On April 6, 1865 Union forces managed to capture a considerable chunk of Lee’s army at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek. And by April 8, Union cavalry had cut off Lee’s further retreat to the west. Grant wrote Lee with a summons to surrender. The Confederate general demurred for as long as there seemed a chance to break out and continue the retreat. But when one key subordinate assured him that the situation was hopeless, Lee said sadly, “Then there is nothing left me but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths.”
Richard Bluttal tells us about the US Civil War generals.
A reproduction of a Thomas Nast painting showing the surrender of General Lee to General Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia on April 9, 1865.
On that day in April 1865, Lee arrived at the McLean house about one o'clock and took a seat in the parlor. A half hour later, the sound of horses on the stage road signaled the approach of General Grant. Entering the house Grant greeted Lee in the center of the room. The generals presented a contrasting appearance, Lee in a new uniform and Grant in his mud-spattered field uniform. Grant, who remembered meeting Lee once during the Mexican War, asked the Confederate general if he recalled their meeting. Lee replied that he did, and the two conversed in a very cordial manner, for approximately 25 minutes. The subject had not yet gotten around to surrender until finally Lee, feeling the anguish of defeat, brought Grant's attention to it. Grant, who later confessed to being embarrassed at having to ask for the surrender from Lee, said simply that the terms would be just as he had outlined them in a previous letter. Aside from Grant and Lee, only Lt. Colonel Marshall and perhaps a half dozen of Grant’s staff officers were present for most of the meeting. Approximately a dozen other Union officers entered the room.
briefly, including Captain Robert Todd Lincoln. Few besides Grant left detailed accounts of what transpired and while some accounts disagree on the details, there are many key consistencies.
Terms
The heart of the terms was that Confederates would be paroled after surrendering their weapons and other military property. If surrendered soldiers did not take up arms again, the United States government would not prosecute them. Grant also allowed Confederate officers to keep their mounts and side arms. Although Lee agreed to the terms, he asked if his men could keep their horses and mules in the
cavalry and artillery. The Confederate army provided weapons and military property, but the men provided their own mounts. Grant indicated he would not amend the terms but would issue a separate order allowing that to happen. Lee said he thought that would have a happy effect on his men. By 3:00p.m., the formal copies of the letters indicating the terms and acceptance of the surrender were signed and exchanged, and General Lee left the McLean House to return to his camp. Horace Porter, one of Grant’s staff officers recorded that Lee paused at the top of the stairs and energetically “smote” his hands together three times. Grant and his staff followed him and removed their hats as a respectful, farewell gesture which Lee returned in kind before riding down the stage road.
The Start
This war opened with a clash between half-armed farmers and half-trained soldiers. From the beginning materials and industry were complete in the North and throughout the war were lacking in the South. The South did not have the type of industrial advancement as the North. If was lacking in methods of transportation such as railroads. The Northern soldier was compelled to fight in his enemy’s country, but he was compelled to devastate it as well as conquer it.
The story of Grant and Lee is a very complex one. You are talking about two of the greatest generals in our history who had so much in common as education and training but there were differences in terms of character and military tactician.
The author Bruce Caton explains it best in his article Grant and Lee: A Study in Contrasts. “The most obvious difference was in terms of early childhood. Lee was tidewater Virginia, and in his background were family, culture, and tradition. . . the age of chivalry transplanted to a New World which was making its own legends and its own myths. He embodied a way of life that had come down through the age of knighthood and the English country squire. Lee stood for the feeling that it was somehow of advantage to human society to have a pronounced inequality in the social structure. There should be a leisure class, backed by ownership of land; in turn, society itself should be keyed to the land as the chief source of wealth and influence. It would bring forth (according to this ideal) a class of men with a strong sense of obligation to the community; men who lived not to gain advantage for themselves, but to meet the solemn obligations which had been laid on them by the very fact that they were privileged. He was Virginian all the way.
