"Thou Knowest Not the Time of Thy Visitation"

Other writers later made the same mistake, but Lee himself corrected the record, stating that he only spoke with presidential adviser Francis P. Blair about this command.6 Until the discovery of Mary Custis Lee's letter, historians were dependent on a series of memoirs or biographical sketches, all of them published decades after the events, and all containing disconcerting inaccuracies. Because they held the best information available, however, they were used and repeated, until some of the stories took on the quality of common knowledge.