Teaching at a military college, one encounters quite a few slogans and inspirational quotations. One of the most popular is widely regarded as one of the most famous things Robert E. Lee ever said: “Duty is the sublimest word in the English language.” Perhaps unfortunately, as it turns out, Lee never said that. The strange set of circumstances surrounding this non-quotation's persistent widespread prominence nearly 150 years after the American Civil War ended has larger implications for professional and general conversations about Lee, the Civil War, and American cultural memory.

One day near the end of a class session I asked the cadets for an example of a slogan they heard frequently. A few of them offered up “Duty is the sublimest word in the English language,” dutifully adding the verbal citation “Robert E. Lee.” Later that day when I went to email the class to follow up on our discussion, I figured I should look up the quotation to make sure I was not misremembering it. I quickly found three versions of the quotation: “Duty is the sublimest word in the English language,” “Duty, then, is the sublimest word in our language,” and “Duty, then, is the sublimest word in the language.”

I was surprised to find three variant versions of the famous quotation, and after doing some digging around I discovered much to my surprise that all three are wrong in one major sense or another, and not just because of minor phrasing variations or something of that nature. Lee in fact never said any such thing. After following the three variant quotations through various research databases, I discovered two things: all the versions are bogus, and at one point early in the twentieth century this fact was fairly widely known. The second thing struck me as being every bit as interesting as the first, because the erroneous quotation has long been, and is still being, reproduced and represented as authentic in a wide range of sources, including history textbooks; grade-school primers; compendia of morally instructive sayings; the annual proceedings of the Virginia State Bar Association; the book Personal Reminiscences of General Robert E. Lee (compiled by Lee's Civil War chaplain); several Lee biographies (biographies published as early as 1871 and as late as 2012); the public papers of former US President Gerald Ford; and recent books about leadership, about world military leaders, and about military ethics and American society. Nearly a century after being widely debunked in print, and nearly a century and a half after being repudiated by Lee and his family, this phantom quotation stubbornly rises again and again. Moreover, the persistence of the faux quotation is noteworthy because of the way the quotation and its strange durability relate to larger issues such as Lee's image, Lee scholarship, and Civil War history.

In 1914 Charles Alfred Graves, a professor at the University of Virginia's law school, presented a conference paper about the source of the quotation to the Virginia State Bar Association. Graves, who had been a student at Washington College (renamed Washington and Lee University after Lee's death in 1870) while Lee was president of the college after the Civil War, persuasively argued that the so-called “Duty Letter” which contained the famous quotation (rendered therein as “Duty, then, is the sublimest word in our language”) was in fact a forgery. On 11 November 1917, the New York Times published an article with the headline “FORGED LETTER WITH LEE'S NAME; Expert Investigation Shows the Document Sold in London Was Not Written by Confederate General.” Although Graves wrote the piece as a letter to the editor in response to an earlier story about the auction sale of the “Duty Letter” at Sotheby's in London, the editors evidently recognized a good story and chose to give the letter a large, eye-catching headline as if it were a standard news article.

In the New York Times piece, Graves points out something strange about the auctioned letter in question: “The announcement of the discovery of the original of this letter, in the handwriting of General Lee, was startling, as it had always been repudiated by the Lee family and was believed, beyond doubt, to be a forgery.” Graves notes that “this letter was disclaimed by General Lee on its first publication in Richmond in 1864, and … it contained erroneous statements of facts as to which General Lee could not have been mistaken.” Graves also notes that the Times had already printed a letter from him explaining the forgery on 21 December 1916.Footnote ¹

Douglas Southall Freeman's R. E. Lee: A Biography, long considered the industry standard by Lee scholars in part because of its sheer profusion of detail, explains the forged letter in an endnote:

