On April 9, 1865, in the parlor of Wilmer McLean’s farmhouse at Appomattox Court House, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant. The two generals, who had spent four years trying to destroy each other, sat across from one another while the remnants of a shattered Confederacy slipped away.
Grant arrived in a mud-spattered private’s blouse with only his general’s straps to mark his rank. Lee wore a crisp gray uniform with a sword at his side. They shook hands cordially, and after a brief exchange about their service in the Mexican War, the surrender was arranged. Grant offered generous terms: Confederate officers kept their side arms and horses, enlisted men were paroled and sent home, and no one would be tried for treason.
When Lee mentioned that his troops were starving, Grant ordered 25,000 rations to be distributed to the surrendered army. As the meeting ended, Grant raised his hat. Lee returned the gesture. Grant’s feelings at that moment were not triumphant.
He later wrote that although he had felt jubilant upon receiving Lee’s request for terms, as he stood in the parlor he felt sad and depressed. “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. ”
That statement captured the core of Grant’s view of Lee. He respected the soldier.
He condemned the cause. Understanding how he arrived at that position requires looking back at the long and uneven paths that brought the two men to that room. Both were graduates of West Point, but their careers there diverged sharply. Lee graduated in 1829, second in his class, with a flawless record.
Grant graduated in 1843, a middling student who excelled only with horses. They served together briefly during the Mexican-American War, where Lee, already a captain of engineers, scouted routes that helped win the battle of Cerro Gordo. Grant, then a young lieutenant, remembered Lee as the chief of staff to General Winfield Scott. He assumed Lee would not remember him, given the difference in age and rank.
Grant later wrote, “I had known General Lee in the old army and had served with him in the Mexican War, but did not suppose, owing to the difference in our age and rank, that he would remember me. ”
In the 1850s, their fortunes moved in opposite directions. Lee rose steadily, becoming a colonel by 1855, respected for his engineering skill and his family connections. His father had been a hero of the Revolutionary War, and he had married into the lineage of George Washington.
Grant, by contrast, resigned from the army in 1854 amid rumors of drinking. The years that followed were hard. He failed as a farmer, worked as a real estate agent, and eventually took a clerk’s position in his family’s leather goods store. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Lee agonized over his allegiance.
Virginia seceded, and Lee chose to follow his state, declining command of the Union army. Grant, an Ohioan, volunteered at once and was made colonel of an Illinois regiment. The war propelled both men to prominence on opposite sides. Lee became the symbol of Southern military genius after victories at Second Manassas and Fredericksburg.
Northern newspapers portrayed him as nearly invincible. Grant climbed to prominence in the western theater, winning at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Vicksburg with a dogged, unrelenting style. After Fort Donelson, the press gave him a nickname: Unconditional Surrender Grant. By 1864, President Lincoln was exhausted by Eastern generals who maneuvered around Lee without defeating him.
He promoted Grant to lieutenant general and placed him in command of all Union armies. The instruction was explicit: Lee’s army was to be the objective. Wherever Lee went, Grant would follow. Grant did not regard Lee as a mythical figure.
He saw him as the linchpin of the Confederacy. If the Army of Northern Virginia could be broken, the rebellion would collapse. Grant did not fear Lee, and he said so plainly. In his memoirs, written near the end of his life in 1885, he wrote that a large part of the national army and most of the press had clothed Lee with superhuman abilities.
But Grant had known Lee personally. “I knew that he was mortal, and it was just as well that I felt this. ”
The Overland Campaign of 1864 became their brutal contest. Grant crossed the Rapidan River and plunged into the Wilderness, where Lee struck hard and inflicted heavy casualties.
Unlike his predecessors, Grant did not retreat. He pushed south to Spotsylvania, where fighting at the Bloody Angle became savage, and then to Cold Harbor, where Grant later regretted ordering a final charge. He telegraphed Washington: “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer. ” It did.
Through North Anna and Cold Harbor, Grant forced Lee into constant entrenchment and bled his army through attrition. Grant’s assessment of Lee became increasingly critical. In June 1864, he wrote to Chief of Staff Henry Halleck that Lee was good but overrated. “Lee’s army is really whipped,” Grant wrote.
“The prisoners we now take show it, and the action of his army shows it unmistakably. ” Grant believed Lee had been propped up by advantages Lee had done nothing to create: interior lines for fast movement, unwavering Southern support, and sympathy from Northern opponents of the war. “Lee was a good man who had everything in his favor,” Grant reflected. “He was a man who needed sunshine.
He was supported by the unanimous voice of the South. Everything he did was right. He was treated like a demigod. ” Grant contrasted this with the situation facing Union generals, who had to operate under a hostile press and lukewarm public opinion.
Grant went further. He admitted that he never felt as much anxiety facing Lee as he had felt facing Confederate General Joe Johnston in the western theater. Johnston, in Grant’s view, was trickier and more unpredictable. Lee was predictable in his defensiveness, always entrenching and rarely seizing the initiative.
During the siege of Petersburg, which dragged from June 1864 to April 1865, Grant slowly strangled the city by cutting supply lines such as the Weldon Railroad. Lee lashed out with counterattacks that failed and cost him heavily. By early 1865, the Confederacy was collapsing. Richmond fell on April 3.
Lee fled west, hoping to link with Johnston in North Carolina. Grant pursued relentlessly while Sheridan’s cavalry cut off the escape routes. On April 7, Grant wrote to Lee: “The result of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance. I regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood by asking of you the surrender.
” Lee delayed, probing the terms, but the end came two days later at Appomattox. The oddity of the location was not lost on those who noticed. Wilmer McLean, whose house had been struck by shellfire during the First Battle of Manassas in 1861, had moved to Appomattox to escape the war. The war now ended in his parlor.
Grant’s view of Lee remained layered in the years that followed. The next day, April 10, the two men met again on horseback between the lines and spoke pleasantly for about half an hour about the prospects for peace. Grant urged Lee to advise other Confederate armies to surrender. Lee declined, saying he would need to consult with Jefferson Davis.
Their final official encounter came on May 1, 1869, when Lee visited the White House during Grant’s presidency. The visit was brief, about fifteen minutes. Lee discussed conditions in the South while Grant asked about Virginia’s roads and railroads, perhaps measuring the progress of Reconstruction. It was cordial but formal, without any display of deep reconciliation.
Lee died in 1870, already regarded as the South’s greatest icon. Grant, suffering from throat cancer, finished his memoirs in 1885. The book became a best-seller and secured his family’s financial future. In it, he repeated his conviction that Lee had been highly esteemed in both the Confederacy and the North, but that circumstance had favored him.
Grant saw Lee as a defensive genius with real flaws, too cautious, missing chances to strike decisively. What Grant truly thought of Lee, then, was consistent. He admired the man’s dignity and courage. He pitied his defeat.
He believed Lee fought for a cause that was morally indefensible, a cause rooted in slavery and secession. There was no hatred in Grant’s account, and no gloating. He even supported efforts to see Lee pardoned. In Grant’s eyes, Lee was a worthy opponent, a mortal man whose legend had outgrown his reality.
Grant had beaten him by refusing to be impressed, refusing to retreat, and refusing to let the myth stand in the way of the war’s necessary conclusion. As the smoke cleared at Appomattox, Grant looked toward reunion, while Lee returned to Virginia to educate its young men. Their legacies remained entwined, but Grant’s own assessment was final: Lee was no demigod, just a brave man on the wrong side of history.