Grant, the son of a tanner on the Western frontier, was everything Lee was not. He had come up the hard way and embodied nothing in particular except the eternal toughness and sinewy fiber of the men who grew up beyond the mountains. He was one of a body of men who owed reverence and obeisance to no one, who were self-reliant to a fault, who cared hardly anything for the past but who had a sharp eye for the future.
Contrast
And that, perhaps, is where the contrast between Grant and Lee becomes most striking. The Virginia aristocrat, inevitably, saw himself in relation to his own region. He lived in a static society which could endure almost anything except change. Instinctively, his first loyalty would go to the locality in which that society existed. He would fight to the limit of endurance to defend it, because in defending it he was defending everything that gave his own life its deepest meaning. The Westerner, on the other hand, would fight with an equal tenacity for the broader concept of society. He fought so because everything he lived by was tied to growth, expansion, and a constantly widening horizon. What he lived by would survive or fall with the nation itself. He could not possibly stand by unmoved in the face of an attempt to destroy the Union. He would combat it with everything he had, because he could only see it as an effort to cut the ground out from under his feet.”
They both graduated from West Point, Lee earlier due to age. At the age of 18, Robert leaves for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which had earned one demerit. Robert E. Lee graduates second in his class from West Point. While at the military academy, Lee is one of six students in his graduating class to never receive a demerit. His classmates note his drive for perfection and focused, secluded personality with the nickname "Marble Model." As one of the top cadets, Lee is able to choose the branch of service for his first assignment and elects to work for the Army’s Engineer Corps. Lee, second in his West Point class, an engineering officer, a career military officer, truly was a great general. As a tactician, he was head and shoulders above Grant. Good defensively, Lee was even better on the offensive. He was bold and decisive, a calculating gambler. Can anyone who has studied the Battle of Chancellorsville deny it? Splitting his army on several occasions, he surprised his opponents and won the day. Lee was a master of the holding attack; a tactic George Marshall would later instill as the only tactic taught at the Army War College prior to World War II. Lee fought in the Mexican American War (1846-1848) as one of General Winfield Scott’s chief aides. He was instrumental in several American victories through his personal reconnaissance as a staff officer, which allowed him to discover routes that the Mexicans hadn’t defended because they thought it was impossible to pass through the terrain.General Scott later wrote that Lee was “the very best soldier I ever saw in the field”.
In 1839, seventeen-year-old Hiram Ulysses Grant received an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. It changed the course of his life—and his name. Grant always disliked his first name and was commonly known by his middle name. He wanted to swap his first and middle names when he entered the Academy. However, Congressman Thomas Hamer had submitted Grant’s application to West Point under the name “Ulysses S. Grant.” Hamer knew the boy as Ulysses and, at a loss for his middle name, chose “S” because Grant’s mother’s maiden name was Simpson. Later on, as result of military victors in the West, the USG becomes unconditional surrender Grant.
West Point
Grant’s experiences at West Point and as a young officer provided both formal and incidental preparation for his later career and gave him insights into future Civil War comrades and foes. Grant, for his part, was a keen observer of human nature who believed that attending West Point at “the right time”—he encountered more than 50 future Civil War generals there—together with his experiences in Mexico, proved “of great advantage.” In addition to teaching “practical lessons,” the Mexican War introduced him to “older officers, who became conspicuous in the rebellion.” More important and what developed into a major military strategy was his proficiency in being a quartermaster, one whose prime responsibility is managing supply trains and transportation in a hostile environment, this became essential during the Civil War.
Surviving drawings and paintings from Grant’s West Point years show early signs of what the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz called a “special gift” common to successful painters and generals alike: namely, a remarkable visual memory. After Grant studied a map, his staff officer Horace Porter recalled, “it seemed to become photographed indelibly upon his brain.” Besides having an incredible gift of memory, he also excelled in horsemanship. Grant experienced combat for the first time on May 8, 1846, at the Battle of Palto Alto during the Mexican American War. Grant served as regimental quartermaster, but yearned for a combat role; when finally allowed, he led a charge at the Battle of Resaca de la Palma. . He demonstrated his equestrian ability at the Battle of Monterrey by volunteering to carry a dispatch past snipers, where he hung off the side of his horse, keeping the animal between him and the enemy.
