[Continued from July 23 (reply #48) ]
Lee tried to keep cheerful, but was depressed by the heat and by the arrival of news that his sister Mildred, Mrs. Edward Vernon Childe, who was only forty-five, had died in Paris.
. Soon after the tidings of Mrs. Childe’s death, there came orders for the detail that Lee must by this time have learned to expect along with changing weather and hard fare: once again he was summoned to court-martial duty – not at Fort Mason or Fort Chadbourne, but 700 miles away, on the Rio Grande, at Ringgold Barracks. The assignment meant weary days of riding across Texas. He was twenty-seven days on the road, but he enjoyed the company of his friend Major George H. Thomas, who met him at Fort Mason.
At Ringgold Barracks, where he arrived on September 28, work was tedious, and the principal case before the court was protracted by two Texas lawyers. On October 30, 1856, the court adjourned to Fort Brown, on the site of the present Brownsville. Lee was now in closer touch with the outside world, and he had already made friends among the families of the other officers, who, like himself, had to travel about to form courts-martial. His duties were not heavy. Soon he recovered his old poise and wrote home in better spirits.
Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee, an abridgement by Richard Harwell