Beschreibung:

LEE, Robert E.] MARSHALL, Charles. Manuscript document, Lt. Col. Charles Marshall's Draft of General Order No. 9, Appomattox, Va., 10 April 1865. 2 pages, 4to, ruled paper, two small holes at fold intersections, bottom edge chipped, with partial loss of several words, small loss at top right corner, affecting portions of two words . In pencil. CHARLES MARSHALL'S DRAFT OF LEE'S GENERAL ORDER NO. 9, WITH THE INFLAMMATORY PASSAGE DELETED BY LEE "THE NOBLEST CAUSE FOR WHICH SWORD WAS EVER DRAWN" AGAINST "THE HATED FOE" MARSHALL'S DRAFT OF LEE'S MOST MEMORABLE ADDRESS, INCLUDING THE LONG- SOUGHT PARAGRAPH WHICH LEE STRUCK OUT. The idea for the famous General Order No. 9 arose around ten o'clock on the night of 9 April 1865. Robert E. Lee sat with his aides around a camp fire, talking over his surrender earlier that day to General Grant, and wondering what would become of his brave, hungry and ragged troops. Would they become lawless, roving gangs of guerilla fighters? Or reconcile themselves to defeat and once again become farmers and workers, husbands and fathers? Lee turned to Lt. Col. Charles Marshall and asked him to compose a draft farewell order. Given the bustle and confusion in the camp, Marshall had not even begun his task when Lee asked for it the next morning. The story has it that Lee then ordered Marshall to lock himself into a nearby ambulance, not to emerge without the completed draft. In the meantime Lee got word that Ulysses Grant had approached the Confederate lines for a conference. Grant too was worried about the mood of Lee's departing troops as well as the remaining Rebel forces still in the field in North Carolina. Grant remembers "We had there between the lines, sitting on horseback, a very pleasant conversation of over half an hour, in the course of which Lee said to me that the South was a big country and that we might have to march over it three or four times before the war entirely ended, but that we would now be able to do it as they could no longer resist us." Grant asked Lee whether he would urge the remaining Confederate forces to surrender and avoid more loss of life. Lee said "he could not do that without consulting the President [Jefferson Davis] first" ( Memoirs , 741-744). Lee couldn't speak for Davis, but he could communicate with his own men, and by the time he returned to his tent, Marshall's penciled draft was ready for his review. "Lee went over it," Douglas Southall Freeman writes, "struck out a paragraph that seemed to him calculated to keep alive ill-feeling, and changed one or two words. Marshall then wrote a revised draft, which he had one of the clerks at headquarters copy in ink. General Lee signed this and additional copies made by various hands for the corps commanders and for the chiefs of the bureaus of the general staff....Marshall probably destroyed or misplaced the penciled text which General Lee revised. The language of the eliminated paragraph is not even known. An amended draft, in Marshall's autograph, is in the hands of his descendants, but cannot be affirmed positively to be the paper given by Marshall to the copyist" ( Lee , 4:154). The present newly discovered manuscripts constitutes Marshall's pencil draft (with the textual variations from the final version noted), as well as the paragraph that Lee struck out: "Hd Qrs Army of No Va, 10th April 1865 Gen Order No. 9 After four years of arduous service(s), marked by unsurpassed courage [and] (&) fortitude, the Army of N.Va has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers [and] (&) resources. I need not tell the brave survivors of so many hard fought battles who have remained steadfast to the last, that I have consented to [the] (this) result from no distrust of them. But feeling that valor and [devotion] (devotion) could accomplish nothing that could compensate for the loss that [would] (must) have attended the continuance of the contest, I determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services