The Nonsense Myth About Grant and Lee

We are comfortable with our myths. They are like children’s favorite bedtime stories, endlessly told and retold, warm, comforting, and timeless. Our myths help us make sense of the world as we perceive it, or as we want it to be. No wonder they die hard. Not surprisingly, the Civil War generated perhaps a greater body of mythology than any other epoch in our history, and its resilience and resistance to correction is inertial. Moreover, regionality is no guide to who believes what. The most die-hard neo-Confederates today often as not live north of Mason and Dixon’s line.

Witness the apotheosis of Robert E. Lee. One essayist declared him the only human in history to demonstrate character, morality, and sacrifice equal to that of Christ. On a more terrestrial scale, no fewer than five times the United States Post Office has honored this man who once fought against its government by placing him on its postage stamps. In a 1954 series devoted to our most distinguished Americans, Lee appeared with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, while his opposite number Ulysses S. Grant was overlooked. Still Grant had at least nine stamps of his own, but usually at lower denominations than Lee’s. Subliminally even our mail has told us that Lee was worth more than Grant.

That seems to have been the conclusion of history for 150 years. Certainly it has been the verdict of buffs and amateur historians caught up in the romance and mythology of the “Lost Cause.” That gave rise to a problem, though. If Lee was so superior to Grant in every way, then how could Grant defeat him? The solution was a whole subset of myth about Grant, that despite his low birth, a career of relentless mediocrity before the war, and supposed perpetual alcoholism, he made up for a complete lack of strategic or tactical ability by dumb luck and using masses of blue-clad cannon fodder to overwhelm the gentlemanly Lee by force of numbers. Grant won because he was no gentleman and he did not fight like one, and thus Lee the gentleman was never really beaten.

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/158451