Grant
and Lee – America’s Military Odd Couple
Published in Marietta Daily Journal August 14, 2016
In May of this year my wife and I
were traversing U.S. Highway 52 from Cincinnati toward Charleston, West
Virginia.
52 meanders alongside the Ohio
River. Although not always within sight,
the occasional prolonged views of the river amply justifify the state’s
declaring the path a scenic route.
Not as vast as the Mississippi, the
Ohio is just as beckoning. At New Orleans,
Natchez, Vicksburg, and points north, the mighty Mississippi implores you to
stand, stare, and ponder its greatness.
Along Highway 52, the gentle Ohio bids you join her. The Mississippi is showy. The Ohio is welcoming.
These two rivers, whose confluence
occurs at Cairo, Illinois are fit reminders of two men who loom large in
American military history and whose confluence at Appomattox determined a
nation’s future. One river bears the
name of a northern state, the other a southern state. One of our two most famous military leaders
hails from the north, the other from the south.
Both rivers played a big role in the conflict that would bring these two
men together.
Enthralled by the river to my right,
I would have missed the little community of Point Pleasant, Ohio had my wife not
called out, “Look! The birthplace of
U.S. Grant!” Looking to the left I saw
the little house and the non-pretentious sign that identified it. Once inside, we were well informed about
Grant’s life.
Arriving home a few days later, I
plucked from my library the still unread biography of Grant by Jean Edward
Smith. (Smith also penned “Lucius D.
Clay: An American Life,” Clay being the grandfather of Marietta’s Chuck Clay,
attorney and former state senator.)
Smith’s biography of Grant is quite exhaustive, providing interesting
details of a heralded general who became an unheralded president.
It is widely held that Grant was a
brilliant and successful general, but a failed two-term president. It is not so widely known that all of his
life he suffered financial reversals, even after his presidency. Grant was simply incompetent in personal
financial matters.
Nor
perhaps would most southerners view him as the kind soul portrayed by all of
his biographers. Grant was no Sherman.
Nor was he among those who urged tough punishment for the South during
Reconstruction. On that topic, Grant was
like Lincoln, preferring to welcome the South back into the Union.
Always an admirer of Robert E. Lee,
I have only recently become a student and an admirer of U.S. Grant. (I have at least two relatives to whom I will
never reveal this admiration.) Unlike
Lee, the patrician son of a Virginia governor, Grant was the son of a
tanner. The Grants were not of the
social or political class that the Lees enjoyed. Aside from the issue of class, however, Lee
and Grant were more similar than they were dissimilar.
Unlike the raging Sherman, Grant
hated vindictiveness. Like the stately
Lee, Grant always maintained a calm demeanor.
At Appomattox, while the terms of surrender were being drawn up, Lee sat
quietly. According to biographer Smith,
the terms required that all Confederate soldiers surrender their horses and
tread their way home by foot. Lee
pointed out to Grant that his cavalrymen owned their horses and requested they
be permitted to retain them.
Grant relented, telling Lee that
although he would not change the written terms, he would still instruct his
officers to allow all the men who owned a horse to take their animals home with
them to work their farms. “I didn’t know
that any soldiers owned their own animals,” Grant opined. After receiving Lee’s gratitude, Grant walked
away. He forbade the firing of
celebratory victory salutes, stating, “The rebels are our countrymen again.”
His presidency wrought with scandal
not of his own making, Grant still elicited from Oliver Wendell Holmes these
words: “I never met a man in whom power was so well combined with modesty.”
The Ohio and the Mississippi are
still flowing. So also lives on the
magnanimity of Grant and Lee. Historians
have given little attention to the similar personalities of these two men of
war who were anything but warlike. Yet,
in studying them both, we can learn much about what it means to be civil, even
during a most un-civil war.
If Grant and Lee could respect each
other and if the rabid abolitionist Horace Greely could pay Jefferson Davis’
bail, there is still hope for Americans today to settle their differences.
I also suspect that Grant would
oppose today’s cultural cleansing of all things confederate. He admired Lee too much and understood the
causes of the conflict between the two of them all too well.
Roger
Hines
8/9/16
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