Just the men: Grant vs. Lee

My wife is currently reading:
The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace by H.W. Brands.

Over breakfast we were discussing the Lee and Grant and their respective popularity.

It is my guess, that Lee is greatly respected and loved by Americans. Americans are glad that Grant won, but that they greatly love and respect Lee.

My family is from the South, so I grew up knowing that RE Lee's horse was named Traveller as well as walking thru the Battle of the Crater.

Is my own impression totally unique or is Lee the man more respected that Grant in America today?

Did you grow up knowing the name of Grant's horse and did you always find him a superior individual to Lee?

I read the Grant book mentioned above and have also read his memoirs. Both are excellent. His memoirs especially are magnificent, as was he. He had one very hard life; so much harder than Lee.

I certainly know I could not have walked in the shoes of either man.

Grant is I believe, less respected than the courtly fellow from Arlington...but I like Grant better. He's more human. While Grant and Lee both had serious injuries from traffic accidents...Grant after Shiloh and Lee during the Antietam campaign, i believe, I don't know the name of Grant's horse...though I suspect he called it, "Horse" :-)
I'm not sure whether the best Grant...the Vicksburg campaign, and the relief of Chattanooga, ...was not best ascribed to Shergrant working in combination...and the considerable contribution given to Grant by the spontaneous advance at Missionary Ridge...but things worked out when he was in charge.
There are persistent rumours that Mark Twain was a considerable help to Grant's memoirs...but how much of such rumours come from CSA fans demonizing any virtue shown by the man who did drive RELee out of Richmond?
Grant would cling to his opponent like a bulldog, and then put his head down and slug it out...Lee, twice (Malvern Hill and Gettysburg) gambled everything on a big gesture and blew it.
So Grant was the better soldier, thought a lesser strategist. I know RELee never had a chance at it, but I've always felt Lee (very good at passive agressive behaviour) would have been a better President than Grant managed to be.

Grant's horse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_(horse)

>2 DinadansFriend:
"Lee (very good at passive agressive behaviour)"

I could be mistaken on this, but I believe it was Lee's failure to remain passive that lost him the Gettysburg campaign.

Lee's willingness to give the orders for Pickett's Charge was wrong in the eye's of Pickett and others. At the end of the charge, while surveying the carnage, he took full responsibility for its failure.

Longstreet, from what I have read, is the man who knew when and how to be passive. Longstreet was not willing to commit his troops in a timely fashion to the Gettysburg battle as directed by Lee.

You want passive, I say Hồ Chí Minh was a man who really knew when to get passive. Americans neither understand nor have the patience for passive, but as they say in NFL, defense wins every time. Maybe not always, but it is certainly a strategy must learn to master and to be able to use.

"Shock and awe" has it limits...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_awe

"Shock and awe" is very American.

>1 Urquhart: I think you nailed it: Lee has always been more loved and respected than Grant, and still is.

His sterling reputation isn't what it used to be, I think, for a number of reasons: 1) The "Lost Cause" mythology (see, for example, The Myth of the Lost Cause) that once buoyed it has faded; 2) Studies like The Marble Man and Lee Considered that have dinged Lee's military reputation (but see Confederate Tide Rising for a counter-argument); and 3) The high-Victorian values he embodied have become more and more alien-feeling in the late 20C and the early 21C.

That said, though, he still fascinates, though, and whatever diminution of his reputation has taken place hasn't been matched by an equivalent increase of Grant's. Parallel dynamics (without the political/cultural baggage of the Lost Cause) are at work, I think, in the reputation of senior WWII commanders. Americans respect Eisenhower and Nimitz, but they love (and admire) Patton and Halsey.

My not-my-specialty take: American culture has a strong romantic streak when it comes to war and the military . . . one that Lee comfortably reinforces and Grant awkwardly undermines. Grant shows people a side of war they'd rather not think about.

>5 ABVR:
In the Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee by Michael Korda he certainly came off as a highly principled man with extreme self-control and high principles, slaves not withstanding.

Strange how that book outlines his inability to control his wife. She just wouldn't leave their house when the Yankees were coming, despite his repeated requests.

He was truly a man who was very non-confrontational. I believe his battle orders to his generals never ordered them to take an action but rather suggested a course of action.
Maybe you can have too much self-control.

Grant lacked the self-control in certain situations with alcohol but certainly did not fear confrontations.

His Ulysses S. Grant : Memoirs and Selected Letters : Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant / Selected Letters, 1839-1865 by Ulysses S. Grant and Mary D. McFeely is an incredibly poignant and beautifully written record of his overcoming many hardships and perseverance.

His last days must have been tremendously painful with the throat cancer that he eventually succumbed to.

If you haven't read those Memoirs, you are fortunate in being able to look forward to doing so.

NB: i would not recommend the Korda book to anyone. It is mostly a rehash of the same old, same old.

Outsider's and historical facts lacking observation here, based on movies and TV sources (I just realised I can't even remember watching a documentary on the civil war, it's not well represented in .eu 😞.

I always get the impression that there is still a critical mass of people in the south that believe in their heart that they were right and that they should've won, or at least that the north shouldn't have. This leads to a more fertile ground for hero worshipping.

They continue to feel oppressed, making their fallen into martyrs to be revered including remembering the little things.

Is this a reasonable hypothesis? Is this related to the lost cause mythology?

