retaliation for the execution of certain Confederate officers in the
West.

Gen. Custis Lee, being then a young unmarried man, on the staff of the
Confederate President, met, under special flag of truce, representatives
of the Government at Washington, and begged to be permitted to take the
place of Gen. WILLIAM H.F. LEE, giving as a reason for the proposed
exchange his desire to save from punishment the innocent wife and
children of his wounded brother. The offer was declined, and he was told
that the burdens of war must fall where chance or fortune placed them.

In this incident we have a beautiful and touching illustration of the
strength and warmth of brotherly love and of the knightly bearing of the
Lees of Virginia. While thus detained as a prisoner of war, racked with
physical suffering and those mental tortures which a sensitive and
high-strung man must feel under such circumstances, there came the sad
tidings of the death of his loved wife and two children; and thus was
added another, the most poignant of all the griefs with which he had
been afflicted. His old Virginia home, associated with so many sacred
memories, had been reduced to ashes, and now there remained of the once
happy family which formerly occupied it only the captive father. This
weight of woe would seem too much for human endurance, but he bore it
with the fortitude of a Christian soldier. He was exchanged in the
spring of 1864, and returning to his division, led it in all the
engagements, from the Rapidan to the Appomattox, where the curtain fell
upon the stirring and bloody scenes in which he had been such an active
participant.

As a soldier he was always calm, cool, and self-possessed. Those who
have had experience in the ranks know that the bravest and best soldiers