Historians increasingly have pointed to the importance of Grant's experience as an assistant quartermaster during the war. Although he was initially averse to the position, it prepared Grant in understanding military supply routes, transportation systems, and logistics, particularly with regard to "provisioning a large, mobile army operating in hostile territory," according to biographer Ronald White. Grant came to recognize how wars could be won or lost by crucial factors that lay beyond the tactical battlefield. Serving as assistant quartermaster made Grant a complete soldier, and learning how to supply an entire army gave Grant the training to sustain large armies. This experience as a quartermaster will later benefit him In the Civil War.
After his victory at Donelson, Grant never failed to base his strategy upon supply, more than often than not the latter strategy upon supplies Lee based his upon search, after supplies and consequently suffered chronically from a shortage of supplies and a dispersion of forces. In the object of the campaign Grant eclipsed Lee, not only because his army was stronger, but because it was better organized and supplied.
From his training and time spent at West Point a number of characteristics were greatly enforced such the ability to develop lucid orders, even in the heat of battle. General Meade’s chief of staff commented that “there is one striking feature of Grant’s orders; no matter how hurriedly he may write them on the field, no one ever has the slightest doubt as to their meaning or even has to read them over a second time to understand them.” His study of maps and creating artwork at West Point was extremely useful. James McPherson attributes to Grant a “topographical memory.” He “could remember every feature of the terrain over which he traveled and find his way over it again; he could also look at a map and visualize the features of terrain he had never seen. . . . Grant could see in his mind the disposition of troops over thousands of square miles, visualize their relationship to roads and terrain, and know how and where to move them to take advantage of topography.” His perseverance was that of history, in 1864–65, Grant demonstrated his perseverance as he carried out his campaign of adhesion against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, achieving all his goals within a year. Grant was a simple man who dealt with the facts as he found them. While his contemporaries saw the war in all its complexities and too often took counsel of their fears, from Belmont to Appomattox Grant saw the main chance, stuck to it, and thus led his armies to victory.” When President Lincoln brought Grant east from his triumphs at Vicksburg and Chattanooga to confront Lee, Grant refused to back off, waging a bloody war of attrition which last exactly a year. His focus, early in the war was to defeat, capture or destroy opposing armies, not simply occupying geographic positions, was critical to his success.
War tactics
Grant had no fear of using all the resources that were available to him. Remember the North always enjoyed a substantial edge in manpower and almost every manufacturing category, He recognition and deployment of these resources stands as one of his achievements. Grant was decisive. Colonel James F. Rusling of the quartermaster general’s staff recalled that in the winter of 1863–64, a quartermaster officer approached Grant for approval of millions of dollars of expenditures for the coming Atlanta campaign, and Grant approved the expenditure after briefly examining the papers involved. Questioning Grant’s swift decision, the officer asked him if he was sure he was right. Grant replied, “No, I am not, but in war, anything is better than indecision. We must decide. If I am wrong, we shall soon find out and can do the other thing. But not to decide wastes both time and money and may ruin everything.”
Grant has gone down to history as a bludgeon general, a general who eschewed maneuver and who with head down, seeing red, charged his enemy again and again like a bull: indeed an extraordinary conclusion, for no general, not excepting Lee, and few generals in any other war, made greater use of maneuver in the winning of his campaigns, if not of his battles. Without fear of contradiction, it may be said that Grant’s object was consistent; strategically it was to threaten his enemy’s base of operations.’ Lee acted on the spur of the moment and never once brought fruition, because he acted so impulsively as to be unprepared to take full advantage of them. The Seven Days campaign ended in the disaster of Malvern Hill, the Second Manassas campaign in that of Antietam and the Chancellorsville campaign led to Gettysburg.
