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The Generals: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee
The Generals Ulysses S Grant and Robert E Lee Author:Nancy Scott Anderson, Dwight Anderson Lee and Grant: The two most celebrated generals in American history, adversaries whose lives were eternally bound together by the war that divided them, are here made vivid in all their paradoxical differences and likenesses. — This full-scale, engrossing dual biography follows the two men from their childhoods through West Point, the Army, the M... more »exican War, the 1850's, when Lee pursued his military calling at a series of Army outposts and Grant became a clerk in his father's leather good store, and through the years of the Civil War.
Ulysses S. Grant; calm and confident. A man often enigmatic to his contemporaries, he was full of complexities: Eager to please; stolidity; dependence on the support of superiors. The son of a prosperous tanner from Ohio, he was honest and forthright, a gifted soldier whose wartime skills had been honed by a lifetime of yearning to compete.
Robert E. Lee; the dynamic, devoted, and divided son of a great, but troubled Virginia family; beloved by his soldiers. He was a vital and humorous though often depressed man, constricted by his own ideals of a life of classical virtue, who grasped at the opportunity war afforded him to shake off his inhibitions and throw himself brilliantly into battle.
We follow Grant and Lee through the tumults and strategies, evoked here with powerful immediacy, of the Civil War, through the campaigns of 1862 and 1863, through Gettysburg and Vicksburg, into the first clash of their forces in the bloody wilderness battle of the spring of 1864, and on to the inexorable pounding of Southern positions that led ultimately to the surrender at Appomattox.
The narrative, based largely on eyewitness accounts, diaries, and memoirs, demonstrates how the two great combatants were mirror images of each other; and, on another level, how the Civil War, even then, appeared as a reenactment of the American Revolution in which each side saw itself as defending from the other the principles laid down by the Founding Fathers.« less