End of a Veteran

General Robert E. Lee, astride his white horse Traveller, shone bravely from the frontispiece of the Confederate Veteran's December issue, published last week in Nashville. Beneath the picture was the caption: "I can only say that he is a Confederate Gray." It was the magazine's farewell salute, after 40 years' service. Death had cut the ranks of Confederate veterans to 4,500. Depression had forced the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which kept the magazine alive in recent years, to withdraw its support. Circulation of the final issue was 6,000. Its peak had been 20,000.

The Confederate Veteran grew out of a series of circular letters in 1890 soliciting funds for a Jefferson Davis Memorial in Richmond. The founder was Sumner A. Cunningham, a Tennessee publisher who had lately sold his Chattanooga Times for $300 to an up-&-coming young newspaperman named Adolph Ochs. Cunningham's pamphlets about the memorial fund aroused so much interest among the Grays that he started the monthly magazine to retain that interest. Main features were veterans' reminiscences, historical sketches "to correct erroneous impressions of the war."

Mourned the final editorial: "Surely there was never a publication which so held the hearts of a people."

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