Ulysses S. Grant was dying of throat cancer, racing against time to finish his memoirs so his family would not be left destitute. Those memoirs, the Personal Memoirs of U. S.
Grant, are blunt and unadorned, written in plain words that read like a man speaking across a table. And in those pages, Grant left behind his truest judgment of the man he defeated at Appomattox: Robert E. Lee. He did not gush.
He built no monuments in print. But he also refused to tear Lee down the way many Union officers did. Instead, he offered something more complicated: respect, measured by disillusionment about the cause Lee served. The best place to start is their meeting on April 9, 1865, inside Wilmer McLean’s parlor at Appomattox Court House.
Grant described the moment with characteristic restraint. “What General Lee’s feelings were, I do not know,” he wrote. “As he was a man of much dignity with an impassive face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come or felt sad over the result and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation.
” But Grant’s own feelings surprised him. He had been jubilant when Lee’s letter proposing surrender arrived, yet standing before his defeated opponent, that triumph evaporated. “My own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed,” he wrote. “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought and one for which there was the least excuse.
”
Those lines carry Grant’s full judgment in miniature. He condemned the Confederate cause as one of the worst and least excusable in history, a clear reference to slavery and secession with no sugarcoating. Yet he did not call Lee evil. He called him a foe who fought valiantly and suffered.
There is respect in those words, and even sympathy. Grant was looking at another human being who had carried an impossible burden for four years, and the sight of him drained away the triumph. The physical contrast between the two men that day was stark, and Grant recorded it almost matter-of-factly. He arrived in a private’s blouse with lieutenant general’s straps sewn on, no sword, his clothes still carrying the mud of the campaign.
Lee arrived in full dress gray, sword at his side, every inch the Southern gentleman. Grant noticed the difference and then moved on. He noted that Lee remembered him from the old army despite the difference in age and rank. Before getting down to terms, they talked briefly about Mexico, polite and civil, in the middle of the bloodiest war Americans had ever fought.
But Grant’s deeper judgment of Lee as a soldier appears later in the memoirs, and it is there that the assessment becomes more interesting and more divisive. “I never ranked Lee as highly as some others of the army,” Grant wrote. “That is to say, I never had as much anxiety when he was in my front as when Joe Johnston was in my front. ” He added: “Lee was a good man who had everything in his favor.
He was a man who needed sunshine. ”
That single word, sunshine, carries a great deal. Grant meant that Lee performed best when conditions were ideal: unquestioned support across the South, sympathy even in parts of the North, admiration from abroad. “Everything he did was right,” Grant observed.
Lee was treated like a demigod. Grant’s argument was straightforward. Lee’s legend was helped along by circumstance. The Army of Northern Virginia received the best headlines and the most devotion, while Union generals faced hostile newspapers and divided support at home.
Grant suggested that Lee was never tested in quite the same way other commanders were. He even compared him unfavorably to Joseph E. Johnston, who fought a defensive campaign that forced Grant to think harder and bleed more for every advance. Some readers saw sour grapes in these passages, Grant quietly diminishing the rival he finally beat.
Others saw Grant being Grant: plainspoken and allergic to romance. He had known from the beginning that Lee was mortal. Back in 1864, when people kept warning him about facing Bobby Lee, Grant brushed it off. “I had known him personally,” he wrote, “and knew that he was mortal.
” He never feared Lee the way some in the North did. He respected the difficulty without question. The Overland Campaign had been savage and unrelenting: the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, names that still make people wince. Cold Harbor especially weighed on him for years afterward, and he called it his greatest regret.
But he never bought the idea that Lee was unbeatable. After the war, when Lee became something close to a saint across much of the South, Grant refused to join the chorus. Even so, he never once attacked Lee’s personal character. When voices in the North called for Lee to be put on trial for treason, Grant made it clear he would not stand for it.
He had given his word at Appomattox: the men could go home if they stacked arms, and he intended to keep that promise. When President Andrew Johnson and others talked about hanging Confederate leaders, Grant quietly let it be known that he would resign his commission if the government broke the parole. He protected the man he had defeated. That is not the behavior of someone who hated or despised his opponent.
It is the mark of a man who saw the war as a tragic necessity, not a personal score to settle. As president, Grant kept that same balance. He fought hard against the Ku Klux Klan, enforced civil rights laws, and appointed Black officials. But he also issued pardons to many former Confederates.
His view of Lee remained consistent across the years: a worthy enemy, a general who earned much of his reputation the hard way, fighting for a cause that was wrong and doomed, yet still a man of personal honor. They met one more time, in 1869 at the White House. Lee, now president of Washington College, came to ask for clemency for former Confederates. Grant received him courteously, but the visit was brief.
No long reconciliation was recorded, no deep conversation, just two men who had once faced each other across battle lines, now trying to live in the same country again. In the end, Grant’s words about Lee are measured. There is no worship and no venom, only the unvarnished truth as he saw it. Lee was good but not superhuman, brave and dignified, yes, but lifted higher by advantages the other side never enjoyed.
And when the moment of victory arrived, Grant chose restraint over celebration: generous terms, no gloating, a quiet sadness instead of triumph. He thought Lee was a man, formidable and dignified, a soldier who deserved respect, but still only a man. Not a god on horseback, not a villain in black. In that plain, stubborn refusal to mythologize, even when the whole country was hungry for myths, there was something quietly powerful about Grant himself.
In a war that left scars that still have not fully healed, that moment of quiet respect at Appomattox might be one of the few things both sides could, in time, look back on without bitterness.