ility and devotion brought him home from
Mexico bearing the brevet rank of colonel. General Scott had learned to
think of him as "the greatest military genius in America."

In 1852 Lee was made superintendent of the West Point Military Academy.
In 1855 he was commissioned lieutenant-colonel of Col. Albert Sidney
Johnston's new cavalry regiment, just raised to serve in Texas. March,
1861, saw him colonel of the First United States Cavalry. With the
possible exception of the two Johnstons, he was now the most promising
candidate for General Scott's position whenever that venerable hero
vacated it, as he was sure to do soon.

Lee was a Virginian, and Virginia, about to secede and at length
seceding, in most earnest tones besought her distinguished son to join
her. It seemed to him the call of duty, and that call, as he understood
it, was one which it was not in him to disobey. President Lincoln knew
the value of the man, and sent Frank Blair to him to say that if he
would abide by the Union he should soon command the whole active army.
That would probably have meant his election, in due time, to the
presidency of his country. "For God's sake don't resign, Lee!" General
Scott--himself a Virginian--is said to have pleaded. He replied: "I am
compelled to; I cannot consult my own feelings in the matter."
Accordingly, three days after Virginia passed its ordinance of
secession, Lee sent to Simon Cameron, Secretary of War, his resignation
as an officer in the United States army.

Few at the North were able to understand the secession movement, most
denying that a man at once thoughtful and honorable could join in it. So
centralized had the North by 1861 become in all social and economic
particulars, that centrality in government was taken as a matter of
course. Representing this, the nation was deemed paramount to any state.
Governmental sovereignty, like travel and trade, had come to ignore
state lines. The whole idea and feeling of state sovereignty, once as
potent North as South, had vanished and been forgotten.

Far otherwise at the South, where, owing to the great size of states and
to the paucity of railways and telegraphs, interstate association was
not yet a force. Each state, being in square miles ample enough for an
empire, retained to a great extent the consciousness of an independent
nation. The state was near and palpable; the central government seemed
a vague and distant thing. Loyalty was conceived as binding o