Freeman goes on to explain and to cite Graves's work to debunk the forged letter, leaving readers with the almost inescapable conclusion that the famous “Duty Letter” was actually written by a Yankee soldier during the period in which the Union Army (in a reminder that government does occasionally manifest a sense of humor, or at least vengeance that can look humorous from certain angles) occupied the Lee family's Arlington, Virginia estate and turned it into a burial ground for Union soldiers killed in action. As Christopher R. Lawton points out, “When Lee surrendered at Appomattox, there were already 1,800 Union dead from First Manassas buried in his wife's rose garden.”Footnote ³ In 1864 the Lee estate, confiscated by the federal government during the war when Lee's wife Mary (who had inherited the estate from her father George Washington Parke Custis, the adopted son of former US President George Washington, and was the legal owner) failed to appear in person to pay the property tax on the estate, was renamed Arlington National Cemetery.

One might think that repeated exposure in the New York Times, in academic journals and conference papers, and in a well-known Lee biography would have killed off this phony quotation in its multiple forms, but that is not the way it turned out, and this is not the first time. (Remember, in 1917 Graves was already complaining that the source letter had long been recognized as a forgery and had been repudiated by Lee himself as far back as 1864.) A few figures will help provide a basic sense of just how widespread the bogus duty quotation (or forged misquotation, or whatever one chooses to call the thing in its three primary forms) is even today: A Google search for “Robert E. Lee” and “sublimest word” (both in quotation marks) turns up about 54,600 results. A Google Books search for the same terms returns about 1,450 results. A Google Scholar search produces 288 results. Even a Google Scholar search of legal opinions and journals yields ten results.

These numbers, though impressive in themselves, fail to communicate the perhaps more startling fact that the ersatz quotation in its variant versions turns up in a truly amazing range of sources from grade-school primers, to academic books and scholarly journals (including military-science journals, military-history journals, and military-law journals), to Forbes magazine, to legal briefs and judicial decisions, to political speeches. The phony quotation appears in Alabama governor George Wallace's 1963 inaugural speech “Address on the future of segregation in Alabama” (the infamous “segregation today … segregation tomorrow … segregation forever” speech). It appears in a 1975 public speech given by President Gerald Ford in New Orleans.Footnote ⁴ It appears on posters, T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, decals, computer mouse pads, and coffee mugs; on engravings, in books of inspirational sayings, and even on tombstones. General William Westmoreland was so fond of the faux quotation that he had it inscribed on his father's headstone. After all this time and after repeated public disavowals and debunkings, the bogus quotation persists in widespread usage as something like a southern (and, perhaps surprisingly, a national) equivalent of George Washington's apocryphal “I cannot tell a lie.”

Trying to explain why this phony quotation does not go away seems at first to be a bit like trying to explain why a dog doesn't bark, but the works of Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward, and Alan T. Nolan, along with other scholars, offer some insights worth considering as provisional answers. First, to give Lee his due, his name has long been associated with duty and honor, and not without reason. As Michael Fellman says, “Lee was an immaculately groomed Adonis, a bright and obsessively hard-working student who completed West Point without a single demerit for misbehavior.” Gaines M. Foster notes that “Lee played an important role in leading southerners to accept defeat and to seek reunion. The general did so primarily out of his well-known sense of duty; he himself apparently found the adjustment painful.” Tony Horwitz cites a letter in which Lee deals with the idea of North–South reconciliation as a duty without directly using the word:

Lee wrote and spoke frequently of duty, and of the associated concept of honor, and he has been revered as a symbol of both since the Civil War. (As a reminder, it is worth mentioning that Lee was not always revered at all: In a 1955 letter to Walker Percy, Shelby Foote notes that in late 1861 and early 1862 Lee was widely mocked for his perceived timidity: “So far, R. E. Lee is a failure: failed in W Va, failed again on the South Atlantic coast: Granny Lee, they call him, The King of Spades.”Footnote ⁶) Not only has the forged duty quotation been widespread and well known for nearly 150 years, but also Lee's famous farewell to the Army of Northern Virginia in which he releases them from military service and encourages “the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed” was for generations widely memorized and recited in schools and other public forums. Even today, Washington National Cathedral features a memorial bay dedicated to Lee and Stonewall Jackson that includes two stained-glass windows and a plaque that emphasize and glorify Lee's sense of duty. Lee biographer Emory Thomas explains Lee's association of duty and satisfaction in terms that emphasize self-abnegation:

