tion may however be called to its peculiar composition. After the discharge of each military "dutie " an "observation" follows filled with classical and Biblical analogies and moralizings. When not engaged in fighting the soldier appears to have read widely.

The ruin of Germany, after years of continual warfare, is nowhere better described than in the modest pamphlet by William Crowne, gentleman,26 who accompanied the Earl of Arundell on a diplomatic mission to the Emperor in 1636. From Cologne the ambassador and his train were towed up the Rhine in a boat drawn by nine horses, "by many villages pillaged and shot down". At Bacharach "the poor people are found dead with grass in their mouths". The party entered Rüdesheim where they saw "poor people praying where dead bones were in a little old house, and here his Excellency gave some relief to the poor which were almost starved as it appeared by the violence they used to get it from one another ". At Mainz the ambassador found it necessary to stay on shipboard for his meals, for there was "nothing in the town to relieve us, since it was taken by the King of Sweden, and miserably battered". There was such a rush for the food sent from the ship that people pushed each other into the river in their eagerness to obtain some of it. From Cologne to Frankfort, Crowne tells, "all the towns, villages and castles be battered, pillaged or burned". Passing up the Main through Würzburg, they arrived at Neustadt, "which hath been a fair city, though now pillaged and burned miserably, here we saw poor children sitting at their doors almost starved to death, to whom his Excellency gave order for to relieve them with meat and money to their parents". Travelling through the Upper Palatinate, they passed "by churches demolished to the ground, and through woods in danger, understanding that Crabbats 27 were lying hereabouts". They had dinner at a little village called Heman "which hath been pillaged eight-and-twenty times in two years and twice in one day, and they have there no water but that which they save when it raineth". Reaching the Danube they continued the journey by boat, still meeting with ruined villages and people seeking relief.28

26 A True Relation of All the Remarkable Places and Passages observed in the Travels of the Right Honourable Thomas Lord Howard, Earle of Arundell and Surrey, etc., by William Crowne, gentleman (London, 1637). William Crowne, according to Oldys, was the father of John Crowne, the Restoration dramatist. D. N. B.

27 Le., Croatians.

28 Crowne, op. cit., pp. 5-17.

Other pamphlets 29 appeared to tell of the horrors suffered by the civilian population; but none can compare with the sober account given by Crowne.

ELMER A. BELLER.

LINCOLN AND MEADE AFTER GETTYSBURG

MR. GEORGE H. THACHER, president of the City Savings Bank of Albany, N. Y., sends the following communication, conveying statements which he received from the late Robert T. Lincoln, and to which he believes that Mr. Lincoln desired that publicity should be given, although he did not precisely say so. He says that Mr. Lincoln gave him this information one summer day, when they were playing golf at Manchester, Vermont, that the following summer he asked him, under similar circumstances, to repeat the story to him, and that he recorded its substance immediately, but did not make it public during Mr. Lincoln's life, because he feared it might involve him in invitations to a correspondence he would be unable to undertake.

After the Battle of Gettysburg, heavy rains had swollen the Potomac to such an extent that the rushing waters had carried away the bridge at Williamsport. This fact placed General Lee in a perilous situation, for it was by this avenue that he must escape the Federal forces, if he were to escape at all. Meade's army, a portion of which was made up of 40,000 trained veterans, greatly outnumbered that of Lee. Of the situation President Lincoln was early and fully aware, and his sagacity led him to appreciate the golden opportunity that then presented itself for speedily bringing the war to a favorable conclusion. Referring to this war-time crisis, Mr. Robert T. Lincoln told me as follows: "Entering my father's room right after the Battle of Gettysburg, I found him in tears, with head bowed upon his arms resting on the table at which he sat. Why, what is the matter, father', I asked. For a brief interval he remained silent, then raised his head, and the explanation of his grief was forthcoming. My boy', said he, 'when I heard that the bridge at Williamsport had been swept away, I sent for General Haupt and asked him how soon he could replace the same. He replied, "If I were uninterrupted I could build a bridge with the material there within twenty-four hours and, Mr. President, General Lee has engineers as skillful as I am". Upon hearing this I at once wrote Meade to attack without delay, and if successful to destroy my letter, but in case of failure to preserve it for his vindication. I have just learned that at a Council of War, of Meade and his Generals, it had been determined not to pursue Lee, and now the opportune chance of ending this bitter struggle is lost.' What I tell you, George", Mr. Lincoln impressively continued, "are the facts in the case, Nicolay and Hay, and all others, to the contrary notwithstanding." Had 29 P. Vincent, The Lamentations of Germany . . . (London, 1638), is illustrated.

