General Winfield Scott had called Lee "the flower of the American Army." He had earnestly recommended Lee as his own fittest successor in supreme command of the United States Army and such command had been definitely offered to Lee. The secession of half a dozen Northern or border states could not have been of greater consequence either to the North or to the South than the decision of Robert E. Lee to resign his commission and go with his native state Virginia into a war of secession for which he saw no occasion or justification. His problem, like that of Farragut and George H. Thomas and other officers of Southern birth in the United States Army and Navy, was a very perplexing one, involving a divided duty such as few men are ever called upon to confront in the course of their lives. He himself set forth the considerations that finally determined his course, in a letter to his sister, the wife of a Union officer, which it is proper to quote here in explanation. To this sister he wrote on the twentieth of April, 1861: "We are now in a state of war which will yield to nothing. The whole South is in a state of revolution, into which Virginia after a long struggle has been drawn, and though I recognize no necessity for this state of things, and would have foreborne and pleaded to the end for the redress of grievances real or supposed, yet in my own person I had to meet the question whether I should take part against my native state. With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the army, and, save in defense of my native state, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called upon to draw my sword." Surely no more tragic, no more pathetic letter than that was ever written. Yet it represented and reflected the struggle which at that time was going on in the soul of every army or navy officer of Southern birth and kindred. It was a part of the tragedy of a war which divided families and set brother against brother in a strife that knew neither mercy nor relenting for four, long, terrible years. Lee went at once to Richmond and was promptly appointed to the task of organizing first the Virginian and afterwards all the Southern armies for effective service. For such work of organization he had a peculiar genius which General Scott recognized, at the same time congratulating the Union cause upon the fact that it had some weeks the start of Lee in the task of creating an army out of untrained and undisciplined volunteers.