War was very simple to him, you have a job to do, you go out and do it to your fullest. One of his biographers said of him “His success was the success of sheer common sense-----which is almost the same thing as generalship—and of American Democracy. “ Here is a man who is not only capable but self-reliant, and its self-reliance which nearly always wins over a superior, because it relieves him of onus of a work which he himself can not control. His honesty and modesty towards himself endowed him with wisdom; he could discover his own mistakes and was never stampeded by his success. Grant’s outlook was simpler and consequently more all-embracing. He sees the war as a whole far more completely than so than even Lee saw it. He is the preeminent grant-strategist, while Lee is the preeminently the field strategical. His orders are simple , direct and unmistakable. Lee’s more often than not are vague and frequently verbal.
He relied on his staff for detail not ideas, which was his job. He was able to bear in mind a clear picture of the topography of the country he operated in. This would enable him to work out a strategic problem mentally with more certainty than could one who does not have this ability. When others were at their wits ends Grant was perfectly calm and collected. With the Vicksburg campaign, in the time that a plan was essential General McPherson offered him a glass of liquor, Grants response. “Mac, you know your whiskey won’t help me to think; give me a dozen of the best cigars you can find…. I think by the time I have finished them I shall have this job pretty nearly planned. “
As Bruce Catton later goes on saying, “Each man had, to begin with, the great virtue of utter tenacity and fidelity. Grant fought his way down the Mississippi Valley in spite of acute personal discouragement and profound military handicaps. Lee hung on in the trenches at Petersburg after hoping itself had died. In each man there was an indomitable quality. . . . the born fighter's refusal to give up as long as he can still remain on his feet and lift his two fists. Daring and resourcefulness they had, too, the ability to think faster and move faster than the enemy. These were the qualities which gave Lee the dazzling campaigns of Second Manassas and Chancellorsville and won Vicksburg for Grant.”
Grant was a mass of contradictions: loved order and yet could find no place in an orderly world. He hated war, and yet found his place there above all his fellows. He went to West Point not to be a soldier but because he was determined to escape the life of a tanner, and West Point did that for him. He never failed to look at every problem from the simplest point of view, and to answer it in the simplest possible manner. He has said he watched the progress of the Army of the Potomac ever since it was organized and has been greatly interested in reading the accounts of the splendid fighting it has done. This is very illuminating for a few generals who had to face his problems would have troubled to find the time to examine those of others hundreds of miles away.
Flaws
Grant also had his flaws. As a tactician, he was horrible. He seemed to know only one tactic – the frontal assault. Time and time again, he threw troops at entrenched positions, only to suffer incredible casualties. At Vicksburg, he attacked strong fortifications and suffered accordingly. Did he learn to try other methods? No. At Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor he did it again on an even grander scale, suffering even grander casualties. Grant seems to be one of those Civil War generals, of whom there are quite a few, who did not understand the changes the rifled musket forced on tactics. Frontal assaults no longer worked, but many a general seemed to think if only another division were thrown in, the result would be different.
Grant’s modesty, lucid orders, topographical memory, full use of his staff, perseverance, full use of Union resources, minimizing support personnel, full use of assigned generals, decisiveness, moral courage, political common sense, focus on enemy armies, maneuverability, and intelligent aggressiveness all combined to make him the best general of the Civil War and to demolish the myth of “Grant the Butcher.” Grant was one of the greatest generals in American history.
Lee
On April 18, 1861, as rising star in the U.S. Military, Lee is called to a meeting with Francis Blair, a close associate of Abraham Lincoln. Blair offers Lee command of the Union Army, but Lee declines the offer, unwilling to fight against his home state of Virginia. Lee next seeks the advice of his former commander and Director of the War Department, Winfield Scott. Lee explains his divided loyalties to Scott, but his superior refuses to allow him to "sit out" the war. On April 20, 1861 After days of deliberation, Lee resigns from the United States Army. He states in a letter to his Union-supporting sister, Anne Marshall, that "with all of my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizens, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home." Just two days later, the governor of Virginia assigns Lee to command the Virginia forces for the Confederate Army. This is perhaps where the contrast between Lee and Grant is so striking. As historian Bruce Catton says, “the Virginia aristocrat, inevitably, saw himself in relation to his own region. His first loyalty would go to the locality in which that society existed. On other hand the Westerner would fight with an equal tenacity for the broader concept of society, “ or for his country. Lee was a Virginian first and a Confederate second. This trait was harmful, even though he was not the commander-in-chief, due to his crucial role as Jefferson Davis’s primary military advisor throughout the war.
