The Most Famous Thing Robert E. Lee Never Said

“Duty is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more. You should never wish to do less.”

It is one of the most quoted lines ever attached to General Robert E. Lee. It hangs on classroom walls, appears in speeches and books, and every freshman cadet at The Citadel in Charleston has been required to memorize it. There is just one problem: historians agree that Lee never wrote it.

The “Duty Letter”

The quote comes from a letter that Lee supposedly wrote to his eldest son, G.W. Custis Lee, in 1852, while Custis was a cadet at West Point. The letter told the story of the “Dark Day” of May 1780, when the sky over New England turned so dark at midday that many people thought the end of the world had come. In the Connecticut legislature, members wanted to adjourn. One old Puritan legislator, Abraham Davenport, refused. If it was the Day of Judgment, he said, he wanted to be found doing his duty, and he asked that candles be brought in so the work could go on.

The letter then closed with the famous line: “Duty, then, is the sublimest word in our language.”

How It Appeared

No one had ever seen the letter until November 1864, when it was printed in the New York Sun. It was said to have been found at Arlington House, the Lee family home, which Union troops had occupied since 1861. Newspapers across the North and in Britain reprinted it, and it quickly became famous.

Even then, there were doubts. In December 1864, it was publicly denounced as a “Yankee forgery” by a source said to be close to the family.

Proven a Forgery

In 1914, Charles Alfred Graves, a law professor at the University of Virginia, published a detailed study called The Forged Letter of General Robert E. Lee. He showed that the letter did not match the facts of Lee’s life in 1852 or the way Lee wrote his other letters. Custis Lee himself told Graves he did not remember ever receiving such a letter. No original copy has ever been found. Most historians believe it was probably written by someone in the Union army after Arlington was occupied.

Why the Line Lives On

The quote survived because it sounds like Lee. Duty was at the center of his life. He left the U.S. Army in 1861 because he believed his first duty was to Virginia, writing to General Winfield Scott that he never wanted to draw his sword again except in defense of his native state. After the war, he took on the duty of rebuilding the South by educating young men at Washington College.

In a letter to the college’s trustees after the war, Lee wrote words he really did write: “I think it is the duty of every citizen, in the present condition of the Country, to do all in his power to aid in the restoration of peace and harmony.”

The famous “Duty” line may not be Lee’s, but the idea behind it was the way he lived. Read more about General Lee in Did R.E. Lee Have Any Regrets? and General Eisenhower on Robert E. Lee, and browse our Confederate flag collection.

Sources: Post and Courier; Sean Heuston, “The Most Famous Thing Robert E. Lee Never Said,” Journal of American Studies (2014).

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