My new favorite W&L Moment

Talk to any W&L person – faculty, student, staff, graduate – and s/he’ll have a ready list of favorite “W&L moments.”

Maybe it was unexpectedly bumping into a W&L grad in Prague (that happened to my boss, Dean Hartog, last month…and the alumnus is a former member of the admission staff!). 

Maybe it was that first time the bells of Lee Chapel tolled the hour at the exact moment you were walking on the Colonnade in front of Washington Hall (that’s happened to all of us).   A tough win on the playing field, landing an internship from a W&L graduate you’ve never met, meeting a Supreme Court justice after a speech on campus (that happened to Cammie, one of my favorite students, who also happens to post on our blog from time to time)…the list of examples is endless.

I have a new favorite W&L moment of my own.  And it happened to me in the library, of all places.

A little background:  here in the Admission Office, we’re in the process of selecting new art to hang on the walls for all our visitors to look at while they wait patiently for their interviews and campus tours.  So, we’re having some old (very old) photographs enlarged, we’re looking in our archives for art created by W&L faculty and alumni, we’re framing posters from around campus…basically we’re looking for items that give visitors a feeling for who we are at W&L and an appreciation of just how long we’ve been here (a very long time…262 years to be exact).

As part of this quest, thanks to the good folks in W&L’s Special Collections, Vaughan Stanley and Lisa McCown, I learned that among the most important items we have in our archives are letters written by Robert E. Lee before, during, and after the Civil War.  He was a prolific correspondent, and one of the many letters in our collection is one he wrote on September 8^th, 1865…it was a reply to a former Confederate (Matthew Fontaine Maury) who had written Lee from Mexico, where he was in exile.  Maury hoped to recruit Lee to join him there in a movement that would prolong the Confederate cause.  Mr. Stanley referred to the letter as Lee’s “reconciliation letter,” because in it, Lee declines to join with Maury and instead admonishes him that it is time to work toward rebuilding the country: 

“The thought of abandoning the country and all that must be left in it is abhorrent to my feelings, and I prefer to struggle for its restoration and share its fate than to give it all up as lost.”  Lee urges Maury to join him in working to “restore the bright hopes and prospects of the past.”

This Reconciliation Letter (I added the caps) is an important document, because it reveals the Lee all of us at W&L admire.  The Lee who wanted to put the division of the Civil War in the past and focus on remaking what the War destroyed, one student at a time, while at the same time seeking to improve society and bring the country into greater unity.  This is the Robert E. Lee we know and revere at W&L,  Lee the educator.

 So, here’s my new favorite W&L moment:  Ms. McCown was helping me to locate and scan Lee’s Reconciliation Letter (it’s old and fragile and requires careful handling!) so that we can have its likeness framed and displayed on the wall in the Admission office.  There I was standing in the library’s office of Special Collections, reading a transcription of the letter Mr. Stanley had given me, thinking what a fabulous writer Lee was.  Then Ms. McCown reappeared and laid a nondescript folder on the table beside me.  She flipped it open.

And there was the original letter, covered with Lee’s precise, ornate script.  We looked at it in silence for a couple of beats. 

Wow.

But it gets better.

She let me hold it.  

I picked it up without breathing, holding it as gently as I could, as if I were holding a butterfly by its wings.

It was a pretty amazing moment, holding that letter written 146 years ago.  Written by a man whose name is known around the world…Lee the educator, who inspired so much of what we still think and do here today at W&L.  Getting that close to any original letter of Lee’s would have been pretty special, but to hold that particular letter, the Reconciliation Letter? 

Priceless.