Forgiving the north.

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Here is a partial newspaper clipping from Soapy’s scrapbook, containing an interview with Robert E. Lee. This comes from an unknown newspaper with no date.

… Many of the most beautiful and pathetic incidents of the late war occurred after it was all over. At a hotel at Washington in 1868 a gentleman, whose face I could not exactly remember, though it seemed strangely familiar, introduced himself and asked permission to present me to his mother, a singularly beautiful old lady of queenly and dignified bearing, to whom he said:

“Mother, let me present to you General R. E. Lee of the late Confederate Army, whose saber thrust gave me this scar on my right cheek and who bears the mark of a wound I gave him.”

The beautiful old lady threw her arms around my neck and wept on my shoulder, and in that tender embrace and in the fervent clasp of that Federal officer’s hand and mine we buried the animosity of the war forever.



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One of the most devoted adherents the Southern cause ever had was Colonel M. When my surrender to General Grant was inevitable a young officer delicately hinted to the Colonel that perhaps his confidence in the ultimate success of our arms, which was still as boastful as ever, was perhaps a trifle overweening. The Colonel looked at him for a moment with an expression in which contempt, anger, horror and amusement struggled for the mastery. Then with hands uplifted, hair standing on end and eyes flashing fire, he roared out at the discomfited Lieutenant in the voice of a stentor: “Dam up Niagara Falls with tissue paper, bottle up the Atlantic Ocean in a whisky flask, paste ‘to let’ on the sun and moon, catch a flash of lightning between your thumb and finger, build a worm fence around a winter supply of summer weather, harness a thunderbolt to a sulky, waft all the clouds out of the sky with a lady’s fan, saddle and ride a hurricane, fasten a dish clout to the tail of a comet, pack up all the stars in a beer keg, knock a tornado out of time with your fist, put Hades to cool in a springhouse, put the sky in your pocket, unbuckle the belly band of eternity, but never again allow yourself to fancy for a moment that the poor little North can ever whip the great Southern Confederacy!”

1894: Colorado Governor Waite fires commissioners Jackson Orr and D. J. Martin, but they refuse to vacate their positions, starting the Denver City Hall War.

1898: Peter Clancy Bean, a miner, was murdered. Powder burns were on his face and a .38 caliber slug in his left breast. Near his body was his empty pocketbook.

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