Meade obeyed his instruction Lee no doubt would have been compelled to surrender. As it was the war was to be carried on, and more lives were to be sacrificed. The President was bitterly disappointed and expressed his feeling in a letter which he penned subsequently, and still later suppressed.1 While there may have been political reasons sufficiently weighty to modify extreme censure of Meade, nevertheless the magnanimity of the President, in withholding knowledge of his positive order to Meade, rose to a height wholly commensurate with the greatness that characterized Abraham Lincoln. Many inferences may be drawn from what is here related, controversies, perhaps, engendered, but whatever may ensue there can be no question as to the immobile truth contained in the recital of the above incident by Robert Todd Lincoln.

1 Text in Nicolay and Hay, VII. 280–281.

GEORGE H. THACHER.

AM. HIST. REV., VOL. XXXII.-20

DOCUMENTS

Major-General Henry Lee and Lieutenant-General Sir George
Beckwith on Peace in 1813.

ON June 18, 1812, Congress declared war on Great Britain. A few days later, a Baltimore newspaper, the Federal Republican, having published vigorous denunciations of the war, a mob made a violent attack upon its house. Friends of the editors defended it, under the direction of Major-General Henry Lee (" Light Horse Harry" of the Revolutionary War). At the jail, to which these Federalist defenders were conducted for safety, they were again attacked by the mob, which broke into the building, killed one of their number, a Revolutionary veteran, and inflicted upon General Lee (as upon several others) very severe injuries, from the effects of which he never recovered, dying in 1818. In the spring of 1813, under medical advice to seek recuperation in the West Indies, he was enabled to go to Barbados, despite war-time conditions, through the good offices of President Madison and of Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren, then commander-in-chief on the North American station. President Madison and he had been born but a few miles apart in Virginia, had served together in 1787 as delegates of that state in the Continental Congress, and had not been fatally estranged by subsequent political differences. In the biographical sketch which General Robert E. Lee prefixed to his edition of his father's Memoirs of the War [of the Revolution] in the Southern Department of the United States (New York, 1869, p. 54), there is printed a letter from Lee to Madison, dated Barbados, August 24, 1813, expressing his gratitude to the President and to Admiral Warren for making possible his voyage, and sending the President Madeira and a green turtle.

Lieutenant-General Sir George Beckwith was governor of Barbados from 1808 to 1814, and commander-in-chief of the military forces in the Windward and Leeward Islands, in which capacity he conquered Martinique in 1809 and Guadeloupe in 1810, but he is best known to American readers as informal representative of British diplomacy in the United States in the period just preceding the appointment of a regularly accredited British minister. In that capacity he paid five visits to this country in the period from 1787 to 1791. Their history may be traced in the appropriate portions of the Canadian Archives Report for 1890, in Professor Bemis's The

Jay Treaty, and most succinctly in a memorial of Beckwith to Dundas, June 20, 1792, printed in an appendix to that volume.1 As Henry Lee attended the Continental Congress in New York in both 1787 and 1788 as a delegate from Virginia, it is very likely that his acquaintance with Beckwith began at that time.

The following documents are from the British Public Record Office, C.O. 28: 82.

Confidential

My Lord,

I. BECKWITH TO BATHURST,3

BARBADOS 26th Novem'r 1813.

I have the honor to submit Six Inclosures, numbered from One to Six, to Your Lordship's consideration.

4

These Papers disclose a correspondence that has passed between General Henry Lee of Virginia, and myself, on the subject of Peace, which might perhaps have been declined by me with propriety in the first instance; but having neither sought nor shunned it, and conceiving it now brought to a close, I feel it my duty to report what has passed. I have already mentioned to Mr. Goulburn, that General Lee came to this Government about the end of June last, with strong recommendations from Sir John Warren and from Colonel Barclay and I have extended towards him every countenance and protection to which his ill Health, general Character, and Introduction entitled him; but I apprehend he will never recover those wounds and bruises, especially about the Head, which he received from the Baltimore Rioters. He remains here for the present.

I have the honor to be with great respect, etc.

Earl Bathurst

II. LEE TO BECKWITH.

GEO. BECKWITH.

More recently the true Policy of the British Government towards the United States, has been completely unfolded. It has been publicly declared by those in power, that the Orders in Council should not be repealed, until the French Government had revoked all its internal restraints on the British Commerce, and that the Trade of the United States with France and her Allies should be prohibited, until Great Britain was also allowed to trade with them. By this declaration it appears, that to satisfy the pretensions of the British Government, the United States

1 Pp. 275-277.

2 Journals (ed. 1823), IV. 738, 840.

3 Henry, third Earl Bathurst, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. 4 Henry Goulburn, M. P., was under-secretary of state for war and the colonies; later he was one of the commissioners representing Great Britain at Ghent, and was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Col. Thomas Barclay, British consul general at New York from 1799 to 1812, was British agent for prisoners of war in the United States from his appointment on December 11, 1812 (landed in New York, April 1, 1813), until September, 1814.