavery.
His views all tended the other way. "In this enlightened age," he
wrote, "there are few, I believe, but will acknowledge that slavery as
an institution is a moral and political evil." He had already set free
his own slaves, and was in favor of freeing "all the slaves in the
South."

But when it came a question of deserting his own State, his beloved
Virginia, the problem was far more difficult. "All night nearly he
paced his chamber," says Thomas Nelson Page, "often seeking on his
knees the guidance of the God he trusted in. But in the morning light
had come. His wife's family were strongly Union in their sentiments,
and the writer has heard that powerful family influences were exerted
to prevail on him to adhere to the Union side. 'My husband has wept
tears of blood,' wrote Mrs. Lee to his old commander, Scott, who did
him the justice to declare that he knew he acted under a compelling
sense of duty."

Lee had no illusions as to the sternness of the contest, and the
sacrifices that he with all others would have to make. His own
beautiful home lay just across the river from Washington. He must have
seen with prophetic vision how it would be seized by the Federal
Government and held for other purposes--an act of confiscation that was
only partially atoned for half a century later. He knew also that
Virginia being a border State would bear the brunt of war.

"I can contemplate no greater calamity for the country than a
dissolution of the Union," he wrote in January. And in April that
dissolution came.

Nor did the fortunes of the War itself swerve him from the belief that
in serving his State, he was doing his highest duty. After it was over
and he had gone into the retirement of work in Washington College, we
find him writing to General Beauregard as follows:

"I need not tell you that true patriotism sometimes requires men to act
exactly contrary at one period to that which it does at another--and
the motive which impels them--the desire to do right--is precisely the
same. History is full of illustrations of this. Washington himself is
an example." (Here he invokes the example that had been his guiding
star since early boyhood.) "He fought at one time against the French
under Braddock, in the service of the King of Great Britain. At
another he fought with the French at Yorktown, under the orders of the
Continental Congress, aga