Although it seems that Thomas is conforming to the hagiographic tradition of describing Lee as if he were possessed of sacred mysteries, somehow beyond the ken of lesser men, or at least beyond logic and close reading, Thomas also makes an especially insightful point about how Lee's Episcopal faith habitually conflated duty and freedom:

In his excellent book Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History, Alan T. Nolan examines Lee's much-discussed concepts of “honor and its companion, duty” (Nolan's words, not Lee's). In a break from the dominant tradition of Lee hagiography, which he criticizes incisively and refers to as “the Lee tradition,” Nolan looks critically at how Lee employed the terms, although Nolan focusses on honor:

Nolan quotes Bertram Wyatt-Brown's assertion that “Honor is … self-regarding in character.” Nolan continues,

Although Nolan does not mention duty in those sentences, he does mention a document that shows the deep association between the two terms: “Lee's memorandum to himself: ‘There is a true glory and a true honor: the glory of duty done—the honor of the integrity of principle.’”Footnote ⁸ The fact that Lee habitually used the term duty much in the same way he used the term honor makes it clear that one can apply most of what Nolan says about honor to Lee's sense of duty as well. In fact, it seems that duty could be the richer of the two terms, at least for the purposes of reading Robert E. Lee, because whereas honor is arguably something of an abstraction, duty for a military officer is not merely an abstract term. (“Duty, Honor, Country” has been the official motto of the US Military Academy since 1898 but was not during Lee's two stints at West Point.)

By the time the Civil War began, Lee was fifty-four years old and had spent thirty-five years, his entire adult life, in the US Army. In addition to performing meritorious service in combat during the Mexican–American War, Lee had served as superintendent of West Point from 1852 to 1855. On 16 March 1861, President Abraham Lincoln issued a commission to Lee as a colonel in the US Army, promoting him from lieutenant colonel. This is remarkable in part because one day before that, Confederate Secretary of War LeRoy Pope Walker offered Lee a commission as a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. Lee accepted Lincoln's commission and promotion (and would have had to swear the oath of allegiance that accompanies military promotions) on 30 March 1861.

Twenty days after accepting the commission and promotion, Lee resigned from the US Army, and two days after that he accepted a commission as a major general in the Confederate Army. (Major general is one rank above brigadier general. Lee had managed to get an even higher Confederate rank than was originally offered to him.) All this makes one think again about how many ways Lee could apparently define the word duty and how the term has for generations been reflexively, often unthinkingly, given as one of the icon's great virtues. As Nolan puts it,

Elizabeth Brown Pryor explains that, at the time, Lee's duty (or at least his duty to a seceding Virginia or the new Confederacy) was in fact anything but clear, and that perhaps because of the unprecedented circumstances duty was in the eye of the beholder:

Pryor also notes that “resigning because of unwelcome orders was considered ‘dishonorable’ in military circles,” and that while Lee was stationed in Texas in 1860 as talk of secession roiled the Lone Star State,

Elsewhere, Pryor points out that Lee's public image and reputation soon began to take on lives of their own: “His very name was recast about this time [April 1861], with the popular press calling him ‘Robert E. Lee,’ a formulation not used by himself or his family, and with which he never identified.”Footnote ⁹

Despite the awkward facts surrounding Lee's promotions, his shifting sense of loyalty, and his move from the US Army to a hostile force that would certainly have to fight against the US Army soon, as Nolan says, Lee has largely escaped standard historical scrutiny:

Furthermore, Nolan argues, the intellectual blind spots characteristic of the Lee tradition plague Civil War history more generally:

