The Odd Couple

The Odd Couple

Grant and Lee stubbornly refused to admit the obvious—that each was the other’s greatest opponent.

By Russell S. Bonds in the Wall Street Journal

‘I never ranked Lee as high as some others in the army,” Ulysses S. Grant said of his legendary Confederate adversary after the war. “I could never see in his achievements what justified his reputation.” The former general-in-chief insisted, apparently with a straight face, that he was more anxious against Joseph E. Johnston, a gamecock better known for orderly retreats than daring victories. For his part, Robert E. Lee treated Grant with similar disdain. Asked to name the best Union general, the Virginian would point to George McClellan or George Meade, ignoring the man who accepted his surrender. In their postwar years, both Grant and Lee stubbornly refused to admit the obvious—that each was the other’s greatest opponent.

Countless authors have paired the two men. There have been dual biographies, from J.F.C. Fuller’s “Grant and Lee: A Study of Personality and Generalship” (1933) to Edward H. Bonekemper III’s “Grant and Lee: Victorious American and Vanquished Virginian” (2008)—both heavily slanted in Grant’s favor—as well as narratives and campaign studies, from Bruce Catton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic “A Stillness at Appomattox” (1953) to Gordon C. Rhea’s compelling series on the Overland Campaign (1994-2002). Now William C. Davis brings the two iconic commanders together in the brilliant and balanced “Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee—The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged.” Mr. Davis makes it his mission to dispel myths and postwar spin, relying on primary sources throughout (though not Grant’s classic memoirs, which suffer from inevitable bouts of self-justification).

In “Crucible of Command,” the mythbusting begins in the opening pages, where Mr. Davis destroys the old canard that Lee, while a cadet at West Point, was referred to as “the Marble Model,” a reference to his striking, soldierly appearance. He continues in this vein through Lee’s death, casting doubt on whether his famous last words (“Strike the tent!”) were in fact his last. Mr. Davis’s meticulous drive for facts and suspicion of historical agendas add credibility to his narrative. His voice is sharp and opinionated, peppered with compliments and criticism, with virtually every assertion supported by a detailed citation. Smoothly written and accessible, the book is also a history buff’s dream, brimming with arrow-filled battle maps and dotted with familiar characters and controversies.

The prolific Mr. Davis’s two dozen books on the Civil War have more often than not focused on the Confederacy. Yet readers expecting the three-time winner of the Jefferson Davis Award to favor Lee may come away surprised. He is scrupulously evenhanded, if anything appearing rather more fond of Grant—whose rise from leather-store clerk to general-in-chief and future president is one of the more appealing personal journeys of American history.

Born in an Ohio cabin in 1822, Hiram Ulysses Grant was an unremarkable boy whose very name seemed to be too much for him—schoolmates taunted him as “Useless” (one of the few pieces of hearsay that Mr. Davis allows himself). After an inglorious career in the prewar Army, Grant seemed destined to become “just one more faceless rural merchant,” Mr. Davis says, a man “utterly wanting in those characteristics that develop into greatness.” But the war saved him from obscurity, and a series of early victories not only propelled him up the ranks but stamped him a national hero. In May 1861, “he had been a civilian in a shabby coat and battered hat . . . on a $2 per diem,” Mr. Davis writes; nine months later he was a major general, racking up victories from Belmont to Fort Donelson and earning the sobriquet “Unconditional Surrender Grant.”

If Grant’s rise was meteoric, Lee’s was a plodding march. Though he hailed from one of Virginia’s great houses, Lee’s aristocratic origin masked familial and financial struggles. His climb up the military ladder required years standing on each rung; Lee spent over three decades in the U.S. Army creeping from lieutenant to captain to lieutenant colonel. After his 1861 resignation and a change to Rebel gray, he was initially disdained as a bureaucrat, “too much of a red-tapist to be an effective commander in the field,” an officer “too cautious for practical Revolution.” Soldiers derided him as “Granny Lee” or “Old Stick-in-the-Mud.” Then, on the last day of May 1862, fate handed him command of the Army of Northern Virginia, and in the 35 months that followed he won a series of spectacular victories—the Seven Days, Second Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville—giving his scarecrow army a “luster of invincibility” before his stumble at Gettysburg in July 1863 and, in time, ultimate defeat at the hands of Grant.

Mr. Davis’s narrative is well-paced, and the smash-cut transitions from one theater of war to another are smoothly handled as the two paths wind toward their ultimate collision. Still, covering the long lives and many battles of both men in less than 500 pages requires some inevitable shortcuts—thus famous controversies such as Grant’s level of preparedness at Shiloh and Lee’s decisions at Gettysburg are quickly disposed of on the way to the climactic 1864-65 showdown from the Wilderness to Appomattox. When Lee and Grant finally met in battle, the gray commander punished “the enemy”—again contrary to popular myth, Lee did indeed call the Federals that—inflicting 60,000 casualties as the bluecoats lurched from the Rapidan River to Petersburg, in Virginia. Grant brushed aside critics who called him a butcher and kept coming. “The Rebellion must be overcome, if overcome at all, by force,” he insisted.

Mr. Davis contrasts his characters but resists caricatures. Along the way, he highlights striking similarities: strong relationships with talented subordinate commanders, tactical creativity and grim acceptance of the price of victory. “As thinkers and decision makers, as soldiers and leaders, and men in command, they could be almost indistinguishable from one another,” Mr. Davis asserts. Many of Grant’s defining military characteristics were decidedly Lee-like: frequent seizure of the initiative, audacious planning and bold execution. As the war progressed, even the two generals’ mistakes seemed to mimic one another—occasional overconfidence, imprecise orders and costly, ill-advised frontal assaults.

Despite his careful analysis, Mr. Davis avoids professorial dryness, and colorful personal details of both men emerge. Grant, we learn, was a middling chess and billiards player but dominant at the euchre table (he would pass up his free-drink winnings in favor of a cigar). Lee could be a hectoring husband to wife Mary, but he doted on her as well, often rising early at Arlington to pick a rose for her breakfast plate.

Lee’s April 1865 surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant at Appomattox Court House, though a moment “enshrined in American memory,” is recounted in three brief pages, as if the author, like the armies, was worn out by the time he got there. “There had been no pomp at Fort Donelson and Vicksburg, and he wanted none now,” Mr. Davis says of Grant; and he seems to feel much the same way. Readers wanting more drama in the denouement will have to turn back to Shelby Foote or Bruce Catton.

Mr. Davis closes with two chapters on postwar matters—the efforts of the two warriors to live in peace. Most fascinating here is the account of Lee’s visit to newly inaugurated President Grant at the White House in the spring of 1869. Ushered in past a gaggle of grumbling congressmen, Lee, his hair white and his health failing, spent a cordial if cool half-hour talking privately with his former nemesis. As Grant described the meeting only briefly in his memoirs, no one knows exactly what was said.

Both old soldiers died at age 63—Lee in 1870 and Grant 15 years later—but neither has faded away. “Like favorite fairy tales children beg to hear again and again, they give us portraits as we want them to be: familiar, comfortable, and unchallenging,” Mr. Davis writes before drawing his own vivid picture of the two icons of the age. “The events of their generation created them,” he says, “and, call it coincidence or destiny, each proved to be the ideal man in the right place, and at the perfect moment.”

—Mr. Bonds is the author of “War Like the Thunderbolt: The Battle and Burning of Atlanta.”