Ulysses S. Grant spent the final months of his life dying of throat cancer, racing to finish his memoirs so his family would not be left without means. The book he produced, Personal Memoirs of U. S.
Grant, is blunt and unadorned, written in plain words that feel as if he is speaking directly across a table. In those pages, Grant did not hide his opinion of Robert E. Lee. He did not gush, and he did not build monuments in print.
But neither did he tear Lee down the way many other Union officers did. The most revealing passage concerns their meeting at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, inside Wilmer McLean’s parlor. Grant wrote that he could not know what Lee felt, describing him as a man of much dignity with an impassive face. It was impossible, Grant said, to tell whether Lee was inwardly glad the end had come or sad over the result and too manly to show it.
Lee’s feelings were entirely concealed from observation. Grant’s own feelings, however, he recorded plainly. He had been jubilant upon receiving Lee’s letter requesting a meeting, but standing in that room, he felt sad and depressed. He felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly and suffered so much for a cause.
And then he added the crucial judgment: that cause was, he believed, one of the worst for which a people ever fought and one for which there was the least excuse. Those words carried no sugarcoating. Grant was referring to slavery and secession. Yet he did not call Lee evil.
He called him a foe who fought valiantly and suffered. There was respect in that line, even a kind of sympathy. The moment Grant saw Lee in person, his sense of triumph evaporated, because he was looking at another human being who had carried an impossible burden for four years. The contrast between the two men in that room was stark.
Grant arrived wearing a private’s blouse with Lieutenant General 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 described it almost matter-of-factly before moving on. He noted that Lee remembered him from the old army despite the difference in age and rank.
They talked briefly about Mexico before getting down to the terms, polite and civil, in the middle of the bloodiest war Americans had ever fought. Grant’s deeper judgment of Lee as a soldier appears later in the book, and it is there that his assessment becomes more interesting and more divisive. He wrote that he never ranked Lee as highly as some others in the army. He never had as much anxiety when Lee was in his front as when Joseph Johnston was in his front.
Lee, according to Grant, was a good man who had everything in his favor, a man who needed sunshine. That single word, sunshine, carries a great deal of meaning. Grant meant that Lee performed best when conditions were ideal, when he had unquestioned support across the South, a good deal of sympathy even in parts of the North, and admiration from abroad. Lee was treated like a demigod, Grant wrote.
Everything he did was considered right. 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 had never been tested in quite the same way other commanders were. He even compared Lee unfavorably to Joseph E.
Johnston, whose defensive campaign had forced Grant to think harder and bleed more for every advance. Some readers have called those passages sour grapes, Grant quietly diminishing the rival he finally beat. Others see it as Grant simply 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. He wrote that he knew Lee personally 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 was savage and unrelenting. The names Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor still make people wince. Cold Harbor especially weighed on him years later. He called it his greatest regret.
But he never accepted the idea that Lee was unbeatable. And after the war, when Lee became something close to a saint across much of the South, Grant did not join the chorus. Even so, Grant never attacked Lee’s personal character. When some voices in the North wanted to put Lee 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 was not the behavior of someone who hated his opponent. It was the mark of a man who saw the war as a tragic necessity rather than a personal score to settle. As president, Grant maintained that same balance. He fought hard against the Ku Klux Klan, enforced civil rights laws, and appointed Black officials.
At the same time, he 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 and no deep conversation were recorded, 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 were measured. There was no worship and no venom, only the unvarnished truth as he saw it.
Lee was good but not superhuman, brave and dignified 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, and a quiet sadness instead of triumph. What Grant truly thought of Lee was that he was a man, formidable, dignified, a soldier who deserved respect, but still only a man, not a god on horseback and not a villain in black. In that plain, stubborn refusal to mythologize, even when the whole country was hungry for myths, there is something quietly powerful about Grant himself.
In a war that left scars still unhealed, the moment of quiet respect at Appomattox remains one of the few things both sides could, in time, look back on without bitterness.