"Lee (very good at passive aggressive behaviour)" What I was referring to was Lee's manner of controlling his subordinates, ie...Stuart after the cavalryman's failure during the Gettysburg Campaign, not his tactics, which on occasion, led him to over-play his hand...but as the overplay was crowned with success...got lost in the general adulation.
>5 ABVR::
I don't love Patton, actually I thought the Film with George C. Scott, was a very well conducted put-down. the biography it was drawn from was much more worshipping. In "Catch-22" there's a scene when Nately in search of his whore breaks into a room of generals, one of them, George, is described as "the best man in the world for attacking an opponent who has already committed his last reserve." To me that was Patton to a Tee!
Remember that Patton wasn't on the team for the D-Day landings, not because he had slapped several soldiers suffering from PTSD, but because during the Sicily campaign, he had gone cowboying off to capture Palermo, (For which he had no orders from any higher authority) thus slowing the Allied Advance on the Straits of Messina, thus allowing more Germans to get off the island.

>7 JerryMmm: A while back I befriended three older Virginians, including two sisters who were originally from Blacksburg, Virginia, and, yes, without being too insistent about it, they definitely let you know they felt sorry the South lost the Civil War. The two elderly sisters were sweet about it, but the gentleman didn't mince words. He pointedly called the Civil War ... "The War of Northern Aggression". I'd say he really had an inferiority complex ... so you had to be careful not to mention politics around him.

When the husband of one of the sisters died, the sisters decided to move back to Virginia ... but I only discovered later (from their neighbor) that the husband had been a history professor at Stanford ... and that the neighbor got all his many books. She was storing them in her basement!

Oh, well, they were nice enough to give me their every-day china, and I think fondly of them every time I use a cup or plate.

Don't know about the younger generation, though. Surely they can't still be holding a grudge.

>9 Rood::
Well, I'm sorry to tell you, some are still sad about it...and they do things like put up CSA flags. Some are sicker than that....

I've read Shelby Foote's history of the Civil War and watched the TV series. My understanding is that the Civil War lasted as long as it did because of military incompetence. Once the Union started making use of its logistic advantages, thanks to both Grant & Lincoln, the South didn't have a prayer. As fought by Grant, the Civil War was the precursor of World War 1, though by then defensive weaponry had become even more powerful. Before Grant came along my impression is that the generals were refighting the English Civil War.

>1 Urquhart: It is my guess, that Lee is greatly respected and loved by Americans. Americans are glad that Grant won, but that they greatly love and respect Lee...

Is my own impression totally unique or is Lee the man more respected that Grant in America today?

Ummmm....
This Yankee will tell you: HELL NO, not in the north, anyway.

In my circles, the Lost Cause of "treason in defense of slavery" had NO romance at all about it.

>9 Rood: Considering the end of the Civil War was 151 years ago, the younger generation isn't that different from the older generation right now.
It will take more years of social media and exposure to different ideas to change attitudes. That's a good result of the Internet.

Lee, in some ways, really is the plaster saint that many attempt to make Lincoln. That doesn't make Grant a bad person; in many ways, he's as admirable as Lee. But Lee's moral virtue was and is more obvious. Add to that a long period of making the 'Lost Cause' a noble one in the minds of many, and linking Lee (not Davis) to that cause.

>12 AsYouKnow_Bob: Perhaps not for you, and certainly not for my upbringing. But as late as the 1950s, a local teaching college had 0 books on the Civil War (excuse me, the War of Northern Aggression) written from the POV of the north in their library. In a Northern (Indiana) state. It's going to take a long time for a more balanced view of the conflict is generally accepted.

14>BruceCoulson

"a long period of making the 'Lost Cause' a noble one in the minds of many, and linking Lee (not Davis) to that cause."

It is easy for the statement to be read in such a way that assumes Lee supported the Lost Cause. He definitely, decidedly, unequivocally did not. Neither did Longstreet. When Longstreet was asked why he did not, he responded that he had fought in one war over the issue and was not about to fight it a second time- or words to that effect.

>14 BruceCoulson: But as late as the 1950s, a local teaching college had 0 books on the Civil War (excuse me, the War of Northern Aggression) written from the POV of the north in their library.

I went off to college and met my first Southerners - and for the first time in my life, I heard the phrase "The War of Northern Aggression" spoken out loud.

You would have thought I had scalded them when I sweetly corrected them,
"Do you mean The Slavers' Revolt?"

(...Hilarity ensued.... Good times.)

Whether Lee supported the 'Lost Cause' (and I will accept that he may not have in certain aspects, although he ended up fighting for it anyway), he's been been made the standard bearer by successive waves of Southern-biased histories. As the Hungry Tiger noted, it's not what Lee was, but what people think he was, that matters to many in the public.

There's an interesting historical marker in Union, CT that commemorates the fallen in 'The War of the Rebellion'. And it wasn't a Revolutionary War marker. I was glad that if someone from that town had spoken to me, I was firmly (and safely?) in the Northern side of the matter.

But getting any group to admit they were wrong, and had shed blood and money in a bad cause, is a difficult matter at best.

At a sing along when someone DEMANDED that we all sing "Dixie", I responded by a request for "Marching Through Georgia" the temperature fell a good way towards freezing....both are good rousing tunes, ...I was just trying to see if the WAHR was yet over...apparently not. sigh.

>18 DinadansFriend: At another "sing-along" someone else requested the band(s) play Dixie. After that was heard, the bands ended the concert by playing Yankee-Doodle.

https://rhapsodyinbooks.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/april-10-1865-president-lincoln...

Aaah, Lincoln! Jewel of American political life. He and Lee might have handled reconstruction better....pity that the cop went for a drink that night, had he seen the play?