As Catton states, “So Grant and Lee were in complete contrast, representing two diametrically opposed elements in American life. Grant was the modern man emerging; beyond him, ready to come on the stage, was the great age of steel and machinery, of crowded cities and a restless burgeoning vitality. Lee might have ridden down from the old age of chivalry, lance in hand, silken banner fluttering over his head. Each man was the perfect champion of his cause, drawing both his strengths and his weaknesses from the people he led. Yet it was not all contrast, after all. Different as they were--in background, in personality, in underlying aspiration--these two great soldiers had much in common. Under everything else, they were marvelous fighters. Furthermore, their fighting qualities were really very much alike.” Despite his lack of manpower and material, Lee’s military genius was the principal factor in keeping the Confederacy alive. He was a legend in his own lifetime. In May 1862 Stonewall Jackson wrote, “Lee is the only man I know whom I would follow blindfold. “ His soldiers, to whom he was either ‘Uncle Robert’ or ‘Marse Robert’ idolized him.
For another difference, Lee was not a good quartermaster. The Army of Northern Virginia was always poorly equipped. Much of its equipment and supplies were taken from the Army of the Potomac after their numerous victories, but there was never enough. Not all of this blame can be laid at the feet of Lee, though. The Confederacy was woefully short of the industry needed to supply its armies, and the Northern blockade prevented adequate supplies from being imported as the war dragged on. Some may lay additional fault on the South’s lack of railroads to deliver supplies. Virginia, however, did not suffer from this lack. Finally, northern Virginia was fought over so much that it simply could not feed the army. Lee was also determined to include Europe in his war with the North. On April 7, 1865 he said to General Pendleton; “ I have never believed we could, against the gigantic combination of our subjugation, make good in the long run our independence unless foreign powers should directly or indirectly, assist us.”
Strategist?
Another major difference, was Lee as a strategist. In a word, he was not. His concern was northern Virginia and nothing else. Throughout the war, he resisted attempts by Jefferson Davis to draw forces from the Army of Northern Virginia to reinforce the western armies. Lee was obsessed with the operations in Virginia and urged that additional reinforcements be brought to the Old Dominion from the West, where Confederates defended ten times the area in which Lee operated. Only once did it happen, when Longstreet went west and fought at Chattanooga, but not without Lee’s efforts to stop it. He also opposed attempts to make him commander in chief of Southern forces until it was too late for it to be of any benefit. Lee’s Civil War strategy concentrated all the resources he could obtain and retain almost exclusively in the eastern theater of operations. His approach overlooked the strength of the Confederacy in its size and lack of communications, which required the Union to conquer and occupy it. He often refused requests by President Jefferson Davis to comply with requests to send critical reinforcements to the West. Lee was obsessed with Virginia and the moral aspects of the war. His one and only grand strategy was to terrify Washington. This would have been a perfectly sound object had his army been well trained and provided with a grand siege train, which was greatly limited in materials and funding. Only once did Lee agree to send a portion of his army west. He delayed for two weeks from Virginia which caused many of them to arrive only after the Battle of Chickamauga and without their artillery.