Michael Fellman makes a related point, saying, “No other American historical figure, with the possible exception of George Washington, upon whom Lee modeled himself and whose step-granddaughter he married, is as shrouded in legend as Lee.” In a bit of droll understatement, Nolan also notes, “People do not, as a general rule, like for their heroes or historical theories to be reexamined.”Footnote ¹¹ In a disturbing demonstration of how this general principle has applied even to some historians (and thus how some historians have been complicit in promoting uncritical Lee worship), Nolan points out two salient examples of historians effectively airbrushing Lee's historical record by leaving out important details about Lee's views on race relations and thus deliberately presenting misleading depictions:

Nolan provides further examples of historians either ignoring inconvenient details about Lee or (in Freeman's case) apparently deliberately obfuscating them by mentioning them only in “a footnote so vague and ambiguous as to amount to a burying of the apparent contradiction.”Footnote ¹²

Readers can easily apply Nolan's insights to works of southern history that do not focus on Lee. Even the justly esteemed Bertram Wyatt-Brown engages in the type of Lee hagiography that Nolan criticizes (and in its habit of quasi-eugenic references to Lee's breeding). In Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, which was a finalist for the American Book Award and for the Pulitzer Prize, Wyatt-Brown writes after mentioning Lee's sense of duty, “We need not dwell on Lee's other much-praised attributes. Douglas S. Freeman explained them well. ‘If blood means anything,’ wrote the great Virginia historian, ‘he was entitled to be what he fundamentally was, a gentleman.’”Footnote ¹³ (This passage also appears verbatim in Wyatt-Brown's Honor and Violence in the Old South.) The flabby logic of Freeman's statement and Wyatt-Brown's use of the quotation as if it meant something clear and profound call to mind Benedict Anderson's observation that nationalism is a belief system, and thus is not susceptible to rationality or argument.

Thomas explains that the truth was the first casualty of the campaign for Lee's posthumous apotheosis:

Once again, when one encounters certain of Lee's words in quotation marks, one should be aware that the phrase Lee's words should itself perhaps be in quotation marks to indicate the way in which words attributed to Lee tend to take on a life of their own. In this, one might think of W. H. Auden's great elegy for W. B. Yeats:

Auden's elegy for Sigmund Freud also pertains: “To us he is no more a person/Now but a whole climate of opinion // Under whom we conduct our differing lives.”Footnote ¹⁵ Insofar as Lee is regarded as the incarnation of some Confederate and/or southern ideal, he effectively functions as something like a belief system rather than as a standard historical figure susceptible to standard historical analysis.

In Figures of the Hero in Southern Narrative, Michael Kreyling says, “Robert E. Lee gave heroic narrative in the South, and in the North, a second life in the remainder of the century following the war.” In The Burden of Southern History, C. Vann Woodward notes that the South “has a tradition of attempting the impossible at great cost, proudly celebrating the failure, and gaining admiration for the performance.”Footnote ¹⁶ Lee – a figure allegedly Christ-like, honorable, and dutiful, a general without sin – is not merely a symbol of this tradition. He is the central symbol, the deified figure at the center of the heroic narrative of the Lost Cause. (The massive carving of Lee leading Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and a Confederate army across the face of Stone Mountain near Atlanta is a visible manifestation of Lee's place at the center of Lost Cause symbolism.) Surely this justifies another look at the assigned, assumed, and self-proclaimed virtues that make possible this position, and, by extension, the logic of Lost Cause enthusiasts and many Civil War enthusiasts in general.

