The removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in New Orleans in May reminded me of Herman Melville's poem, "Lee in the Capitol." My college graduation paper half a century ago was on "Moby-Dick."
As Melville explains in his note to the poem, Lee, like some other Southerners, was summoned by the Reconstruction Committee of Congress a year after the Civil War was over. Evidently, what the former general might say aroused great interest, "both in itself and as coming from him." As it turned out, he said little. He "briefly answered" "various questions" put to him, and when, at the close, the committee urged that "if there be any other matter which you wish to speak on this occasion, do so freely," Lee waived the invitation.
That means that most of Lee's words that take up half of the 200-odd-line verse are Melville taking "a poetical liberty." So one can't be sure if Lee actually mentioned things like "Our cause I followed" and "Secession's pride," or, referring to the South, "You ask if she recants; she yields," and such veiled warnings as "Shall the great North go Sylla's way?" to allow "Freemen [to be] conquerors of the free?"
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