He never came to Vicksburg, but Gen. Robert E. Lee had a family connection here that is deemed typical in Southern genealogy — no blood kin, but connected by marriage — sort of.

Eilbeck Mason and his wife, the former Virginia Magee, lived across from the Balfour House on Crawford Street, then bought The Castle on Castle Hill but sold it just before the War Between the States and moved to Tensas Parish, La., where they both died in 1862. Their bodies were reinterred here in 1866.

The link between the Lees and the Masons was Eilbeck Mason’s sister, who was married to Smith Lee, the general’s brother. Another Mason girl married Confederate Gen. Samuel Cooper from New York

Mason’s brother James was part of the duo, Mason and Slidell, who were forcibly taken off a British ship by Northern Naval officers during the war, creating an international incident that almost brought England into the war.

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Was Robert E. Lee wearing a pair of Vicksburg boots when he met with Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox in 1865? He very well might have been, for two local ladies had sent him boots as a birthday present just a short time before.

The sisters, Sallie and Lucy Marshall, were refugees living in Columbus, Ga. They were the daughters of the Rev. Charles K. Marshall of Vicksburg, a Methodist minister who was active in support of the Confederacy. The young ladies were descendants of Vicksburg’s founder, the Rev. Newit Vick, as their mother, Amanda, was his daughter.

On Jan. 8, 1865, a few days before his birthday, Lee wrote the Marshall girls, telling them that their father had delivered the gift, and Lee had worn them on “one of the most tempestuous days of the winter, hail, rain and sleet. By their means throughout all day I was very comfortable. Please accept my grateful thanks for your kindness and believe me with great respect, R.E. Lee.”

The boots had been paid for with money carefully saved by Sallie Marshall. She had covered gold coins with cloth and used them as buttons to keep them from being stolen, and some of those “buttons” had been sacrificed to pay for the boots. The boots might have been galoshes or overboots.

When Lee prepared to meet Grant to talk surrender terms, he put on his best apparel — a handsome new uniform, his dress sword and his deep‑red sash, for he fully expected to become a prisoner. He commented, “I must make my best appearance.”

His uniform immaculate, his boots well‑polished — what a contrast Lee was to Grant when the two met, for the Union commander wore a crumpled uniform and mud‑spattered boots. A witness of the meeting described Lee as “six feet tall, hair and beard of silver gray, a handsome uniform of Confederate gray buttoned to the throat, with three stars on each side of the turned‑down collar, fine topboots with handsome spurs and a splendid sword.”

That “fine topboots!” Were they the ones from the Vicksburg sisters?