Additionally, and most importantly, Lee failed to realize that the Confederacy’s best hope of survival was to hold out. Since the South had a lack of fighting men compared to the North, its best hope was to keep casualties to a minimum, to live to fight another day. Lee’s offensive tactics ensured the Army of Northern Virginia sustained greater casualties than it could afford. Had he fought defensively most of the time, Lee would have saved soldiers who could fight again, perhaps outlasting the North’s will to win. That Lee though loyal to Virginia, was at heart disloyal to the Confederacy is absurd. To him the base of the Confederacy was but the base of Virginia because the only form of attack he really understood was the moral offensive, and Virginia enabled him to carry this out.
While the North was compelled through force of circumstances to develop its resources the South, relaying on Europe for its munitions of war, failed to do so, with the result, that more and more did Southern policy develop into a political game of chance.
Conclusion of the war
Lee was successful only at winning battles. He never had a conception of how to take battlefield victories and turn them into victory in war, unlike U.S. Grant and W. T. Sherman, who both came to realize that individual battles were themselves meaningless — what mattered was winning the war. In this area Grant, in particular, completely out-classed Lee. Sherman proved better at achieving goals without the waste of battle — but battle was what graduates of the U.S. Military Academy had been trained to think was how wars were won.
Lee ceased being “successful” (except at not-losing) when Grant was put in charge of all Union armies because Grant, unlike Lee, had a conceptual strategy and (some) subordinates he could trust to execute it out of his sight. But the decisive theatre of war was not Virginia, even though this is where nearly all the focus of study on the U.S. Civil War stands. The Western Theatre contributed far more to the collapse of the Confederacy first by splitting the Confederacy in two, logistically and economically, and then destroying Southern morale via Sherman’s destruction of the Confederate back yard — all of it effectively unopposed, because Sherman was a master of achieving his ends without uselessly killing his men in meaningless battles.
In the words of the General who defeated him, the legend of Lee as a “great general”, is much overrated and a product of the lovers of the “lost cause”. His use of Napoleonic tactics caused Lee to lose more men than all of his other generals combined. Lee himself said that even in victory that he never did anything that would “last longer than the battle that occurred that day.” His blunders at Gettysburg cost him that battle and was the beginning of the end for his army of northern Virginia. “It is all my fault”, Lee said to the men of what was left of Pickett’s division after he sent them to their slaughter.
Lee rejoins his family in Richmond, where Mary has been living since 1861. That summer they will move to the country in Derwent, Virginia.In a letter to Jefferson Davis, Lee blames the loss of the war on the moral condition of his men. He believes that the troops had been getting letters from home indicating that they no longer supported the war, leading the soldiers to lack aggressiveness and the grit necessary to win battles.
The Lee family moves to Lexington, Virginia, where Lee assumes the role of President of Washington College. Lee overhauls the curriculum, requires weekly progress reports for all of the students, and encourages the females in his family to attend church services in the hopes that "if the ladies would patronize it that the students would be more interested in going." The college has since changed its name to Washington and Lee University.
Lee assembles notes, letters and data in an effort to defend his actions and his Army of Northern Virginia, but never writes. Lee discusses the failures of Gettysburg in conversations with his peers at Washington College, attributing the loss to his commanders J.E.B. Stuart and Richard Ewell.
Lee is summoned to give testimony to the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. In his testimony, Lee expresses his concern over the social and political structure of the country and his doubts that African Americans should have civil rights. Above all, he expresses a desire to be left alone.
After suffering a severe stroke on October 12, 1870 Lee dies in the company of his family. Lee's coffin is paraded through the small town of Lexington, Virginia. The procession, filled with former Confederate soldiers, Washington College students and state politicians, makes its way past the Virginia Military Institute for a small service.
Grant became a national hero, and the Republicans nominated him for president in 1868. A primary focus of Grant’s administration was Reconstruction, and he worked to reconcile the North and South while also attempting to protect the civil rights of newly freed black slaves. While Grant was personally honest, some of his associates were corrupt and his administration was tarnished by various scandals. After retiring, Grant invested in a brokerage firm that went bankrupt, costing him his life savings. He spent his final days penning his memoir which was published the year he died and proved a critical and financial success.
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Now read Richard’s article on the role of baseball in the US Civil War here.