I take the widespread and persistent (and, I am tempted to say, apparently willful) cultural amnesia regarding the long-discredited, endlessly repeated forged quotation “Duty is the sublimest word in the English language” and its variants as both an intriguing phenomenon in its own right and a metonymic indicator of how Lee has been remembered (or not), explained (or not), and deployed over the last century and a half. In this, I acknowledge a debt to Nolan, who argues convincingly that noticing the Lee tradition's pattern of deviating from the usual critical perspectives of historical and biographical scholarship teaches us something important about how deviations of those sorts inhere in much of the writing and thinking about the Civil War:

Nolan also points out that even the index to Freeman's Lee biography suggests a high degree of hero worship:

Despite (or perhaps because of) the Lee tradition, some major southern writers have reacted differently to Lee after dealing with some of the particulars of his biography. Shelby Foote has said, “Nothing pleases me more than to find some shortcoming in Lee, because it humanizes him.” As Kreyling explains, Allen Tate finally gave up his attempt to write a Lee biography, in part because “[w]hat begins as Lee's laudable integrity and repose soon becomes his cold and impassible supremacy. So aloof does Lee become, for Tate, that the biographer uses the word inhuman to describe him.” In a 1932 letter that Kreyling quotes, Tate says of Lee, “He could not see beyond the needs of his own salvation, and he was not generous enough to risk soiling his military cloak for the doubtful salvation of others.”Footnote ¹⁸

Horwitz's observations about the last days before Lee's surrender at Appomattox lend some context to Tate's charge against Lee: “By the end, Lee's men quaffed creek water and ate parched corn intended for their horses; 500 of the rebel mounts died of starvation during the army's last three days in the field.”Footnote ¹⁹ In addition to the widespread suffering and the appalling loss of life, the problem is that by that point (and for quite some time before, arguably as early as late 1864 when Lincoln was reelected) Lee must have known that the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt and that the Confederate cause was finally irrevocably lost. Nolan focusses on the military understanding of duty and on the tremendous human costs of Lee's decision to fight on until Appomattox (keeping in mind that it really was Lee's decision; Lee, appointed general-in-chief of all Confederate forces in February 1865, did not request Jefferson Davis's permission to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia; he informed Davis):

Such a scathing indictment of Lee's interpretation of duty, and of its terrible consequences during the final futile months of the Army of Northern Virginia, may come as a shock to many, but it helps one understand at least some of the antipathy Tate came to feel toward Lee. As Susan Donaldson points out:

Although Tate started work on his Lee biography in 1930 thinking of Lee as a figure of masculine southern virtue, his research made him uncomfortably aware of the dissonance between aspects of the Lee myth and aspects of the historical record. Whereas Tate ultimately declines to participate in the tradition of Lee hagiography, Tate's Fugitive and Agrarian colleague Warren comes to embrace the confusion of myth and history, albeit not uncritically. In the foreword to his late-career magnum opus Brother to Dragons Warren proclaims, “Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.”Footnote ²² That said, Warren generally remains alert to the ways myth or biased narrative can distort history and impede or discourage intellectual inquiry. In The Legacy of the Civil War, Warren says,

A few pages later, Warren describes the two terms in ways that resonate with the Lee tradition:

Warren also explains the psychological and cultural functions of the terms along with their maladaptive aspects in a passage that makes possible a fuller understanding of the enduring appeal and power of Lee as a symbol of rectitude for so many people in and beyond the South:

Warren's remarks can help us understand the Lee tradition, the scope and power of Lee's image, and the long, strange career of the forged duty quotation. The image of Lee and Lee alone straddles and even transcends the two categories. Invoking Lee allows southerners and northerners (and others) to partake of both the Great Alibi and the Treasury of Virtue, through a kind of magical thinking that renders insensible the great questions of the Civil War, the man himself, the Lost Cause, and the racism often associated with it. Remembering unpleasant details (including many details of the so-called Late Unpleasantness) is unpleasant, and thus is often avoided, whether we are talking about (or not talking about) many real details of the real life of the real Lee or about a famous, stirring, allegedly edifying thing that Lee actually never said. As Warren says in explaining the Great Alibi and the Treasury of Virtue, “When one is happy in forgetfulness, facts get forgotten.”Footnote ²⁶