BUY Rebel Flags For Sale“Every one should do all in his power to collect and disseminate the truth, in the hope that it may find a place in history, and descend to posterity.”
— General Robert E. Lee, letter to General P.G.T. Beauregard, 1865
Where the Quote Comes From
General Lee wrote these words in a letter to General P.G.T. Beauregard in the fall of 1865, only months after the war ended. Beauregard had written to say that his papers, and those of General Joseph E. Johnston, were lost or out of reach. Lee urged both men to write the history of their campaigns anyway, and to make sure the truth was recorded.
In the same letter, Lee said he was glad Beauregard had no plans to leave the country, because the South needed the help of her sons then more than at any time in her history.
This quote is often shared together with a second sentence: “History is not the relation of campaigns and battles and generals or other individuals, but that which shows the principles for which the South contended and which justified her struggle for those principles.” That line does not appear in Lee’s letter to Beauregard, and it remains unconfirmed by historians.
Lee the Historian
Lee took his own advice seriously. After the war, he planned to write a history of the Army of Northern Virginia and wrote to his former officers asking for their reports and records. He never finished the book, but the effort helped preserve many documents that historians still use today.
Preserving the Truth Today
Lee’s words are as important now as they were in 1865. Every family that keeps an ancestor’s letters, every local group that cares for a cemetery and every reader who shares a true story of the war helps make sure Southern history is not forgotten. That is the reason this blog exists.
Read more about General Lee in Did R.E. Lee Have Any Regrets?, and browse our Confederate flag collection.
Source: John William Jones, Life and Letters of Robert Edward Lee: Soldier and Man, p. 390.
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Cotton was the reason for the war.
LOL. So “cotton” was the “principle” for which the South fought? Guess it could have been worse. You could have said slavery. Still the reason(s) for the war and what the South fought for are two different things and that’s R E Lee’s point.
Hopefully no one thinks cotton was what the fight was about. In truth, there were folks behind the scenes agitating for the conflict because they had things to gain from both the fight and the hoped-for break up of a nation that was a great influence around the world for liberties and freedom, virtues those folks were very much against. Regarding Lee, he wrote that he did “…not believe in secession as a constitutional right, nor that there is sufficient cause for revolution…” but he did choose to stand with his state of Virginia. We cannot make some blanket statement as to why “the South” did what it did. We can, though, isolate why individuals did what they did. I wrote an article about the flag Alabama was flying at Secession, and one key source of my research was a document written by an Alabama delegate at the Secession Convention. He voted against seceding from the Union, but once it was a fact, he supported his state and its choice to join the Confederacy. 40% of the delegates, as I recall, were against secession, a ratio that was pretty common in the Southern states, some of them rather closer to 50-50. Lots of people in the South preferred to stay in the Union and work out differences in a less dramatic fashion.
The South fought to protect their state rights and slavery.
States rights(Nullification Crisis of 1832) and slavery.